…How to properly make sacrifices to the G-d of Israel, animal sacrifices, which should not surprise. We see animal sacrifice in the foundational story of our people, the binding of Isaac, which ends with the command to sacrifice not a human being but animal, a ram. The psychoanalysts would call this sublimation.

The story of the binding of Yitzhak has many features, one of them the moral of a God that opposes human sacrifice, and redirects the impulse to the killing of animals, which Judaism further refines by the laws of proper and improper ways of killing animals for our food.

We know that after the Flood eating meet was allowed, though perhaps the Almighty wished we had transcended our natures as carnivores. In this regard we not different than lions and tigers and grizzly who feed on the meat of the animals they kill.

And what was the Temple, both Temples if not a holy abattoir, slaughter house. The Temple’s central function was killing animals properly as a sacrifice, which was a gesture to God, but why that?

Well, what else are you going to sacrifice if not the animals on which we depend for food, clothing shelter?