Tzav – “Tzav,” means “command”. The Torah details the specific laws for the Kohanim (priests) regarding the five main types of sacrifices (Olah, Mincha, Chatat, Asham, and Shlamim). It concludes with the description of the seven-day inauguration ceremony for Aaron and his sons to begin their service in the Mishkan. This is also Shabbat HAGadol, the last Shabbat before Pesach, before Passover.
Our portion opens like this: Zot torat ha’olah – This is the ritual of the burnt offering: The burnt offering itself shall remain where it is burned upon the altar all night until morning, while the fire on the altar is kept going on it.
At a first reading, this is just a manual for sacrifices. BORING as some children would say. But Rabbi Avraham Gottlieb teaches it differently:
Zot torat ha’olah — this is the Torah of rising. The rising spoken here, he says, is the soul’s. And when does this rising take place? Al mokedah al hamizbe’ach kol halaylah ad haboker — on the fire, on the altar, all through the night, until morning.
The Torah is telling us something profound about how we grow.
When the morning is here — when life is good, when things come easily — it’s no great feat to be kind. It’s no great achievement to love. When the sun is shining, anyone can be a mentsch. That’s not where the real aliyah, the real rising of the soul happens. The real rising happens at night.
At night — when things are hard. When the relationship is strained and you choose to stay soft. When the world is at war and you refuse to let your heart turn to stone. When exhaustion, grief, or conflict press down on you, and still — still — you reach toward the other person. Still you choose connection. Still you choose love.
This is the olah. This is the offering that rises. This is the real rising of the soul.
The Torah doesn’t say the fire burns during the day. It says kol halaylah — all through the night. Because that is precisely when it matters most. The night is not a pause in our growth — it is the very furnace of it. It is in the dark, difficult hours that we are refined, that we discover what our love is actually made of.
And the promise hidden in the verse is this: ad haboker — until the morning comes. The night is not forever. If we can keep the flame burning — in our marriages, in our communities, in a fractured world — then morning will come. Not because the darkness lifts on its own, but because we rose through it.
We, as King David teaches in Psalms, we are the ones who bring the morning. Ura ch’vodi! Ura haneivel v’chinor! A-ira shachar. – Awake, my glory; awake, lyre and harp; I will awake the dawn. Through our own rising in darkness, through the night, we bring forth the morning.
And perhaps this is no accident that we read these words as Pesach approaches. Because the entire arc of the Exodus is exactly this teaching, lived out on the stage of history. Pesach begins in the deepest night — leil shimurim, a night of watching, a people enslaved, a people afraid in darkness. And the journey from Mitzrayim to Sinai, from degradation to revelation, is nothing other than the movement the verse describes: kol halaylah ad haboker. The whole night, until morning.
The Haggadah itself says that the story of the Jewish people begins in shame and ends in praise — matchil big’nut um’sayem b’shevach. It begins in night and walks us toward dawn. And it tells us that in every generation, we must see ourselves as if we went out. Not our ancestors alone. Us. Because the night returns in every life, in every generation. And in every generation, the question is the same: will we keep the fire burning until morning?
Zot torat ha’olah — this is the Torah of how a human being ascends – all through the night, until morning.
Shabbat Shalom. Chag sameach.
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