In the cycle of Torah reading, we are headlong into Leviticus, the third book of the Torah. It is, on a week-to-week basis, the most challenging of the five books when attempting to read for contemporaneity. Its content is primarily, though not exclusively, a set of instructions to the priests who are Levites (thus the English name of the book) on the various kinds of sacrifices and how to offer them. Many are the Bar and Bat Mitzvah youngsters who have striven mightily with the text.

And, truth to tell, many are the rabbis who have struggled as well, yours truly included. In our ongoing desire to make not just some but all of Torah meaningful in the modern world, we often stretch beyond the normal limits to find meaning in any individual passage.

But there is one thing about the book that bears no stretching at all, and that is meaning of sacrifice in biblical terms.

Unlike the English word sacrifice, the root of which is to make something sacred, the Hebrew word korban means to draw near. Our ancestors didn't offer up the animals as an attempt to make anything sacred; they did it because they believed it helped them draw close to God.

One of the reasons Judaism has survived over the millennia is our ability to adapt - to maintain our core values even as we have altered symbols.

What could be a more core value to the Jewish people than to attempt to draw close to God. When the Temple was destroyed, the rabbis realized that offering up animals no longer captured the essence of that value. And so they declared an end to all animal offerings.

While the specific replacement for the sacrificial service was the prayer service, the rabbis were aware that prayer alone is not the answer. It is really mitzvot that bring us closer to God, the mitzvah of prayer being but one. Reading the Book of Leviticus always reminds me that though the customs and traditions of Judaism have changed over the centuries, our core values have not. Through time we have grown those values to higher and deeper levels of human behavior, and even added to them. Through our rituals and through our behavior, we express our connection to Abraham and Sarah and declare ourselves inheritors of a divine covenant.

Whatever has changed, what we have never lost as a people is our desire to draw closer to God, whether by the ritual of offering animals thousand of years ago, or the rituals we practice today, or by our mitzvot, of tzedakah and gemilut chassadim - charity and deeds of loving kindness.

As we read the Book of Leviticus, I sincerely believe that this central message abides and still defines us as a people who strives to live in covenant with God.