For the next few weeks, we are going to hear a lot about sacrifices. Sacrifices are interesting in an historical anthropological sense. Through the book of Leviticus we have the inner workings of a sacrificial cult now foreign to us, frozen in time.

Scholars think that the sacrifices were given for various reasons including giving back life in order to take a life, essentially assuaging the guilt of killing a fellow creature by making ritual out of it. Other opinions are that the sacrifices were meant as ways to get closer to God through a combination of gifts, attempts at communion, and atonement. I also like to think about the sacrifices as road maps to relationships—and for now I’ll focus on the relationship we have with ourselves.

One can have different relationships with oneself at different times. Sometimes, we might love ourselves and want to give ourselves gifts in all forms. Other times, we might bribe ourselves to get to the place of love. Of course, sometimes we are not pleased with ourselves  and need to find ways to get passed the negative feelings.

This time of year I especially have a lot of conflicting feelings about my relationship to myself. No, I am not talking about Passover. I am talking about St. Patrick’s Day. You see, my great grandmother on my mother’s side, may her memory be for a blessing, converted to Judaism to marry my great grandfather.

Stepping off the boat from Ireland, this nice Irish Catholic girl fell for a nice Jewish boy. They faced difficulties with their families for getting married. My great grandmother’s family could not understand how she could turn away from her upbringing and convert to Judaism.

My great grandfather’s family was not accepting of his newly converted wife who still held on to the religious heirlooms of her family in a permanently closed box she kept on her dresser. They raised two Jewish daughters: my Bubbah and great aunt, who went on to marry Jewish men and have Jewish children.

After my parents were already married, my father’s grandmother, my other great grandmother, found out about the conversion and it caused a rift between her and my mother. My other great grandmother felt as if a betrayal had happened and that my mother had somehow deceived my father into marrying her, which of course is ridiculous.

But from my parent’s union came my older sister and myself, and our relationship with my father’s grandmother was always a bit different than her relationship to my other cousins.

I am very proud of my Irish heritage. I have my great grandmother’s hazel Irish eyes that she passed to my Bubbah and to my mother. I have very fond memories of eating Irish potatoes, an Irish-American dessert, with my Bubbah and dressing up in green on St. Patrick’s day so that my Bubbah wouldn’t pinch me.

This is the same Bubbah who last week I told you took me to shul with her and made me stay until the bitter end. The same Bubbah who made lit candles for all of us during Shabbat and holidays and baked her famous briskets and kugels for any occasion.

She was a fierce Jew who loved Judaism. And her mother was from Ireland, and her first cousin was an Irish catholic nun,and she was fiercely proud of this as well. Growing up, I inherited this all. The good with the bad.

This time of year, I feel it all. Which brings me back to the sacrifices as a guide for a relationship with oneself.

I feel pride for being a Jew who has Irish heritage. I give myself that gift. I also sometimes need to bribe myself to feel my full pride, due to the fact that my family has faced and been the generators of multigenerational discrimination.

I also sometimes feel negative feelings directed towards myself for having negative feelings towards my father’s side of the family due to this multigenerational discrimination, but I work towards forgiving myself in order to forgive them.

All three ways of approaching my heritage are important—the gifts, the attempts at communion, and the atonement—and holding all three allow me to have a more honest relationship with myself. And having a better relationship with myself makes me more present for my community and of course, more present for God.

So, yes, the sacrifices we will be reading about the next few weeks are an amazing look into an historical anthropological past of a distant cultic practice. And the sacrifices are also very close to us. They are road maps for being in the present.