The Temple sacrifices that gave expression to our burning desire to bond with God were thanksgiving offerings. However, many of the sacrifices were sin offerings meant to achieve atonement and restore at-one-ment by re-igniting our lost passion for God. How does this work? When we sin, we violate our loving bond with God and abuse God’s greatest gift to us—life. Imagine that I give my son a ball with the one condition that he does not bounce it around the house. But he does just that and breaks my computer, a lamp and a window. It is understandable for a child to break something by accident, but for him to break things with the very gift I gave him and in direct disregard of my request is a flagrant act. In essence, a transgression is this type of blatant violation of love, an act of total disrespect and complete ingratitude. And this is really what we need to atone for. For example, God gives us the power to speak, and we use it to gossip and slander. He gives us the ability to see, and yet we use it to look at obscenities. He gives us the ability to hear, and yet we are not attentive to His will but prefer to follow our petty egos. He gives us the ability to taste, and yet we taste forbidden fruits. He gives us the ability to touch, and yet we reach for things that do not belong to us. When we realize our mistake and understand that we have abused God’s gifts, we naturally want to seek ways to counteract our ungracious behavior and overcome our embarrassment. We want to demonstrate to God and ourselves—in the most dramatic and radical way—that that our life and all our life skills really belong only to God. Everything we thought we own, we really owe to God. We want to show that all life is His. We want to forfeit life and restore it to its rightful owner. But, of course, God does not want us to die. Instead, He gave us the chance to offer animal sacrifices—in the limited confines of the Temple—as a way to express our burning desire to acknowledge that life is His, and that He lovingly shares with us life powers under the condition that we use them properly. Offering the sacrifice, we experience as if we ourselves were being offered, as if we were returning our entire self to God. However, the sacrifices were designed to do more than help us psychologically atone for our sins. They demonstrated to us how flimsy and transient the physical truly is. Because we gave our flesh too much attention and substance, we deluded ourselves and concluded that we exist independent and separate of God. This illusion, however, quickly went up in smoke with the flames of the altar. The sacrificial service in the Temple was an effort to experience becoming the sacrifice in order to remove the feeling of alienation and separation from God. Consider why, when we love someone, we want to squeeze the person as hard as we can. Or why we hear parents say of their children, “Isn’t he delicious? I could just eat him up!” We say these things because we can’t handle the separation and distance; we feel that our body is getting in the way of our desire to be one with who we love. Through animal sacrifice we tear down the conceptual walls we created out of our bodies and their desires; we burn the flesh that falsely suggested we exist separate of God and act independent of His will. The sacrifice reminds us that the physical is not a barrier that set us apart from God. It is really only a smoke screen that hides our eternal oneness. There are different opinions regarding the actual meaning of the animal sacrifices. The Rambam describes the sacrifices as a Divine concession. God recognized that when the Israelites left Egypt they were steeped in a religious culture that brought sacrificial offerings to their gods. Thus God decided to allow the Israelites to express their religious passion in a way that they were accustomed to seeing, but He set limitations which were meant to help wean them off this approach, so that eventually they would not need it at all. In other words, God was not at all interested in sacrifices, but allowed this form of worship in response to the people’s needs. However, this concession was made with an eye towards the future when the ideal Temple worship would be prayer. According to this opinion, animal services will ultimately be nullified. Rav Kook elaborates that when the Temple is rebuilt, we will bring only meal offerings. And then even the meal offering will be nullified until the Temple will be strictly a house of prayer. In other words, when we reach the point when we no longer need the sacrificial service, we will be on a high enough spiritual level to experience “giving ourselves completely to God” through prayer alone. We will put our entire souls into our words of prayer—reciting them soulfully—and thus no longer need sacrifices to experience God’s absolute oneness and our oneness with God.