One simple verse, two important ideas.
“And you shall cook and eat [the Korban Pesach] in the place that Hashem your G-d will choose, and then you shall turn in the morning and go to your tents” (Deuteronomy 16:7).
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch notes that the Torah specifically requires cooking and eating - not praying and sacrificing - before we can leave the Beit Hamikdash and return home. He writes, “Only when you have learned ‘to cook and to eat’ at places consecrated to G-d, only when the spirit of the Sanctuary has so penetrated the whole of your being…that even your bodily life of your senses…is elevated into the sphere of a moral, holy, G-d-serving life of mitzvot…only then have you gained the right spirit of the meaning of the ‘Home of G-d’ that is to accompany you home for your ordinary homely life.”
But even that is not enough. We have to stay in the environs of the Beit Hamikdash until morning. Why? Because a korban isn’t something you can just “drop off” and go on your merry way telling yourself that you have paid your dues. A korban is supposed to change you.
Rav Hirsch writes: “The Torah never, and in no circumstances, wishes the purpose of any pious gift or offering brought to its Sanctuary to be terminated by the mere objective bringing of it, but insists on its being completed by the impressions its Sanctuary is to make on us in its influence on our thinking and feelings, on our desires and actions.”
Thus, the Torah insists that a person who brings a Korban Pesach - or even donates wood, wine, or frankincense to the Beit Hamikdash - “stays in the surroundings of the Sanctuary over night and only returns home the next day (Sifre).” For the Torah wants us to “collect our thoughts in its vicinity, and allow the impressions we have gathered to mature in the still night, so that then - with our clear morning thoughts spiritually enriched - we can carry that treasure, as the true blessing of the Sanctuary, back to our homely hearths.”
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) - head of the Jewish community in Frankfurt, Germany for over 35 years - was a prolific writer whose ideas, passion, and brilliance helped save German Jewry from the onslaught of modernity.
Elliot Resnick, PhD, is the host of “The Elliot Resnick Show” and the editor of “The Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch Dictionary.”