Animal Sacrifice and Interspecies Transformation

Are the sources of modern Jewish thought capable of theorizing a planetary politics? This paper suggests a non-anthropocentric Jewish ecotheology by conceptualizing sacrifice as interspecies transformation. An interpretive tradition developed by medieval and modern Jewish thinkers understands biblical sacrifice as a sacrament symbolizing apotheosis. Unexpectedly, human union with the Divine opens up interspecies possibility. Thinking beyond the human becomes possible because apotheosis is contingent upon the human offerant’s identification with the sacrificial animal. What is the nature of this “identification”? In what ways are human and more-than-human life bound together by their shared materiality? And what is the fate of this materiality? This paper populates an interspecies sacrificial imagination that reworks human-critter relations to reimagine the nature of perfection.