Salt From the Six Days of Creation

And  every meal  offering  of yours  shall you salt;  neither shall you allow the  salt of the covenant of your God to be lacking from  your  meal  offering; upon  all  your offerings shall you offer salt.                                                                         Leviticus 2:13

           Rashi comments that “... a covenant was established with salt from the six days of creation, when the lower waters (those of the oceans) received assurance that they would be offered on the altar in the form of salt.” Our Sages understood that the salt which was preferred for salting the sacrifices was sea salt, not salt extracted from dry land. As Rabbi A.M. Silverman explains in his English translation of Rashi, the “lower waters” (see Genesis 1:7) were dissatisfied that they had been assigned a place on earth and not in heaven, whereupon God made the assurance mentioned by Rashi. Based upon this elucidation, Rashi’s comment teaches that salting the sacrifices symbolizes combining the heavenly and earthly, which is the essential function of the Mishkan and Mikdash    (Tabernacle and Temple).

          My father noted an additional lesson of the Torah’s requirement to salt the sacrifices. Just as salt, the biblical preservative, par excellence, not only preserved, but enhanced the sacrifices, so too, the sacrifices in the Mishkan and Beit haMikdash, or their contemporary equivalent, serving God in general, preserve and enhance life.