Salt

As universally know, every sacrifice needs to be brought with salt. In fact, there is even something covenantal about salt. The question I would like to ask is what exactly is covenantal about salt. 

Firstly, the verse, which depicts how the grain-based meal offering served as an exemplar of all offerings: 

"You shall season your every offering of meal with salt; you shall not omit from your meal offering the salt of your covenant with God; with all your offerings you must offer salt."

Salt is oft-seen as primordial in nature, a world of dessication, dehydration leaving precious salts and minerals behind. In fact, the Midrash takes it a step further; God promised the primordial subterranean waters that they would be offered on the altar for libation, along with their complementary salts. 

The struggle I have with this approach is that the Midrash, in its haggadic or illustrational form, seems to have no connection with the literary textual meaning of the Torah itself. Nowhere is there a covenant mentioned with water or salt, and if it does serve allegorically, there should be some linkage to the simple meaning of the text. Yet, in the text, i.e. the Torah itself, to the best of my knowledge, never is water, or salt, for that matter, anthropomorphized, i.e. given human qualities. You really can't make a covenant with salt, or water; it's like talking to the table, or the keyboard, or a glass cup. 

What then, is at the heart of Midrashic thought? 

Rashi, who is much more likely than the Ramban to seek allegorical meaning, sets on a difficult chase; the Ramban, well aware of that difficulty chalks salt up to sod, or kabbalah, hinting at a deeper spiritual meaning, while at the same time, giving credence to the paradoxical nature of salt, salt signifying death, when all water has gone leaving the most elemental minerals, and yet, its quality of being around forever. Salt is here to stay, which is why, fascinatingly, the optimal salt for the altar is that from Sodom, which has the deepest roots, and being at the lowest place in the world, is most "organic" and elemental.

The Kli Yakar, it would seem - piggybacking on the Ramban - states that salt is a primer for all of the contradictions in Judaism. If we can comprehend the oxymoron of salt then we can accept other questions that seem beyond our human grasp. Representing the life that once was, salt also preserves life, for salting meat and the like. Thus salt, is an end, but also the foundation of future life. 

At the end of the day, something all commentators seem to have in common is that they see salt as something of lasting significance, eternal, having been and also set to be in the future, and likewise, something of universal import. Salt belongs to the world, the very fabric of the world, and therefore a person was not allowed to bring his own salt for his sacrificial offerings, yet had to use the salt provided by all of the entirety of the Jewish people. The same way the word covenant is used in the context of the Torah as an eternal covenant, or brit olam, salt has to come from the entirety of the Jewish people, combining or synthesizing those two elements, coming from everyone, and representing the lasting endurance and eternity of our people!