Parsha Tsav: The vampire in the palace

By Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel in Chula Vista, California

In many Jewish communities, there is a curious custom of drinking only white wine during the Passover Seder. To an outsider, it seems like a mere culinary preference. But history tells a darker tale. For centuries, the “Blood Libel”—the grotesque accusation that Jews used the blood of children to bake matzah—turned the red wine of our celebration into a target for those seeking a pretext for massacre. Blood has always been the terrifying, thundering theme of Passover history.

In our secular culture, we relegate this terror to the realm of Gothic horror. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the quintessential example: the dark, forbidding forests of Transylvania, the gloomy corridors of London, and the figure of the Count—a predator who fears the light, cringes at the cross, and possesses a “foreign” quality that some antisemites of the 19th century explicitly coded as Jewish.

But why the obsession with blood? Why would anyone, in fiction or reality, want to consume it?

Because blood is the ultimate symbol of vitality. To the ancients, and to the monsters of our myths, blood was the nefesh—the soul-force. To consume it was to steal the strength of another. It is the ultimate act of parasitism: surviving not by one’s own merit, but by sucking the life out of the living.

In this week’s parsha, Tsav, the Torah pivots from the “how-to” of the offerings to a repeated, severe prohibition:

“You shall not eat any blood, whether it be of fowl or of beast, in any of your dwelling places” (Leviticus 7:26).

The penalty is karet—to be cut off, spiritually and communally. The Torah commands us to pour it out or cover it. Why? Because we are forbidden from incorporating the life-force of another into our own. We are commanded to be a people who sustain life, not a people who feed upon it.

Today, in the spring of 5786 (2026 CE), this ancient warning has moved from the parchment of the scroll to the front lines of history. The escalation of violence in the Middle East—specifically the direct conflict between the United States, Israel, and the Islamic Republic of Iran that erupted on February 28th—has pulled back the curtain on a modern Gothic horror.

For 47 years, the mullahs of Iran have presided over a vampiric regime. Since the 1979 Revolution, this theocratic tyranny has not lived; it has fed. It has fed on the life-force of its own citizens. We see the statistics, and they are staggering: over 2,200 executions in 2025 alone. But the recent months have been even darker. As the regime faced economic collapse and nationwide dissent, it chose the path of the predator. Reports suggest that in the latest wave of crackdowns, over 30,000 Iranians have been killed—massacred, buried in unmarked graves, or “disappeared” into the bowels of the state.

This is vampiric behavior at the highest level of state power. When a regime hangs protesters, tortures dissidents, and executes children for the “crime” of wanting to breathe, it is literally consuming the nefesh of its people to sustain its own decaying grip on power. Their hunger is insatiable. It moves from their own streets to proxy wars, to hostage-taking, and finally to the nuclear brinkmanship that has now drawn the world into war.

The tragedy is that this barbarism is often draped in the robes of religion. Tyrants have always used the name of God to justify the excess of the Devil. Consider the hadith often quoted by those who seek our destruction:

·         “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews… the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say, ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.'” (Sahih al-Bukhari 2926)

How pathetic is a worship of God that requires the inanimate world to act as an informant for a firing squad? When religion is used to order the execution of thousands, it ceases to be a ladder to heaven and becomes a shovel for a mass grave. Gandhi was once asked what he thought of Western Civilization, and he replied, “I think it would be a splendid idea!” We might say the same of religion. Faith exists to make us more human. If it makes us more savage, it is not faith; it is a “twisted version” of the sacred used to sanctify bloodlust.

We might think ourselves enlightened because we no longer drink blood from a chalice. But the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah knew better. They equated the shedding of innocent blood with the act of consuming it. Isaiah thunders:

“Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood; their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity…” (Isaiah 59:7)

One does not have to be a literal vampire to be guilty of the prohibition in Tsav. A dictatorship that ruins the lives of millions to feed the ego of a few “great ones” (rabbarebai) is guilty of consuming blood. There is the violence of the battlefield, yes, but there is also the violence of state terror and the violence of indifference.

The goal of our religion—the goal of the laws of Tsav and the laws of Pesach—is to make us into more sensitive, caring human beings. The Torah’s command not to consume blood is a call to reject dehumanization. It is a call to recognize that the blood of an Iranian protester, an Israeli soldier, or an American civilian contains the same sacred soul.

As we move toward Passover, the festival of our freedom, we must remember that we are not yet fully redeemed as long as vampiric regimes still suck the life-force out of the vulnerable.

May the Almighty grant wisdom to those fighting to end this reign of terror. May He protect the innocent trapped in the dark forests of modern tyranny. And may we have the courage to uphold the true meaning of the Torah: to be a people who never feed on the lives of others, but who work instead to ensure that every soul can live in the light.