This week, many Americans will sit down with their families to celebrate Thanksgiving by sharing what has become one of the traditional American meals: turkey. Jewish tradition tells us that in the days of Moshiach, the Bais HaMikdash will be rebuilt and the order of animal sacrifices will be reinstituted. Some have trouble imagining this scenario due to the massive number of animals that will need to be slaughtered on a daily basis, not to mention yomim tovim. Current estimates put the worldwide Jewish population at around 13 million. That means that on holidays like Pesach, a mind-bogglingly large number of sacrifices would have to be performed. But how many lambs would we really need? Is it really that much, especially when compared with the number of turkeys slaughtered each year for Thanksgiving?
Let’s take a look at the numbers. The minimum requirement to fulfill the mitzvah of korban pesach is a ke’zayit. There’s many different opinions as to actual volume of a ke’zayit, a full discussion of which is beyond the scope of this post. Let’s assume a ke’zayit is about 45 cubic centimeters (according to the opinion of Tosafos). An average lamb weighs about 45 lbs, and assuming the density of lamb meat is about the same as that of a navy bean (I couldn’t find density info for lamb meat, sorry), that’s about 23,780 cubic centimeters of meat. That means we could feed about 530 people with one lamb! That would be a bit of a logistical nightmare, having to measure out a ke’zayit to each and every person; but it would mean that we could get away with about 25,000 lambs!
Let’s assume for the sake of our discussion that we limit the number of people per lamb to 50, a much more manageable number. In that case, we could feed 13 million Jews with only 260,000 lambs.
That sounds like a lot, but let’s now take a look at the number of turkeys killed to feed Americans for Thanksgiving. Estimates put the number of turkeys slaughtered each year somewhere between 250 and 300 million, with about 42 million of those for Thanksgiving alone. The USDA provides a handy search engine that lists data for the number of turkeys slaughtered each month (along with lots of other useful information). According to the USDA, the number of turkeys slaughtered in the US in September of 2008 was 22,700 thousand head, or 22.7 million turkeys! Assuming they worked 30 days out of the month, and slaughtered the same number of turkeys each day, that works out to about 750,000 turkeys a day!
We’ve created this handy illustration that sums it all up pretty nicely:
Now, granted, those lambs are distributed throughout the United States, and not concentrated into a single area; I’ll leave the logistics of how to slaughter that many lambs to the expert when the time comes. But it’s still reasonable to see how, logistically, korbonos in the Beis HaMikdash aren’t as much of an impossibility as one might originally have thought. And we didn’t even factor in Pesach Sheni. 
If you’d like to do your own calculations, here are some of the sites/tools I used.
- Weight to Volume conversion tools
- USDA Data and Statistics Quick Search (select U.S. and State data/Poultry slaughter)
- How much meat from a market animal?
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
You need to subtract the bones and other inedibles to determine how many people can actually eat the korban pesach.
The illustration was particularly helpful.
I think the navy bean density (0.8 g / cm^3) was the wrong one to use. And I’m not sure how you did your calculation.
(45 pounds) * (1 cm^3 / 0.8 g) =~ 25,500 cm^3 (calculation here)
Anyway, the density of muscle, which is what meat is, is 1.06 g / cm^3 (See references here.)
Using this value, you get ~19,250 cm^3 of meat. (calculation here)
That is about 428 people per lamb. Still huge.
Good comparison, though.
Moishe – if you check that link, the weight of a lamb given here is average weight of usable meat on a lamb.
Subtracting 10 lbs of weight from the meat of the lamb to account for bone-in chuck would still give us about 15K cubic cm of meat, enough for about 350 ke’zaytim. We figured 50 people per cow for the sake of simplicity, so I think we’re ok.
I’m glad you liked the illustration.
I am glad the illustration says “BaltimoreJewish.com” for when it is stolen to appear in the next RJJ journal.
Eli: thanks for your correction, you’re numbers make sense.
Moishe is right though, the source I used mentioned “bone-in chuck,” so we’d have to remove that from the equation. Still, we’ve got more than enough wiggle-room by limiting to 50 pplp (persons per lamb).
A few points:
1. There are 13 million Jews but how many will actually bring a Korban Pesach? How many don’t believe in God or believe in God but don’t believe we should bring korbanos etc? I know we’re talking about Moshiach coming but I still find it hard to believe that more than half the Jews will all of a sudden start bringing Korbanos. maybe I’m wrong.
2. You brushed over the fact that all the animals will have to be slaughtered in one place. That’s a huge deal and the thing that is most dissimilar to Thanksgiving. I do agree with you that it will be manageable with proper planning but it will still be an awesome thing to see if you can get close enough.
3. The day of the korban Pesach there will be Chagigos brought plus some other regular korbanos. It’s going to be unbelievable.
Great post (as usual).
…and I thought I was bored.
Eli -
If I was right, it was only by accident – I appreciate the correction. Another thought I had was that meat tends to lose somewhere between 20-30% of its mass when cooked (mostly water loss), so there are fewer people per lamb. Also, it seems reasonable to assume that some percentage of the population will want to use a larger shiur.
Of course, you can also use goat. The other grey meat.
How much longer does it take to slaughter a kosher lamb vs a treif turkey? If you slaughter 100 lambs, how many of those can actually be used as a karbon? (ie. how many are not treif etc…)
mike: not sure; we are assuming for the sake of our discussion that we’ve got 100% utilization of animals. I’m sure that in real life, there is a significant number of animals that will be found to be treif after scheitah.