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Parsha by Gura

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Parshat Shemini (Leviticus 9:1-11:47)
28th Nissan, 5761
Birkat Hahodesh
13th of the Omer
Leviticus 9:22-10:3 22

And Aaron lifted up his hands towards the people and blessed them. He then descended from preparing the sin offering, the burnt offering, and the peace offering. And Moses and Aaron went into the Tent of Meeting. Then they came out and blessed the people, and the glory of the Lord appeared to all the people. And fire went forth from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering and the fats upon the altar, and all the people saw, sang praises, and fell upon their faces.

1. And Aaron's sons, Nadab and Abihu, each took his pan, put fire in them, and placed incense upon it, and they brought before the Lord foreign fire, which He had not commanded them. And fire went forth from before the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord. Then Moses said to Aaron, "This is what the Lord spoke, [when He said], 'I will be sanctified through those near to Me, and before all the people I will be glorified.' " And Aaron was silent.

Wrapped up in this six verses are all the contradictions, perplexities and confusions that lie at the center of our modernist encounter with antique ritual. The greatest minds of Jewish intellectual life over the centuries, and some of the most insightful scholars and academics during the past 150 years, have tried to extract purpose and meaning from this verses in a manner that both does justice to the text itself, and yet does not require us to surrender our critical skills and capacity.

A bold rejection of the temple cult and its sacrificial system does a disservice to both the biblical text and its rabbinic exposition. An unquestioned acceptance of the sacrifices and Nadab and Abihu's deaths belittle our inherent desire to both understand and demand justice with reason.

These concerns are not new to post-traditional times. The great rabbinic extrapolation of this story searches for meaning and purpose in their deaths. Midrash Rabbah on Numbers 3:4, ('And Nadab and Abihu died before the L-rd') states, "Bar Kappara, in the name of R. Jeremiah b. R. Eleazar, says: Aaron's sons died on account of four sins, viz. for drawing near, for offering, for the strange fire, and for not seeking counsel of each other." In other words, they did not perform the cult rituals correctly, nor in their proper time. Likewise, the Midrash also suggests that they may have been drunk, or previously had acted at Mt. Sinai with levity when Moshe announced G-d's revelation.

In the end, none of these midrashim are truly satisfactory, and their very quantity suggest that the rabbis were not contented with them either.

Gary Anderson, in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, points out that the final 3 verses of Leviticus 9 are the climax of the 22 chapters ordering and defining the sacrificial cult. Starting with Exodus 25, and continuing through Leviticus 7, the Priestly narrative (the P document) elaborately records G-d's architectural plans and their subsequent execution, down to the last piece of Priestly clothing, and details the sacrificial specifics. Commenting on these verses quoted above, he writes:

"The importance of this narrative has been underestimated by biblical scholars. In may respects it reflects the very center of the P document. Whereas prior to the revelation at Mt. Sinai, God has appeared to his chosen only sporadically, now this divine presence could be routinized and made available on a regular basis: "An altar of earth you shall make for me and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your peace offerings, your sheep and your oxen; in every place where I cause my name to be remembered I will come to you and bless you." (Exod. 20:24).

The ritual sacrificial cult systematizes a communal relationship with G-d previously available irregularly and unpredictably.

But that systematization comes with some cost: routine demand sobriety.

It is not sufficient to be G-d loving, or even, as Nadab and Abihu were, G-d intoxicated. One can imagine Nadab and Abihu's extreme joy: G-d was predictably present among His people. Now they could present themselves in worship at will, without limit. They were literally "enthused" (from the Greek, to be divinely possessed). Their romantic enthusiasms and emotional longing for G-d's presence overcame their reason. They failed to see the dangers, the frightening elements in religious life.

Critiquing some current trends in feminist discourse, Judith Plaskow writes, "Rereading the story of Nadab and Abihu.I was struck by the extent to which the God who devoured Aaron's son for offering 'strange fire' is largely absent from feminist imagery. This God, the same who killed Uzziah for putting our his hand to steady the ark (2 Sam. 6:6-7), and who warned the assembled Israelites not to come to close to the base of Sinai lest they die (Exod. 19:12-13), seems to me to point to a profoundly important dimension of human existence. Unless the God who speaks to the feminist experience of empowerment and connection can also speak to the frightening, destructive, and divisive aspects of our lives, a whole side of existence will be severed from the feminist account of the sacred." (From "Facing the Ambiguity of God" in The Jewish Philosophy Reader edited by Daniel Frank, Oliver Leaman and Charles H. Manekin).

That same idea applies to the current enthusiasm for mysticism. The dangers of those impulses led the rabbis to build a protective fence around mysticism, for unalloyed mysticism can harm not only the individual, but can bring pain and grief to the community.

G-d intoxication is dangerous. We all too often translate "yirat shamayim" as "awe of heaven", but perhaps we can use this story of Nadab and Abihu to retrieve its other meaning: "fear of heaven". The divine can, must be, scary, frightening, dangerous. One who claims exclusive knowledge of the divine is invariably scary, frightening and dangerous. All of our knowledge of the divine is conditional, hesitant, and partial. Even with Revelation, it takes enormous intellectual and emotional effort to decipher Revelation's implications and applications.

Nadab and Abihu, we can allow ourselves to read, got lost in their own feelings, in their own G-d intoxication, in their own emotional and intellectual conceit. Imagine what they might have done if tried to impose that intoxication on the rest of Am Yisrael!

Aaron, the bereft father, is again our model living on the cusp between a failed human world and the beckoning Divinity. In his grief, and perhaps his wonder, he stood silent.

Yesterday was Yom HaShoah. There are many ways we need to respond. One of course is to insist "Never again". But another, at least for a moment, is to stand silent, and wonder.

Shabbat Shalom,

Dennis