Shmini

This is from the parasha today. Nadav and Avihu, the sons of Aaron go into the Mishkan and offer Eish Zara to God, that they were not commanded to do, and God zaps them. And Moses says through those close to me I will be holy. And Aaron is silent.

I want to talk about Eish Zara or strange fire. In our tradition there are hundreds of commentaries on this because many in our tradition are uncomfortable with the pshat version of events. On the surface of it, two enthusiastic sons of Aaron want to get closer to God and are killed as a result and their father Aaron says nothing, while Moses tries to say nice, kind words.

It seems so unfair. Where is the Justice in God’s actions. Why are good people being made to suffer? The boys didn’t seem to do anything wrong and were killed by God for no good reason. In fact, they weren’t just killed, they were burned alive, incinerated. Ribono shel ha olam…And their father says nothing. (Of course, their mother’s response isn’t recorded in the Torah)

Thank God for our Rabbinic tradition to fill in the gaps. The Rabbis of the Talmud, the Midrash and beyond to our modern age, try to explain. They mostly work hard to suggest that the brothers must have done something wrong to merit this punishment.

The reasons vary from it was an improper offering or unsanctioned offering, to them wearing the wrong clothing, to them being naked, to them being drunk, to them being very stoned on the incense, to their arrogance, to them undermining the leadership of Moses and Aaron, to them refusing to marry and procreate. Or maybe it was just a tragic accident. Or maybe they dared to teach the law in the presence of Moses.

I bumped into Laliv yesterday on the high street and she said look at the Rashi on parashat Mishpatim chapter 24, on verses 10-11.

She was right. It was fascinating. For context, this is from parashat Mishpatim in Exodus, chapter 24, on verses 10-11 that we read weeks ago….

‘Then went up Moses, and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel; and they saw the God of Israel; and there was under His feet the like of a paved work of sapphire stone, and the like of the very heaven for clearness. And upon the nobles of the children of Israel He laid not His hand; and they beheld God and did eat and drink’

Rashi puts that together with what we read today – where they get burned up and he suggests:

‘They gazed and peered and [because of this] were doomed to die, but the Holy One, blessed is He, did not want to disturb the rejoicing of [this moment of the giving of] the Torah. So, He waited for Nadab and Abihu [i.e., to kill them,] until the day of the dedication of the Mishkan.

In other words, God didn’t want to spoil the party, but Nadav and Avihu tried to get too close to God, so they had to die. They believed that they could add to their love of God a greater love, in order to melt into His radiance and so God just helped them along with the melting.

That’s Rashi, but take your pick for the reasons why bad things happen to good people. It’s a very uncomfortable place to sit knowing we are powerless against deaths of children, against pogroms, and the pain and suffering we see all around us. Explanations make us feel better. I hear this a lot. Oh Israel deserved October 07 because of this and that reason. If only we did this and that, then we can escape that suffering. But ladies and gentlemen, I believe that isn’t so. We can be as good as gold and still…

This week I heard the mother of a hostage speak. Her name was Orli Shem Tov. It was on Zoom. Her son, Omer Shem Tov is still held hostage in Gaza and she has had to live with the excruciating pain of that for the last six months. Every morning when she opens her eyes, the pain begins again. She spoke to us from her home in Israel to us sitting safely in London, but her pain was palpable. She told us her son is like sunshine and everyone one wants to be in his company. He is a good kid who loves life and freedom, and he was kidnapped from the Nova festival where he went to party.

Because we were so far away, we could only respond with silence when really what we wanted to do was to be there with her and to give her a hug. I am impatient with people that comment from far away when they are not sitting under rocket fire themselves or have not experienced the pain of losing children themselves. People that don’t know the pain of loss that great. I hear Aaron’s silence and cringe at Moses’s explanations.

It’s easier to listen to people who really know. I was pleased to find a commentary from Elie Wiesel on the strange fire of Nadab and Abihu, and why they were killed for offering it. He says, we don’t know.

Elie Wiesel survived the Holocaust. The word Holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston, a translation of the Hebrew word ʿolah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. His sister, father and mother were offered up in the strange fire of Auschwitz.

He says this: ‘it is to teach us that there are events in life -- in our national life, in our personal life -- events that transcend our understanding. God’s motives and ours are not necessarily the same. There is pain, and there may even be injustice, that we cannot understand. We may try to find answers, but we do not have the answers. We understand that we don’t understand.’

There is so much I don’t understand but am absolutely certain that I am grateful to be here with you all now, and for the wonderful tradition that we all share. We are the lucky ones. Shabbat Shalom.

Tzav

Tzav We all do bad things. We offend by accident and on purpose. We don’t mean to, but we hurt people close to us like our children and our parents, and sometimes we offend complete strangers. We frequently sin in big ways and small against our living planet. We try our best but none of us are perfect. What’s needed is a mechanism for repairing the fracture we have caused and will continue to cause. Otherwise, we will be paralysed by a need for impossible perfection. I believe if you aren’t making mistakes, you just aren’t trying hard enough. Or living in the real world.

When the Temple stood in Jerusalem, people would offer korbanot (sacrifices) for their misdeeds. Today in the parasha, we read about the different sacrifices, like korban hattat (the sin offering) and also Korban Asham (the guilt offering). Although administered by the priests, they were made for the benefit of everyone, rich or poor, powerful or unconnected. The sin offering in particular, allowed for a range of sacrifices, from a whole bull offered by the people at the top to just a handful of fine flour offered by the poorest.

Maimonides has something very interesting to say about the altar where these diverse sacrifices happened . He takes considerable historic licence to say that the altar in the Temple has always been in the same place. Going back in time, he says, the altar in both Temples was in exactly the same spot and it was in exactly the same place where Abraham built the altar for the sacrifice of Isaac all the way back to where Adam was created on that very same spot. He says: ‘Thus, the sages have said: Man was formed from the place of his atonement.’ אָמְרוּ חֲכָמִים אָדָם מִמְּקוֹם כַּפָּרָתוֹ נִבְרָא Quite a flight of fancy for the Great Eagle. But he does it, because he wants to say the potential for atonement is built into all people since the very first person was created. We are all created on that fault line. It is the crack through which the light gets in, some might say.

It’s true today, without a Temple, that people still need a way to repair their mistakes. They still need capara, teshuva, atonement. They still need another chance to do better.

The rabbis that created Rabbinic Judaism after the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 ACE needed to replace those essential processes that used to happen in the Temple. They stopped killing the animals in one large, centralised place and they went smaller, taking the processes into the synagogues, into the study halls and into the courts. The rabbis understood the value of us taking our court ordered punishment.

Take your pick from punishments available. It’s all going to a good cause. Judaism allows capital punishment, lashes or being cut off from your community. The best punishment in terms of getting a second chance is definitely lashes or flogging. Makot in Hebrew.

This brings me to what I really wanted to share with you today. I learned this bit of Talmud with R. Chaim Weiner three weeks ago and it’s a good one. We were learning Shevuot 20b. In it, the rabbis are trying to figure out the correct punishment for taking God’s name in vain when making a false oath. The ten commandments in Exodus are quoted where it says you should not take God’s name in vain because the Lord will not absolve him of his guilt.

Rav Pappa says maybe this means there’s no absolution for this crime at all. But Abaye can’t be having that. He says yes in the Torah it says that God will not absolve him. But there’s another way out. There has to be. God may not absolve him, but the earthly court flogs him and in so doing absolves him of guilt.

That’s why we don’t kill people who take God’s name in vain. Don’t tell anyone but blasphemy is not a big thing in Judaism. I don’t know for sure, but the God I stand before doesn’t need that from me or want me to kill people in his name. Who knows what happens in heavenly courts. We need creative law makers and just courts down here. We need social mechanisms to get people up and to try again, this next time a little better.