April 16, 2009
A few years ago, on the first morning of Pesah, I was scanning The New York Times. There was a startling and sad news article about a young Jewish man in Brooklyn who, while participating in the ritual burning of hametz on the morning before the first seder, had tried to accelerate the process by spraying lighter fluid on the remaining crumbs. The resulting flashback left him seriously burned.
I am reminded of this story when we come to parshat Shemini, with its brief and troubling account of how Aaron’s two sons, Nadav and Avihu, were destroyed by a burst of divine fire as they prepared to participate in the first sacrificial offerings in the newly constructed Mishkan.
The story as it comes to us is perplexing and elusive, as well as ambiguous in its apocopation.
What exactly is the esh zara, alien fire, that Nadav and Avihu bring? What exactly did Nadav and Avihu do that was wrong? What could have been so wrong as to warrant execution by “a fire that came out from before the Lord and consumed them”? (Leviticus 10:1) And what kind of God is imagined by the biblical author, why would he write such a story, and what message are we supposed to take away from the text?
All theology is inevitably biography. Our reactions to the story — ranging from compliance to complaint — tell us less about the story than about ourselves. This is equally true in terms of many traditional commentators, the majority of whom gravitate toward a negative view of Nadav and Avihu, premised on the assumption that their deaths must be justified. Professor Edward Greenstein sees such a story, however, as “a punishment in search of a crime.”
A minority of commentators attribute a pious proclivity to Nadav and Avihu, seeing them as acting out of a desire to be close to and serve God. When they inadvertently cross a sacred boundary, they regrettably but circumstantially suffer the consequences, much as a benevolent bubbe might if she tinkered with a fuse box.
But something feels wrong here, and it is not the actions of Nadav and Avihu — it is the actions the writer attributes to God. Most of the Midrash tries, sometimes with an edge of desperation, to legitimate the actions of God by finding fault with some action or inaction of Nadav and Avihu. But any bar or bat mitzva student assigned this parsha would surely know that two junior-league priests on their first day on the job were entitled to a reprimand, not a “firing.”
Most of the time, we live without an active awareness of the socially constructed nature of what we take for granted as objectively “out there.” We forget, until we are forced to confront difficult and often tragic circumstances, that what we take as necessary is more often contingent. Things “are” the way they “are,” but in such moments we know they could have been different.
Rabbi Neil Gilman teaches that sacred stories are the reality we create to interpret and understand the common human experiences shared by all people. Gilman, among others, argues that myths are designed, however subconsciously, to combat the disorder and disarray that lurk just beyond the boundaries of the meanings we create. These myths, what sociologist Daniel Goelman calls “vital lies,” are indispensible — they structure reality and stabilize existence, give us a frame of reference, and create and transmit meaning from one generation to the next.
As applied to our parsha, why were generations of Jews before us content to accept the deaths of Nadav and Avihu at face value, assuaged in their anxiety by the explanations of rabbinic tradition? And why are we so often unsatisfied with those same answers that carried them over any doubts they may have had, or at least held them at bay?
Like it or not, we live at an unprecedented time in Jewish history, when modernity has unraveled the stories earlier generations took for granted. We are trying to hold onto the threads and maintain the fabric of Jewish life even as we live with the frayed edges, until we find new ways to bind them together again.
And in the countless number of daily circumstances that challenge the taken-for-granted nature of life — moments of illness and of loss, of tragedy and of suffering, of disruption, despair, and distress — in those moments we can still use the resources of Jewish tradition first to help us endure, and then to help us respond, recover, or rebuild.
Richard Hirsh is executive director of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, Wyncote, Pa.
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