This week’s parsha, Shmini, contains one of the most painful passages in the book of Vayikra (Leviticus). The high priest, Aharon, has been instructed on how to bring korbanot – sacred offerings, our earliest mechanism for drawing-near to God. And then two of his sons, Nadav and Avihu, bring “alien fire” in their incense pans.
Fire comes forth from before God – at least, that’s the translation that comes closest to the original; here’s a great piece about that – and they die on the spot. It’s shocking. It’s terrible. Predictably, though midrash will embroider and explore, Torah herself does not give us insight into how our ancestors felt about any of this.
We just get two tiny words that speak volumes: וַיִּדֹּם אַהֲרֹן׃ / vayidom Aharon. “And Aharon was silent.” We’re going to dive deep into this story during SoulSpa tomorrow morning: what exactly happened? What did they do wrong? Why did they die? Where was their mother this whole time? What can we possibly learn from this today?
I’ve always been troubled by Aharon’s silence. But this year I thought: maybe his silence is his way of showing that he doesn’t yet have words. And until he does, he will take refuge in the structures he’s been given, the careful steps of the sacrificial process – dress in this specific way, offer this incense here, burn fats and organs there…
This year I hope that Aaron and his remaining sons (and his wife, too, though she’s absent here) were sustained by holding on to ritual. Maybe it helped them to follow the steps they had been given. Emily Dickinson wrote, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” Sometimes, in times of great pain, structures help us keep going.
I think of my own times of grief and loss, after the deaths of my parents. The rituals of shiva – covering my mirrors, leaving my hair uncut, giving myself over to the unpredictable flow of shiva visitors – helped me. They scaffolded those early days. Of course there’s no comparison between my losses, and God forbid losing a child. And.
Ritual and structure can help us stay upright when our steps feel shaky… just as being deliberate and deliberative can help us stay ethically upright when the world feels shaky. This is the deep Torah of this parsha for me this year. When the world is too much, we can take refuge in silence, and in taking small, careful steps on tradition’s ethical path.
The deaths of Nadav and Avihu are shocking. They come out of nowhere. This is every parent’s worst nightmare. And as Charlotte Clymer notes, each of the 13 American troops killed in Iran so far was someone’s child or parent, sibling or friend. The same is true of each Iranian killed in this war. And each Lebanese person. And each Israeli.
Sometimes, faced with the enormity of the world’s grief, I am like Aharon: I go silent. My stream of words feels inadequate to any single person’s suffering, much less the whole of it. Every human being is as dearly beloved to someone as my child is to me. Every death is the loss of a whole world of possibility. In this way, every loss is infinite.
This year, this Torah portion reminds me: it’s ok to be silent when we don’t have words. It’s good to lean on ritual and practice, whether that’s the practice of making a cup of coffee every morning, or doing a familiar flow of yoga, or reciting the mourner’s kaddish. And this parsha also reminds me that death, even at a distance, has an impact on us.
This part of Torah speaks a lot about taharah and tum’ah – sometimes rendered as purity and impurity, though I understand the words differently. We become tamei (spiritually charged-up, vibrating at a different frequency) when we come into contact with blood, with illness, with birth, with death. Every life includes this sometimes.
Even those of us who don’t use the words tahor and tamei know what it is to feel fragile, vulnerable, mortal. And though cable news and NPR and Instagram were unimaginable in Torah times, our ancestors knew that encountering death has an impact. And that’s true even when we encounter it at a distance. Like vicarious trauma: vicarious tum’ah.
Sometimes, maybe often, the best way out of a feeling of tum’ah is time. In this part of Torah, someone who’s come in contact with death or illness is sequestered outside the camp for a week. For us here and now, Shabbat might be our time of being “outside” normal life, taking some time for quiet and for healing at the soul’s own pace.
So here is my blessing, my prayer, for us as this Shabbat begins:
May we find ourselves today able to temporarily set aside the weight of the world. May we allow ourselves to be silent when we don’t have words. May our systems and structures and rituals be spiritual scaffolding to hold us when our legs or hearts feel wobbly. And when we make havdalah tomorrow and Moshiach hasn’t yet come / the world isn’t yet redeemed, may we be strengthened in our capacity to be there for each other, and may we remember that we’re not alone.
And let us say: Amen.
This is the d’var Torah R. Rachel offered at Kabbalat Shabbat services (cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)
