For Parashat Shemini 5781
The piece of Torah that Isaac just opened up for us is one of the more difficult turns in our texts. It starts with Aharon, the High Priest, beginning his duties on the very first day in which the mishkan, the nerve-center of our relationship with God, was in operation.
Aharon makes a series of inaugural sacrifices – a ram and a calf on his own behalf, and a goat and a calf and a lamb on behalf of the people, and then an ox and a ram, with flour and oil for a wholeness sacrifice. He does the slaughtering and eviscerating; the pouring of blood on the altar as an act of purification, because blood in Torah has this quality. And he atones for himself and for the people.
And through all this, Aharon remains impervious. He handles all this priestly stuff, moves and clears ritual impurity and lifts and offers up and alleviates the guilt of all the people’s missteps. And he does all of this without absorbing any of it. He even, in a portion a few weeks from now that you might remember from Yom Kippur, transfers the guilt of the people onto a goat. But he himself remains impervious.
Oh to be so impervious! To hold the weight of the hardship of the people and for it not to absorb through our skin and into our bones! But no, we are so porous. N’kavim n’kavim chalulim chalulim as we say in our morning prayers. We are porous and penetrable! We were made that way.
We don’t know much about the inner life of Aharon the high priest. He does Moshe’s bidding and Moshe’s speaking for so many years. He trains up to be the High Priest, to be the people’s conduit to the Divine. He learns it and masters it and indeed, at the end of that first day, God accepts the sacrfice with fire and the people are filled with awe. What a tremendous, open, clear, impervious vessel Aharon must be for this to work.
But then the unthinkable happens. Just as everyone is getting ready to call it a day, Aharon’s eldest sons, Nadav and Avihu, jump in to offer something different at the altar. A “strange fire” Torah calls it. Something not contemplated or planned for. And just like before, a fire bursts forth, but this time it consumes them.
This is a moment of Torah so harrowing that sages and scientists have been trying to understand it for ages. What happened? Is there a physical explanation or only a metaphysical one? Were they unprepared? Were they drunk? Were they in an ecstasy of love for God?
In the tenuous moment that follows, Moshe says something uninterpretable. He says: “This is what Adonai meant by saying, “Through those near to Me I show Myself holy and gain glory before all the people.” For millennia our teachers have argued about whether God is saying that the two young men were taken because they were dear to God, or whether it means the opposite. Either way, the verse then ends most memorably. Vayidom Aharon. “And Aharon was silent.”
This is a huge silence. A loud silence. One that still rings in our ears.
We don’t know if Aharon was shocked, shamed, accepting, speechless, or – as his job demanded – impervious.
Moshe quickly warns Aharon and his remaining sons not to mourn. Not to tear their clothes. Not to go drinking. Not to go seeking solitude outside the camp. There is work to be done. Aharon and his remaining sons are the conductors of the Divine-human machinery; they cannot afford to mourn. They must be fully in the zone of the holy. They must remain impervious.
And so they go back to work, sorting through what elements of the sacrifices are discarded and what are theirs to ritually eat. But Moshe notices that they went through the motions but did not actually do the eating. He asks them angrily why they did not, because the eating was commanded. And Aharon finally now opens his mouth and speaks. He says, “On a day such as this one that I have endured, had I eaten the offerings, would Adonai have approved?” And in saying this, Moshe is won over.
Without being there, without being in the vibration of this day of revelation and tragedy, without being inside the relationship of these brothers, without hearing Aharon’s tone of voice, it is hard to know what he was in fact saying. He could have meant that he was too shaken to be able to be the conduit of all that Divine power, and it was important for him only to do these rituals when he was at his best.
On the other hand, this could at last be Aharon’s protest. Against Moshe. Against God. Against the system that now controlled him. Aharon’s passive resistance. Aharon’s hunger strike.
Aharon was expected to somehow be impervious to his grief. Circumstances demanded it. We too live in a culture that expects us to be impervious to our grief. In Jewish tradition after a death we rend our clothes and we wear that torn clothing for a week or a month or a year so that we are visible as grieving people. But in this American culture not so. People are expected to get back to work. People are expected to make their grief invisible.
And this is a tall order. Because we all feel grief so much of the time. Sometimes without even noticing. Not just the obvious loss of people we care about. But all sorts of losses.
Over this last year we have grieved over the loss of freedom, of mobility, of financial security, of community, of certainty, of touch. We have grieved over injustice. We have grieved over illness. We have grieved over our children’s loneliness. Whether we talk about this grieving or not, we are not impervious to it. At least I’m not.
Ironically, I’ve noticed myself even grieving because of the fact that things are beginning to open up. I know that as more people have been getting vaccinated, there has been a lot of happy talk about the light at the end of a tunnel. But I’m not quite ready for happy-happy. I am holding so much accumulated grief. And I also find myself feeling grief leaving this year behind. Because there were things that were beautiful. Things that suited me and things I got just got accustomed to. Being home. Having purpose. Managing an emergency. Feeling like people were connecting rather than commuting. Welcoming Shabbat with you all without having to worry who is going to stack the chairs. Being home so much with my family. And I know a lot of this reflects both privilege and blessing – that I have work I can do from home; a large, interesting family to shelter with. But still, I will miss a lot about this more hermetic, more introspective time.
Maybe it is Yom Hashoah this week that has made me especially sensitive to my grief. But even as I have had my first extra-familial hug, and I have had a first gathering of classmates in person, I have felt the grief for the hugs that weren’t and the things that didn’t come into fruition. We will never know what the year would have been if the virus hadn’t emerged and hundred of thousands hadn’t died and we hadn’t gone inside.
We have all sacrificed over this last year. So much. We offered the year up, more than the year, we are still offering it up. At the altar of caution and care and decency. And may our offering be acceptable for health and healing and justice.
We are priests, all of us, negotiating this delicate balance between the human and the Divine, the inner and the outer, the personal and the collective, between civilization and Earth itself.
And in our priesthood, there is no need to be impervious. It is our grief and all that we learn from it, that qualifies us for this holy holy task.
For more about the High Priests invulnerability, see Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus (2004), pp. 98-99. For a very different treatment of this moment, the way I was feeling it in 2012, read “Hush, and Love Your Children.”