What are we to make of Parsha Shemini? Our ancestors struggled mightily with this reading because there are things in it that also made them very uncomfortable. There are things in it that make me very uncomfortable. But open-hearted struggle with what makes us uncomfortable is in fact a part of the tradition. A part I really connect with – because the Torah is part of our inheritance, whether we like parts of it or not. And I like a good story…
The story begins after 7 days of preparations for the dedication the Tabernacle are ending. So there are lots of lists of ritual laws of sacrifice and holiness for the priests and the people, connected to the Mishkan. The reading also includes the introduction of the dietary laws. With all these laws we get the story what happened at the consecration of the Mishkan and the ordination of the priests — including Aaron and his sons.
Unfortunately, this ordination does not go well. Okay, that’s an understatement...
The text tells us that during the ceremony, after the Divine Presence appeared before the people, Aaron's sons, page:
"each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and laid incense on it; and they offered before HaShem an alien fire, which HaShem had not commanded them. And fire came forth from HaShem and consumed them; and they died before HaShem."
Now this is weird. After all, it was only recently that Aaron himself had sinned as an idolator, serving as priest before the Golden Calf. Yet here he is officiating (after a sin offering of expiation) as high priest at the Mishkan. He wasn't consumed. So what's going on here, what’s so terrible about this alien fire? What is alien fire?
The Sages and rabbis have been writing about this for a couple of millenia now, trying to make some sense of it. And there’s nothing more traditional than to consider what they have to offer us as we wrestle with this story ourselves.
In recent times, there have been some orthodox rabbis (and I emphasize only some) who have used this story to rail against the conservative and reform movements, linking them to Nadav and Avihu, calling our ways of worship an alien fire. And in particular they have branded the acceptance of queer people as rabbis as alien fire. I find their interpretation just as divisive of our people as they find our practice, if not more so. Having noted their opinion, let’s leave it behind without adding to rancor or divisiveness.
Going back a bit further, Rashi gives two opinions on this story: first that Nadav and Avihu made a ritual decision without consulting Moses, and second that they brought their offerings in a state of drunkeness. Unfortunately, I don’t feel the text supports either of these lines of thought. But such is our Midrashic instinct -- we've got to find a reason, an explanation for the things that make us very uncomfortable about this text that our tradition reveres. Even if it requires us to make up a story that doesn't appear in the text so that we can feel better. And while Rashi was, after all, Rashi, I'm not buying his explanation.
Rambam says that the sin of the alien fire was about their intellectual vanity, an arrogance that they knew better how to perform this ritual. The insight here is that their role as priests was to bring the people closer to the Divine Presence, and that any vanity about this role in fact creates separation. It’s an important insight, especially for those who serve on the bimah. But as far as I can see, it doesn’t seem to be supported in the text either.
Rabbi Akiva suggests that what made the fire alien was that it did not come from the Altar — but once again, this mistake in ritual seems minor to me when compared to Aaron's previous transgression.
But while I don't feel right about Rabbi Akiva's explanation, there's a story about him that I think offers a clue to reading the parsha.
The story appears in tractate Hagigah of the Babylonian Talmud, and it's short:
"Four sages entered Paradise. Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Aher and Rabi Akiba. Ben Azzai looked and died. Ben Zoma looked and lost his mind. Aher cut himself off and became an apostate. Only Rabbi Akiba entered and departed in peace."
Now some of you may be thinking, this is an even weirder little story. What’s it got to do with the death of Nadav and Avihu? But this story about the 4 sages is a coded teaching about Jewish mystical practice — the Hekaloth and Merkavah meditations they did in order to experience visions of the Divine Presence.
Many traditions teach meditative practices that offer visions of the Divine. In ours, there is a fence built around such practice — there is an understanding that there is a danger in seeking a spiritual experience that one has not made full preparation for. It can be beyond one's capacity to endure it.
Leviticus Rabbah says of Ben Azzai, one of the 4 sages who entered Paradise, the one who looked and died, that when he sat down to meditate on Torah, the words burned like fire in his sight, and they were so joyful to him that as he passed through the chambers of heaven on the divine chariot his soul could not tear itself away, and he took leave of this world.
Ben Zoma could not contain the experience either — he went mad. Aher is so named because the experience also blew his mind, and he became a heretic.
But this story of Ben Azzai takes place at least 1500 years after the death of Aaron’s sons. So lets look a little closer to the story of Aaron's sons for an example the dangers of a vision of the Divine. Rabbi Uziel Milevsky calls our attention to the midrash that tells how the souls of the Jews actually left their bodies when they heard the first two commandments at Sinai. Remember, God instructs the people not to even touch the mountain lest they die. When they hear the Divine voice deliver the commandments, Milevsky says they experienced: a “spiritual short circuit,” which is what happens when a “powerful spiritual experience excites the soul and makes it vibrate at a higher frequency than that of the body. Such an experience”, he says, “can cause the soul to burst out of its physical confines in a flash of supreme rapture, and the body may not survive the experience.”
This is the reasoning behind the traditional restrictions on who is allowed to study the mystical practices of the kabbalah – it must be a married (and thus presumably heterosexual) male, over the age of 40. That he is a devout and orthodox Jew goes without saying.
What all this suggests to me about the story of Nadav and Avihu is that they were seeking a spiritual experience beyond their capacity to hold. That their strange fire was in fact their burning desire to be closer to the Divine Presence, and that their inability to withstand that experience burned them up.
And this may suggest why the dietary laws follow. If one considers the body a tabernacle that is capable of receiving an experience of the Divine Presence, it is imperative that one prepare that body so that it can hold this experience without shattering, without what Rabbi Milevsky referred to as the spiritual short circuit. It is a recognition that is profoundly (though certainly not exclusively) Jewish, that the spiritual is not separate from the physical. That to split reality in this or any other way is dangerous. Of course any Buddhist can tell you that.
So here we are today, eleven days in to the counting of the omer. Nowadays, too often practices like these devolve into a hollow ritual. This to me qualifies as strange fire -- fire without light. Yet the culmination of the counting of the omer is in fact the same encounter of the Divine experienced by our ancestors at Sinai.
The question then falls to each of us, as individuals in community, before we enter further into this ritual counting: what is the quality of fire we bring – and how have we prepared ourselves for this moment, the ever present moment that offers the experience of Divine Presence?
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