The Torah reading this week begins with a fire brought down to consume that which is on the altar in the tabernacle in the wilderness.
And in the first section of the Torah reading,
There is a fire that leaps forth to consume the offerings,
The first offerings offered at the altar.
And everyone's impressed,
Everyone's astounded.
But then not long thereafter,
In the same immediate section of the Torah,
In the section,
As Jewish communities called it,
One of seven parts to each week's Torah reading,
There's a fire that consumes Nadav and Avihu as they enter and offer some sort of strange and inappropriate or untimely or unseemly offering at the altar,
Something not required,
Not requested,
And they are consumed.
They're deceased.
And this question of why there is,
Candidly not ought to be,
But is,
Untimely death in the world,
That the good are not always rewarded and the wicked not always punished,
And sometimes the converse,
Consumes our rabbis when Nadav and Avihu die.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch,
About two centuries ago,
Suggests maybe they died by lack of self-control.
There was something they did that they were not meant to do,
That was not meat to do at that time.
Our sages confront the issue of unmerited suffering,
Unplanned or undeserved death,
As we do on a regular basis,
As art can,
As art can confront issues of seeming unfairness of the impenetrability of God's justice,
How the world doesn't seem so finely balanced and that,
To quote one author,
There has never been one person who got exactly what they deserved,
No more and no less.
There's another train of thought among our sages that maybe their death was a grace and a blessing,
That they approached the supernal light because they were in love with the holy,
The divine,
And they were consumed in what they wished to be consumed in,
That they were themselves elevated from the physical and became transcended.
They died by,
The quote is,
A divine kiss,
Which is how the sages understood Moses to die,
That only the perfectly righteous die from a divine kiss.
They describe it as pulling a thread out of milk,
Oh so gentle.
And they died because they wanted to get closer to God,
So God admitted that,
God permitted that.
They sensed their own demise as our sage,
But that didn't prevent them from drawing near to God in attachment,
Delight,
Delectability,
Fellowship,
Love,
Kiss,
And sweetness,
To the point that their souls departed.
A beautiful reading of it,
So it could either be from lack of self-control,
From arrogance,
Or from spiritual desire to be uplifted.
The ways of the world,
God's ways,
The ways of the universe are mysterious to us,
And to quote Pete Holmes and the road manager of ACDC,
God is just the name of the blanket we throw over mystery to give its shape.
There is much that is unknown and much that art and spirituality probe,
The edges of what's known.
Even science admits to difficulty understanding what's within a black hole,
What's before the Big Bang,
What exists at the infinitesimal level of an electron.
These things are no longer precise,
They evade knowledge.
It's understanding from science,
From spirituality,
From art,
From nature,
That there is a limit to what we can know,
And we as artists and creators strive mightily to achieve something,
And that good and bad are abstract,
Hard to understand,
Hard to fathom,
The lines are not clear.
Say our sages,
The Bible records six instances of fire descending for good and six for ill.
That fire,
As we understand it,
Is often compared to money.
It can serve for good and for wicked ends,
And that God's fire can consume sacrifices,
And it can also consume human beings.
Even Korach,
From the book of Numbers,
Who has consumed whole in the earth,
Is given testimony in the book of Psalms.
There are Psalms attributed to his school.
Life has a lot of ethical ambiguity.
How do we react to a world that is not clean-cut,
That is not clearly good and evil,
That does not have the alignment system that Dungeons and Dragons describes between lawful and chaos,
And good and evil,
But is much more complex?
We could reject the whole world entire,
And that is one of the things that Aaron does when his sons are deceased.
This week in the Torah reading,
There are the rules of kashrut,
The rules of animals that are clean and unclean to eat,
The rules of setting boundaries of what may be consumed and what may not,
What is sacred,
Profane,
What is pure and impure.
Even these rules are given after the deaths of Nadav and Abihu.
And then there is a Greek concept called theistai,
Which I believe exists in Christianity and preceded in Greek tradition,
Table fellowship with the deity.
So God notices,
Moses notices,
That Aaron is not eating of the sacrifices as he ought,
As high priest.
He has rejected sitting at the table with God.
That's one option,
Looking at the distress of the world and stepping back from it,
To live a monastic life or a life of a hermit or a misanthrope.
We could,
It's not the outcome I would wish.
Another outcome is,
I wouldn't call it acceptance,
But mute understanding of how much we don't understand.
When Aaron's sons die,
Vayidom aharon,
Aaron was quiet.
Aaron was silent.
He had no response to Moses's pleading with God.
He had no response to the attempts to defend God's justice.
He just stood in stone silence,
Perhaps reeking with disapproval.
We don't know.
One of our sages says,
At times it's better to listen.
Moses usually spoke,
And now he learned to listen.
He heard what Aaron had,
And it seemed good in his eyes.
That's all we can do,
Be witnesses sometimes to the world's distress.
Witness it through our painting,
Through our music.
Witness it through our gestures,
Through our kindness to others who suffer.
You can't fix.
You can't change most things.
You can't make children unperish.
You can't make bridges unbreak.
You can be silent witnesses to the terror of it all,
And the difficulty of living,
And the merit of living,
And the importance of existence.
Our Talmud says that there is merit in silence,
And one of the sages says,
The merit of attending a house of mourning is observing silence there.
It's a hard skill.
Les Pascal said,
Most of man's problems stem from one's inability to sit silently in a room alone.
I think as artists,
We cultivate that level of attention,
That level of stillness,
The ability to listen and not speak until we are truly ready,
Until we have something that is better than silence.
There's one word,
This is a parenthetical practical point,
Of all the things you shouldn't say when someone suffers,
There is one word that almost always works,
And I learned this from a colleague years upon years ago.
At first,
I thought it was being very silly,
But he used to say the word wow a lot,
And I've learned,
If you can't be silent,
At least you can just say wow.
It works in a lot of cases.
You dropped your glasses,
Wow.
Your puppy died,
Oh wow.
Your son has cancer,
Oh wow.
It is the only response beyond silence.
And Nachman of Bratislava bemoans this,
That we learn things in the wrong order.
When we were children,
We learned to talk,
He said,
And in maturity,
We learned to be quiet.
That's a human's problem,
That you learn to talk before you learn to be quiet.
I can attest with small children,
They love to talk,
And they talk to themselves,
And they talk in gibberish and silliness and stories that don't make sense and misquotings of YouTube shorts that they saw of a gamer they love.
And it's taken me decades to learn to be quiet and to appreciate that God is praised through quiet,
And that stillness is a way to apprehend and to learn God.
One of our medieval sages says that this phrase,
That Aaron became quiet,
Is connected to the encounter between Elijah and the prophets of Baal in the Book of Kings.
Elijah expects to hear the voice of God through fire or earthquake,
And instead hears a small,
A quiet,
A petite,
A delicate voice.
We don't need to yell.
Maybe we don't need to explain God.
Maybe we don't need to pontificate or sermonize about why the world has suffering.
Maybe we need to be silent witnesses to it and forge it into meaning through our creativity and through our capacity.
I know that my sermons are the best when I need to hear the lesson,
And that is attested by a line in the Talmud repeatedly that words from the heart penetrate the heart.
I know that when I am speaking from my heart,
It is more likely to penetrate a friend's heart.
When I am speaking from a place of courageous vulnerability and authenticity,
It is more likely to be heard kindly,
Generously,
And to be internalized.
Spend time in silence.
Spend time being quiet.
Spend time absorbing and witnessing.
Don't spend time defending.
Understand that the world has a very vague and hard-to-understand morality,
And that the world,
In our tradition,
We say the world is managed according to its management.
There are things we cannot grasp.
There is great mystery and unknowability,
Not just in morality but in the function.
And so we attend to each other,
We listen,
And let your words be words from the heart to penetrate the heart when you must speak.
