Shemini 5770
04/09/2010Divrei Torah
Temple B’nai Israel, Laconia, NH. April 9, 2010
This week’s Torah portion Shemini falls exactly in the middle of the Torah scroll. There is a huge build-up to this moment. First, there is the entire story of the Exodus – slavery in Egypt, the plagues, Pharaoh changing his mind, God splitting the sea, the manna, the revelation on Mount Sinai, the Golden calf. Then there is the building of the tabernacle, and all the instructions for sacrifice and for the priesthood. All of the pieces are in place. Everything that has happened up until now is leading up to this moment. We don’t usually think of it that way. We think of leaving Egypt as the big, important moment or maybe the giving of the Ten Commandments. But you have to remember that the whole point of God redeeming the Israelites from slavery was not so that they could be free to do whatever they pleased, but so that they could be free to worship God. And now that is about to happen. They are about to implement the sacrificial system.
The period of ordination of Aaron and his sons as priests lasts for seven days. And on the eighth day, they perform the first sacrifices. This is the big moment. If all goes well and they follow all of God’s instructions, then God’s presence will come to dwell among them. It is a moment of incredible power and potential. I think it is hard for us modern people to imagine the scene. Our rituals have become sanitized. But try to imagine this: animals are slaughtered and then their blood is dashed against the altar and their insides are pulled out and burned on the altar. And it’s not just one – there is a calf and a ram and an ox and a lamb. There is blood everywhere. We feel a little squeamish and like to skip over these parts, but there is incredible, visceral power to this scene. There is incense and the smell of burning flesh and there is excitement and there is fear. Then in the midst of all this, Aaron lifts up his hands and blesses the people and suddenly Kavod Adonai appears before the People. God doesn’t have a physical form so who knows what appears to them, but they experience the Presence of God in that moment. That is how Kavod Adonai is usually translated – the Presence of the Lord. And from that Presence, from that power, fire leaps out and consumes the sacrifices and the People see and shout and fall on their faces!
This is an incredible moment. It is powerful and it is dangerous. It is dangerous to get too close to God. And that is what happens to Aaron’s sons. They are carried away by the power of this moment and they rush forth to offer incense to God and they are consumed. Now, we could talk endlessly about why they are destroyed. But today, on this Shabbat before Yom Ha Shoah, when we are remembering the fires of the Holocaust, I want to focus on a different question, and that is the human response to what has happened. Moses tells Aaron that this was God’s will and Aaron… was silent – va yidom Aharon. For me, that is perhaps the most poignant and heart-breaking verse in the entire Torah, even more than the binding of Isaac on the altar because in the final moment Isaac is saved. But Aaron’s sons are consumed by fire. They are dead… and Aaron’s response is silence.
A few verses later, something truly remarkable happens. Later that day Moses is angry with Aaron and his two remaining sons – Eleazar and Ithamar – because they did not eat the sin offering in the sacred area as Moses had instructed them. Moses wants them to carry on as though nothing had happened. But this time Aaron is not silent. He answers Moses, saying: See, this day they brought their sin offering and their burnt offering before Adonai and such things have befallen me! If I had eaten the sin offering today, would it have been good in the eyes of God? I think what Aaron is saying is that even at this most important moment for the Priesthood, this moment when he has brought God’s presence down to the People, he cannot deny that he is a human being. The priests were designated to serve God. The priesthood is all about structure and ritual and following God’s instructions. But priests are not angels that serve God with no will of their own. There are moments when personal experience trumps everything else. In this moment Aaron is not the High Priest; he is a father and he is grieving the loss of his sons, and he knows that this grief, this inability to continue with God’s instructions must be good and right in the eyes of God. Now it is Moses’ turn to be silent. He knows that what his brother Aaron has said is true.
So, coming back to the Holocaust, I want to tell a story about the Rabbi of the Warsaw ghetto. Rabbi Travniki survived the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and was sent to a labor camp. His followers wanted to save him and sent a courier to bribe the guards at the camp. Rabbi Travniki refused to go because he had made a pact with the others in the camp that no one would leave unless they were all released. My teacher Rabbi Polen who told me this story said that he was bothered by Rabbi Travniki’s choice because the Talmud teaches that saving one life, even your own, is more important than anything else. This concept of pikuach nefesh is more important even than Shabbat. If a person is drowning, our tradition teaches us that we must break the laws of Shabbat in order to save that person.
Rabbi Polen went to a Hasidic rebbe and asked him about Rabbi Travniki’s decision. The rebbe quoted for him the verse I just read from this week’s Torah portion, the verse in which Aaron asks: If I had eaten the sin offering today, would it have been good in the eyes of God? Then he asked Rabbi Polen, If Rabbi Travniki had saved himself and left the rest of his people behind, would that have been good in the eyes of God?
There is no simple answer to that question. Each of us must answer for ourselves – Would that have been good in the eyes of God? But what is important about both of these stories is the idea that there are some values that are greater than all of the laws and rituals in our tradition. We can’t always control what happens to us and to our loved ones; we surely can’t explain why so many terrible tragedies occur in the world. But we can respond with our human hearts. That much we can do, and that is good in the eyes of God.