Acharei Mot-Kedoshim

Acharei Mot/ Kedoshim - Levi Lauer

Levi Lauer, is a rabbi and founding executive director of ATZUM. He lives in Jerusalem and teaches in Israel and abroad about the need to found Jewish life on a respect for ambiguity, yet without ambivalence. His younger daughter is doing compulsory army duty.

The reiterated poignant tragedy of Nadav and Avihu (Leviticus 10:1-3 and 16:1) reveals deep paradox and unanswered question. Why would God punish with death the well- intentioned sacrifice of his priestly servants, however ‘strange' that offering? Why would religious practice that seeks God's pleasure expose you to mortal danger?

R. Shimshon Rafael Hirsch (1808-88) following Midrash Vayikra Rabba (traditional rabbinic narrative) found unbearable hubris in the need of Nadav and Avihu to seek personal attention and offer something unasked, a hubris so dangerous it brought their destruction. For Biblical Jewish leadership demanded self abnegating acceptance of the prescribed authority of God. The people's urgent needs would not be met by even the most insistent charismatic personality, but by disciplined adherence to divine command. God struck them dead lest their charisma go unchallenged.

How difficult for modern sensibility to accept that discipline, not free will, would best secure communal well-being and universal concern. How resistant we are to a halakhic (legal) understanding that "greater is the merit of one who is commanded and performs a mitzvah (commandment) than one who performs the same act of their own accord."  Even when we accept with Hirsch and Emmanuel Levinas that personal and communal ritual can serve to remind us of moral demand (hence the linking of ‘Aharei Mot' and ‘Kedoshim'); even as we recognize that ritual might condition us to a life of restraint  - the world is not for our savaging but for our wondrous awe and we'll exactingly delimit what we eat, what we'll wear, with whom we'll sleep, what we'll say, so that perhaps when we stand to exploit the other we'll have conditioned our hands and the grooves of our brains to the decency of restraint  - it's still hard to submit to the prescriptions of God's command or even of communal enterprise at the expense of personal proclivity. We celebrate the gifts of spectacular individual creativity and achievement while the weak suffer and perish.

But kill Nadav and Avihu to make that point  - "and (their father) Aharon was silent?!" (Leviticus 10:3).

The following is told of the Kotzker Rebbe (Menahem Mendel 1787-1859) which offers an appreciation of paradox and unanswerable question. Recall it's the Kotzker who declared, maybe with Aharon in mind, "Nothing is as whole as a broken heart nor cries out more compellingly than silence."

Once, a hasid broke into the years long, self imposed [perhaps manic-depressive] isolation of the Kotzker, for he had  deeply troubling thoughts.

"What are these thoughts?" asked the Rebbe.

"Woe is me, Rebbe. I hesitate to express them. Even in Gehinom there will be no forgiveness for them. They come [from my subconscious] against my will."

"What are they?" impatiently insisted the Kotzker.

"Rebbe, sometimes I think, Heaven forefend, there is neither Judge nor justice in the world."

"And what do you care?" [Imagine that response from your therapist to a "breakthrough" moment.]

"Rebbe, if there's neither Judge nor justice, there can be no meaning to creation."

"And what do you care [and anyhow, who are you to worry] whether there's meaning in creation?"

"But Rebbe, if there's no meaning to creation, there can be no meaning to the words of Torah."

"So what do you care if there's no meaning to the words of Torah?"

"Rebbe, if there's no meaning to the words of Torah there can be no meaning to life and that matters to me a great deal. [Imagine a devotion to Torah so complete you really feel meaningful life and the words of Torah are inseparable.]

Responded the Kotzker: "If that's truly what's disturbing you, then you are a kosher Yid/Yehudi kasher, a fit and appropriate Jew, and for a kosher Yid are permitted the most disturbing thoughts."

May we learn well enough to appreciate both questions without adequate answer and the power of paradox, and thus save ourselves from a religious arrogance that imperils all within our reach.