Matters of Death and Life

Aharei Mot 5776/ 7 May 2016

Mysteries are fun. For as long as I can remember, my mother always had a stack of Dick Francis and Agatha Christie by her bed; as a boy, I read Encyclopedia Brown and the Hardy Boys; and earlier this year Odelia discovered a trove of Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames in Rebecca’s parents’ basement. I love the thrill of discovery, the competition with the hero to work out the clues before he or she gets to the bottom of things.

There is, however, a limit, as I discovered around this time last year. A friend posted to Facebook mentioning that “Murder She Wrote” was available to stream on Netflix — all twelve seasons. I immediately closed my eyes and could see the opening scenes of Cabot Cove, Maine, with Angela Lansbury’s Jessica Fletcher typing away. I remembered nothing else from the show; it probably aired right around the time I was sent off to bed. Seized by nostalgia, I quickly logged in and started watching. Halfway through the first episode I was hooked, trying to sort out the clues and suspects, and for two weeks my nightly ritual included watching episodes of “Murder She Wrote” while cleaning the kitchen.

Here is where things start to unravel. In the 1980s, when you had to wait a full week to catch the next installment, you could pull off 264 episodes of a show like “Murder She Wrote.” In 2015, when Netflix automatically starts the next episode 10 seconds after the last one finished, you can tear through a month’s worth of mysteries in under three hours — and it starts to suck all the joy out of it. Somewhere between minutes six and eight, you know someone will end up dead under suspicious circumstances. Pretty much everyone who has appeared so far, often including Jessica herself, has a strong motive and a flimsy alibi. By the halfway mark, the police are annoyed that Jessica keeps sticking her nose into their business. Ten minutes before the end, Jessica suddenly remembers something, or notices the relationship between two things she had missed, or finds a surprise clue that was right under her nose all along. In the final scene, following a confession and handcuffs, the police sheepishly thank Jessica and she goes along her merry way.

Still, some mysteries manage to hold our attention much longer, demanding and rewarding repeated exposure. These stories endure because they lack one key element common to most mysteries: the definitive reveal at the end, which resolves all the questions. Instead, we are left with loose ends, unsure of the characters’ motives, with an ambiguous sense of what it all means.

This morning’s parshah reopens one of the great mysteries in the Torah: what happened to Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu? If you recall, a few weeks ago we read in parashat Shemini how, on the day of the Mishkan’s dedication, Nadav and Avihu took fire pans and attempted to offer their own incense in the Holy of Holies. It didn’t end well: “Fire came out from before Adonai and consumed them, and they died before Adonai.”^[1] At first glance, it seems like a straightforward story; but a second reading shows that while the Torah describes the basic outline of what they did, it remains silent about why they did it and how they transgressed. Each time we come back to the story, with each additional commentary we read, we discover new layers and new questions. We propose and refute answers, challenge and defend assumptions, deepening our understanding and yet never quite solving the puzzle.

The first verse this morning takes us back to that story: וַיְדַבֵּר ה’ אֶל־מֹשֶׁה אַֽחֲרֵי מוֹת שְׁנֵי בְּנֵי אַֽהֲרֹן, “Adonai spoke to Moses after the death of Aaron’s two sons.”^[2] From that passing reference, the parshah immediately launches into the laws of Yom Kippur. Evidently, the Torah intends to use Nadav and Avihu’s deaths as a frame for the Day of Atonement — but to what end? In a rare show of consensus, the classical commentaries view the allusion to Nadav and Avihu as a warning to Aaron of the seriousness with which he must approach his role.^[3] Rashi uses the following metaphor: imagine two doctors, one who tells a sick patient to avoid eating cold food or sleeping in a cold room; and a second who tells the patient to avoid cold food and cold rooms, explaining, “That’s how this other patient died.” Just as the second doctor will elicit more diligence from his patient because he pointed to an immediate example, God seeks to sharpen Aaron’s attention to the details of Yom Kippur by reminding him of what happened to his sons when they crossed the line.^[4]

Rashi’s metaphor makes a strong impression, but it also reawakens the fundamental question about Nadav and Avihu: where did they go wrong? For their deaths only function as a warning if we understand the cause of their demise. Here the commentaries go their separate ways again. For Ibn Ezra, their mistake was entering the Holy of Holies, where only their father, the High Priest, was authorized to worship.^[5] Rashbam argues that they went at the wrong time, and the Torah invokes their memory here to emphasize to Aaron that he should only enter on Yom Kippur.^[6] According to Sforno, they sinned in going beyond the prescribed rituals and innovating their own offerings.^[7] Kli Yakar, on the other hand, suggests that Nadav and Avihu entered the Mishkan full of food and wine from the dedication festivities, and lacked the proper reverence necessary to serve in the Temple.^[8] Despite the many readings of this story, I believe there is a common thread here: whichever explanation you take, Nadav and Avihu acted without a proper sense of their context. It was not their time nor their place, and yet they went ahead anyway, blind to the significance of their actions. Now, when Aaron is to receive the instructions for entering the holiest precincts of the Mishkan, on the holiest day of the year, to offer the holiest sacrifice, God wants to underscore the need for a proper frame of mind.

Then again, we’re dealing with Aaron here — the High Priest, Moses’ brother, co-leader of the Jewish People. Can’t we expect him to take every Divine ordinance seriously? Aaron was a great man indeed, but he was still a man; and as Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Sher, head of the Lithuanian Slabodka yeshiva in the early 20th century, points out, “so long as a man lives, all the properties and forces of nature act upon him; and whatever the nature of these forces, an emotional understanding will always have a greater impact than intellectual knowledge.”^[9] No person — not Moses or Aaron, and certainly not any of us — can expect perfection. Whatever our intentions, it’s hard to maintain a state of focus indefinitely. Routine creeps in. Our attention fades. With so much at stake around Aaron’s entering the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur, the Torah emphasizes his need to understand, emotionally as well as intellectually, the gravitas of the moment — quite literally a matter of life and death.

We should not be surprised to find that this parshah, which opens with a meditation on the deathly seriousness of religious service, should also contain one of the Torah’s most powerful statements about the significance of human life. Toward the end of our parshah, God directs Moses to tell the people, וּשְׁמַרְתֶּם אֶת־חֻקֹּתַי וְאֶת־מִשְׁפָּטַי אֲשֶׁר יַֽעֲשֶׂה אֹתָם הָֽאָדָם וָחַי בָּהֶם אֲנִי ה’, “You shall keep my statutes and my rules, so a person will live through them; I am Adonai.”^[10] The Talmud draws a very strong inference from this verse — וָחַי בָּהֶם, ולא שימות בהם, “Live through them, and not die through them”^[11] — to establish the well-known principle that all but three mitzvot may be set aside in order to preserve life.^[12] Moreover, in a surprising move our Rabbis set aside their usual reliance on probability and majority outcomes and instead rule that even a slight risk to life overrides ordinary mitzvah observance.^[13] 

The halakhah universally accepts the principle of life-preservation derived from this midrash; but when it comes to interpreting the verse in context, the classical commentaries split on how we should interpret it. None of the rabbis take this verse literally; observance of mitzvot, in and of itself, won’t insulate us from death.^[14] Some read the verse as a reference to social order: if people violate the laws of murder, theft, and adultery, the world will become consumed with vengeance and descend into a Hobbesian war of all against all; the mitzvot, in establishing basic norms of civilized behavior, make it possible to “live through them.”^[15] Others, given the inevitability of death in this world, read the verse as a reference to reward in the world to come.^[16] But there is also a third way, one which harmonizes both views.

Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Ferber, who led London’s West End Synagogue during the middle of the last century, points out that many of the mitzvot are common sense; even without the Torah, pretty much every functioning society figures out that murder, theft, adultery, and the like are not good things, while charity and neighborliness are desirable. What, then, is so special about these mitzvot? Rabbi Ferber suggests that the significance lies not in the act itself but in the mindset: there is nothing wrong with performing these mitzvot out of common sense, but we gain an additional benefit when we understand them as a spiritual practice.^[17] As Reb Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad,^[18] teaches, when a person gives tzadakah from the money he earned through the labor of his hands, all the life-force he put into earning that money becomes invested in his act of tzedakah; in the same act, he both provides material sustenance to the poor and elevates his own prior labor from a secular to a sacred act.^[19] When we perform mitzvot with an understanding of our connection to all other people and indeed to all of Creation, we infuse our lives with holiness. My teacher, Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson sums this up beautifully:

Our purpose as human beings, created in the image of God, is to honor that Divine image in others.^[21] In order to fulfill that mission, we must cultivate an understanding of ourselves as “sacred servants” whose every act contains the potential for holiness.

Now we can see the link between these two poles of our Torah portion: the prescription to live through the mitzvot, and the visceral warning to Aaron not to become blasé in performing his ritual duties. The Hasidic Rebbe Menahem Mendel of Kotsk reads the words וָחַי בָּהֶם, “live through them,” as a command to perform mitzvot with passion and a lively spirit;^[22] and we can derive the same message from the beginning of the parshah as well. Many have observed that only one factor distinguishes ritual from routine: our frame of mind. We have so many day-to-day mitzvot that can become rote, habitual, things we do going through the motions without thought. This morning’s parshah warns us that these mitzvot — not only the High Priest’s service on Yom Kippur, but everything we do — are, in a very real sense, matters of death and life. Will we succumb to the deadening routine of habit? Or will we act in ways that awaken our souls and bring our spirits to life? That choice lies before each of us, each and every day.

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Tags: Aharei Mot, Life, Passion