At last we are getting to the weekly Torah portion (parsha) called Shmini. I say, “At last,” because our parsha has been preempted, for the last two shabbats, by the holy days involved with our becoming a people: Pesach (Passover).
Shmini is an interesting parsha, recounting the first sacrifices made by the newly anointed priests in the newly created mishcan (tabernacle). At the climax, after haShem (god/dess) comes down on the people and eats the sacrifices, two of Aharon’s sons, two priests, in their sheer joy, make an unauthorized incense offering and the fire of haShem eats them too. The Torah gives us some details of the aftermath of the loss the two sons of Aharon, and then ends the parsha with a bunch of laws about what animals are not kosher for us. What is the Torah trying to tell us here?
What I see when I read this parsha is a very important teaching: there are many ways to reach god/enlightenment. The goal, however, is not just to get close to god; it is to get close AND to come back and bring the shefa, the light/energy of haShem, back down and into this world.
What Nadav (donation) and Avihoo (my father is he), the two sons of Aharon that brought the unauthorized offering, did was sanctify the mishcan. What they did came from their sincere desire to get close to the divine. And their wish and offering was accepted: they did get close to haShem. They got so close that they became absorbed into haShem and were unable to differentiate themselves and return. As I stated above though, the goal is not to lose yourself, but to share that part of the infinite you have touched with the finite world. I think there are many ways to get close to haShem Our parsha provides us with one example. However, the ways of haShem, at least for the children of Yisrael, are designed in such a way as to allow us a path to godliness in a way that protects us from getting lost within the infinite, and also a way back to this world with a gift given by haShem. From Nadav and Avihoo, we discover what happens when one strays from this path.
Why do we then go from here to laws surrounding what animals are kosher? Well, now that we know what happens if we don’t follow haShem’s way, we get told more of haShem’s ways for us. Why the animals? Because our bodies are like the mishcan What we eat is in essence a sacrifice. And as we learned from Nadav and Avihoo, we need to be very careful what we sacrifice, and how we sacrifice, in order to bring ourselves close to haShem and bring haShem into this world.
May we all find our way to the divine, and share what divinity gifts to us with the rest of the world
About the Author
Shmuel Shalom Cohen spent 10 years studying Torah in Jerusalem. Six years ago, he started Conscious Torah to help Jews connect to their tradition in ways they didn’t think possible. Shmuel also started, and is the executive directory of Jewish Events Willamette-valley, a non-profit whose mission is to build Jewish community, pride, and learning. In his free time, Shmuel likes walks in nature, playing music, writing poetry, and time with good friends.