The parsha (weekly Torah portion) for this week is called Shmini and means, “8th,” as in the eighth day after Aharon and his sons began their initiation ritual. I find it very interesting that this is the first time we have moved beyond a concept of seven days. Seven is the directions: north, east, south, west, up, down, and center. It is also the number of days god took to create the world. So it represents the physical world or the space/time continuum.
In the Jewish family tradition, we don’t have names for the days of the week. We say, “This is the first day in shabbat (sabbath in English, shabbat is the 7th day of the week),” or “The second day in shabbat,” etc. Everything revolves around seven because we are in the physical world. Here is the first time we read of a day beyond the seventh, beyond shabbat.
It is the day that the mishcan (tabernacle) and the priests to haShem have finished their initiations, and are ready and able to fully serve. This is the first day that the infinite creator can come down into the finite world, and hence we reach a new level: the level of eight which is the level beyond time and space; the level of the infinite. This is the number eight, and this is the name of our parsha.
What is in the parsha? We are on the 8th day, and Moshe (Moses) tells Aharon and his sons to take animal offerings, and then to tell the rest of Yisrael to bring offerings. When everyone assembles at the tent, Moshe tells Aharon to prepare all the offerings, and we read of him performing the tasks related to the sacrifices. After he finishes, Aharon then raises his hands and blesses the people. Then, the text says, he came down from making the offerings.
Moshe and Aharon enter the tent of meeting and when they come out, the glory of haShem (god) appears to all the people, and a fire comes from before haShem and eats the offerings on the altar. The people see this and fall on their faces.
Then two of Aharon’s sons make an uncommanded incense offering and a fire emanates from before haShem and eats them and they die. Moshe speaks to Aharon and Aharon is silent. Moshe then calls for a couple of Aharon’s cousins to carry away the bodies to the outside of camp, which they do. Moshe then tells Aharon and his remaining sons not to show outward signs for mourning in order to prevent them from dying and problems within the community. Also, they were not to leave the entrance of the tent of meeting because they still wore the holy anointing oil. All this, they did.
God then tells Aharon that the priesthood cannot be intoxicated when they enter the tent of meeting, and that it is an eternal statute that the priesthood is to distinguish between the holy and the mundane, and between pure and impure, and to teach the children of Yisrael all the rules god gave them thru Moshe.
Moshe then tells Aharon and his sons to eat their portions of the offerings. They don’t and when Moshe finds out, he becomes angry with Aharon’s remaining sons for not doing their job (imagine having a job where you are required to eat). Aharon responds to Moshe by asking if god would be happy if they ate the offerings on this particular day. Moshe agrees they did right.
God then talks to Aharon and Moshe and tells them to tell the people what animals are acceptable to eat, and that touching a dead carcass can make one impure. Likewise we read of how the carcass can also make clothing and utensils impure, and also how to purify the body and these objects. The parsha ends with god telling the people to be holy for god is holy, and for them not to make their souls tamae (impure? mixed I think is a better word), and to distinguish between tahor (pure or unmixed) and tamae, and between kodesh (holy) and chol (mundane), and what can be eaten and what cannot be eaten.
Ok, we covered a lot of ground here. And we took a very strange path. We start with a very joyous and exciting occasion: the completion of the mishcan and priestly initiations, and the priests performing the sacrifices, and seeing god accept the offerings, to the tragedy of the death of two of Aharon’s sons, and Aharon and his remaining sons being told not to mourn. We then veer to Aharon being told not to be drunk when working in the mishcan, and then to laws about what the people can and cannot eat, and ending with the reason for these laws is to be tahor and not tamae. What is going on here? What is the connection?
This is not an easy parsha to understand. But for me, what binds this parsha together is the idea of tahor and tamae. Now last cycle (last year), I don’t recall in which parsha I talked about these two words. In a nutshell, I said that tahor is pure and I called tamae mixed. My reason for that is to take away the connotations of tahor being good and tamae being bad. They are merely states of being and are neither good nor bad. As I talked about it before, I don’t want to go into that discussion again here. I will be happy to email it to anyone who wants it, or you can search through the blog looking for those words.
Today, what I want to do is take the discussion to another level. Why do we talk about god appearing to the people, Abihu and Navadab (Aharon’s sons) dying, and being aware of what makes you tahor and tamae? To me it goes like this: God is everything, and so, by definition, he is tahor. Not only is she tahor, he is also holy. She is so holy, that anything touching god becomes holy, just like the things in the mishcan. Now in order to have his presence amongst the people, the people have to be pure enough to survive the presence of god.
What do I mean by that? I mean that if they are not pure, the contact with the divine will separate what is mixed up within a person so much and so quickly that they will not be able to survive the extraction of what is not them.
From this we can begin to see why we need to concern ourselves with what animals get mixed up into us and what don’t. As I am writing this, I can already here the questions of “Why…?” All I can answer is that I don’t know why certain animals get stuck within us and others don’t. That is something for you to ask god. 🙂
What does this have to do with Navadab and Abihu? The key to understanding what they bring to the parsha is in the words, “Aish zara.” The literal translation is a foreign fire. The two of them brought a foreign fire before the presence of god.
Now, at this point I want to make a small digression. We Jews are not suppose to worship idols. Idol worship, in Hebrew, is called, “Avodah zara,” or literally, strange service. In other words, to have the infinite creator reside amongst us, we cannot do anything that is strange to the ways prescribed by the infinite.
Why? Because he created the rules of this world, and hence the laws that govern how the infinite and finite can co-exist together. For those of you that are into science fiction and Star Trek, think of the warp drive. It works by mixing matter and antimatter together. This has to be done in a very exacting way, and if anything strange enters the mix, a breach can occur in the containment field and everything is destroyed.
Now, I am not suggesting that god will get destroyed by us doing strange things, rather that the finite world will get destroyed. My proof of this is Abihu and Navidab who brought the strange fire which the fire from haShem ate like it was a sacrifice. And the two of them being so close to it, their souls also got taken.
From here, we can learn what happens if we break the containment field by introducing something foreign to the mix.
Wait, I just used the word mix here. Hmmm. If I mix something foreign into the pure process that makes the containment field, then the tahor field becomes tamae.
Now, what if each and every person that god appears to is part of that containment field?
Maybe we need to be pure to keep the field pure. And if we eat something that sticks to us and mixes with our soul (again, don’t ask how, that is a whole other discussion), or even touch something that sticks to us and mixes with our soul, then we have introduced something foreign into the containment field and we could end up just like Aharon’s two sons.
Or haShem could removed his presence and the danger goes away.
But don’t we want to be near the divine, the infinite, the one who can answer all our questions and make everything perfect for us?
On that question, I bid you all a good week, and may we all learn to distinguish holy from mundane, and what keeps us tahor from what makes us tamae. Blessings. 🙂
If you care to read what I wrote about this parsha last year, click here.
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.