I truly love being asked to provide halakhic guidance. It’s literally what I went to school to learn how to do – which is more than I can say about some of the other questions that I am asked about. Sometimes people apologize when they ask me a halakhic question which is so unnecessary. At least I know the answer to the halakhic questions (or I know how to find the answer).
Pesach season is always the peak time of the year for halakhic questions and that is understandable. Even those who are very comfortable and confident in their observance of kashrut are unfamiliar with the numerous details of preparing and maintaining a kosher for passover kitchen. The mitzvot of the seder are many and are worth studying anew each year as well.
And, Pesach is a holiday that people take seriously. Across major cities in the United States, there are non-kosher restaurants that put out boxes of matzah next to their bread baskets so Jews observing Passover can have their weekly bacon cheese-burger on matzah instead of on a regular hamburger bun during Pesach. It is true that the Torah attaches greater severity to the prohibition against eating hametz on Pesach than it does to other food prohibitions that are listed in Parashat Shemini and that form the core of the practice of kashrut, but the severity of the prohibition cannot explain the phenomenon of Jews putting Kosher l’Pesach certified mustard on their ham sandwiches.
Jews who do not care about the list of forbidden species of animals in Parashat Shemini may nonetheless invest a great deal of time into avoiding hametz and hametz derivatives on Pesach because avoiding hametz for eight days is a meaningful way to celebrate a beloved holiday that has a compelling story and a readily apparent rationale. There are many Jews who have never encountered a compelling reason to observe kashrut, even at the most basic level of avoiding the prohibited species listed in the Torah.
And, this afternoon before Mincha, I’ll share some compelling reasons to observe the laws of kashrut – or at least to avoid eating the prohibited species listed in the Torah.
The list of kosher and non-kosher species in Parashat Shemini, straightforward lists of things one can and cannot do, are an interesting counterpoint and contrast to the first half of the parasha which is a story of intense religious drama and pathos, that just needs a bit of scrutiny to discover.
Parashat Shemini takes place on the eighth day – וַיְִה֙י ב֣יּוםֹ ה ְּׁשִמִ֔יני at the end of the construction of the mishkan as the mishkan is being inaugurated. It is the triumph for Aaron and his family as their status as kohanim is confirmed and their service in the mishkan begins as God’s very presence settles over the mishkan:
ֽוַיָּבֹ֨א מֹשׁ֤ה וְאֲַהרֹן֙ אל־אֶֹ֣הל מוֵֹע֔ד וַיְֵּ֣צא֔וּ וַֽיְָבֲרכ֖וּ את־ָהָע֑ם וַיֵָּר֥א כבוֹד־ה׳אל־ָכּל־ָהָעם׃
And then, tragedy strikes. Nadav and Avihu, sons of Aaron offer some additional fire offering in the mishkan after the obligatory, commanded, and permissible offerings had been completed. A fire does descend from the heavens and consume their offering, just as had happened to the offering brought by Aaron himself, but this fire strikes Nadav and Avihu dead.
From the moment that they die, Jews have struggled to understand the meaning of their death. Moshe himself tries to comfort his brother by declaring:
ֶג וַיֹּ֨אמר מֹשׁ֜ה אל־אֲַהרֹ֗ן הוּא֩ אשׁר־ִדֶּבּ֨ר ה׳ לאמֹר֙ בְּקרַֹב֣י אָקֵּד֔שׁ וְַעל־ְפּנֵ֥י כל־ָהָע֖ם אָכֵּב֑ד וַיִּדֹּ֖ם אֲַהֽרֹן׃
Then Moses said to Aaron, “This is what the LORD meant when He said: Through those near to Me I show Myself holy, And gain glory before all the people.”
That is a very cryptic response from Moshe. It seems that Moshe is suggesting that by violating the sanctity of the mishkan, by doing something unauthorized there and having then been severely punished, they demonstrated the awesome sanctity of the space itself.
If that isn’t compelling to you, Aaron also didn’t find it compelling. וַּיִּדֹ֖ם אֲהֽרֹן׃ – he says nothing.
But Moshe’s comment is revealing. Nadav and Avihu are referred to as “קרְבַֹי֣“ those “close to me” which is not a description one would expect for someone whom God had just smitten dead.
Nadav and Avihu can be understood as sincere religious seekers. They joined their father and all of Klal Yisrael in awe as God’s very presence rested in the mishkan they had built. They wanted to serve, they wanted to be close ְקרַֹב֣י to God. They were empowered and creative Jews who were paving their own path. They were not content to do just what everyone else does. They had to do something unique to them. Their worship had to be personally meaningful and lacked any sense of normativity.
The message of their deaths seems to be that there is no place for creativity in the mikdash. There is no place for subjectivity in serving God. The same rules need to be for everyone. The list of kosher animals that follows this episode is therefore a fitting response to the deaths of Nadav and Avihu. Some animals are kosher and some are not. It doesn’t matter how good my neighbors bacon smells as he fries it up on Sunday morning. It doesn’t matter that I live in a town where lobster fishing has been a staple of the local economy and cuisine for generations. The law is the law and the law makes no exceptions for individual circumstances.
Or does it?
At the end of the Torah’s description of the death of Nadav and Avihu, the Torah shares an easily overlooked detail. There was a korban, an offering that had been brought earlier on that eighth day and it was supposed to be eaten, like all korbanot of that variety, by Aaron’s surviving sons, the remaining kohanim. In their grief and in their mourning, they had neglected this responsibility to eat the korban and this alarmed Moshe greatly:
Then Moses inquired דֹׁ֥רּש דַרׁ֛ש מֶֹׁש֖ה about the goat of sin offering, and it had already been burned! He was angry with Eleazar and Ithamar, Aaron’s remaining sons, and said, “Why did you not eat the sin offering…? …And Aaron spoke to Moses, “See, this day they brought their sin offering and their burnt offering before the LORD, and such things have befallen me! Had I eaten sin offering today, would the LORD have approved?”
וַיְִּשַׁמ֣ע מֹשׁ֔ה וַיִּיַט֖ב בֵּעינָיו׃
These verses in the Torah are the origin of the obligation to mourn. When we are in a state of mourning, certainly when a deceased relative lies before us unburied – a stage halakhah calls “aninut” we cannot engage with the world of mitzvot in a normal way. Some things are different. Rav Yehuda Amital thought that this passage in the Torah, and the obligation to mourn itself, were significant in a much broader way.
A life of Torah and mitzvot ought to orient us towards something beyond ourselves and our own subjective desires and limited perspectives. But, we are meant to engage with the rubric of Torah and mitzvot as authentic human beings and not as automatons. Nadav and Avihu were wrong to think that their sincere desire to serve in a specific way at a specific time was a license to bring a strange fire into the mishkan. But Moshe was also wrong to think that a family mourning the tragic deaths of their brothers and sons could maintain their religious practices as though nothing had changed.
All of Jewish life, is a dialectic between those two poles. Jewish law is normative and Jewish law is personal and subjective.
One particularly acute and timely arena where this dialectic operates is in post-Holocaust theology. As we approach Yom HaShoah, which we will commemorate in shul Sunday afternoon and Sunday evening, we all need to think through how the horrors of twentieth century Jewish history have forced us to rethink elements of our religious worldview. There have been philosophers and thinkers, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg among them, who have taught that in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the very covenant itself has been broken and refashioned. Biblical and Rabbinic theology cannot accommodate the Holocaust and therefore a new understanding of our relationship to God and our relationship to the Torah needs to be promulgated.
There have been other thinkers, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook and Rav Yoel Teitlbaum among others, who have pigeon-holed the Holocaust into existing Jewish historical paradigms and understand what they call “the hurban of Europe” to be no different, theologically, from other cycles of sin and punishment throughout Jewish history.
And, there have been other philosophers, Rav Amital among them, who have embraced the dialectic between these two polls. The covenant endures. God remains God. Israel remains Israel, and mitzvot remain mitzvot. But we can no longer think and feel about our relationship to God as we once did. Medieval philosophers anchored all religious sentiments to a foundation of gratitude. Gratitude can no longer be the foundation for religious life for our orphaned, post-Holocaust generation. New ideas, new ways of relating to mitzvot, shifting emphases among and between older religious values allow us to continue our faithful commitment to the covenant forged at Sinai -but to do so as feeling, caring, living and breathing human beings.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 