Rabbi David Wolkenfeld

When the first atomic bomb was exploded in a test detonation near Los Alomos laboratory, Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist known as the “father of the atomic bomb” quoted Hindu scripture and said, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”. Oppenheimer was expressing the super-human, god-like power of nuclear fission. This power is creative and this power is destructive. In Hindu mythology the creator of worlds becomes the destroyer of worlds In the atomic age, humanity has claimed that power as well. After the war, Oppenheimer called for strict international controls over nuclear weapons and opposed the development of the even-more destructive hydrogen bomb. For this, his politics was suspected and he was blacklisted. But he was absolutely correct that the power to destroy that is now in human hands is a power that needs reckoning

Parashat Acharei Mot literally and inescapably begins in the aftermath of a similar moment of reckoning with death:

וַיְדַבֵּר ה אֶל־מֹשֶׁה אַחֲרֵי מוֹת שְׁנֵי בְּנֵי אַהֲרֹן בְּקׇרְבָתָם לִפְנֵי־ ה וַיָּמֻתוּ׃. 

The LORD spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron who died when they drew too close to the presence of the LORD.

The deaths of Nadav and Avihu are described in Parashat Shemini which we read weeks ago. The Torah returns to that moment to tell us that there is something essential about the mitzvot that introduce this parashah that can only be understood as occurring in the aftermath of this tragic death. There are three layers in which we can make sense of that framing: I’m going to call them the peshat answer, the Freudian answer, and the post-national answer.

On a level of peshat, the plain sense meaning of the Torah, the rituals delineated in Parashat Acharei Mot are the direct and straightforward response to the deaths of Aharon’s sons. Nadav and Avihu, as they are characterized here in our parasha, “died when they drew too close to the presence of the LORD.” The mitzvot with which the parasha opens teaches us how not to draw too close to the presence of the Lord. We are forbidden to enter the Holy of Holies without undergoing the Yom Kippur ritual as described in the Torah. Rashi says that the reminder of the death of Nadav and Avihu is akin to a physician warning a patient about the consequences of ignoring medical guidance. But even without Rashi, we can say that the invocation of Nadav and Avihu link the cause of their deaths to the precautions that are commanded in this passage.

Ramban introduces a strange and mysterious element to this section of the Torah. The procedure by which the kohen was to prepare to enter into the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur entailed taking two identical goats, one of which was slaughtered as a burnt offering, dedicated before God in the beit hamikdash, and the second goat was sent to “Azazel” in the wilderness. 

Ramban, in a long and cryptic comment, explains a tradition that the goat offered to “Azazel” was a sort of gift to honor or to appease the demonic spirits that operate in the universe. Of course we are forbidden to worship anything or anyone other than God, but on Yom Kippur, the Torah itself, tells us to send out this goat so that the demonic spirits and destructive forces should be appeased. I can only  make sense of this tradition as a psychological metaphor. But as a statement about psychology it is quite apt and quite important. The major enduring insight, or chiddush, of Freud, was his awareness that we are captive to motivations and drives that are subconscious and which give rise to behaviors and thought patterns which can be unwanted and unhelpful and unpleasant. Freud further taught that ignoring and repressing the darker corners of our psyche is a recipe for some even more destructive sublimation as those drives inevitably make themselves felt. 

Acharei Mot, in the aftermath of the death of Nadav and Avihu, the Torah tells us that there are destructive and dark forces active in the universe. Indeed, those dark and destructive forces are active inside each one of us. Pay attention to them, and pay them their due, or else they will make themselves felt in ways even more damaging and harmful. The most destructive drive, according to Freud, was something he called the “death drive” which he first identified and named in the aftermath of the first world war.

In modern times the most destructive and bloodthirsty human instincts, the death drive itself, has been channeled through large groups of people, called tribes or nations, or empires, and organized so as to better inflict violence on those belonging to a different tribe or nation or empire. If you are immune to patriotic feelings, perhaps you can remember the sting of defeat or the thrill of victory when a beloved sports team has made it to the final rounds of a league championship. If you don’t like sports, think of the thrill you experience when you watch a flag unfurled blowing in the wind high above. 

The Torah tells us that the kohen, before entering the most sacred spot in the nation, the center of the beit hamikdash on the Temple Mount, must confess his sins and the sins of the entire nation over the goat. A nation that can feel guilt and the need for teshuvah is already somewhat immune from the bloody competition between nations for dominance. Rav Kook wrote that, “Our nationalism in the spirit of the Torah is saved from the riot-causing idiocy of Nationalism divorced from the righteous path, easily becoming self-love.” Confession, guilt, repentance, replace self-love in this ritual and we can build a collective identity that avoids some of the poisonous elements of secular nationalism. 

We are all living through an Acharei Mot moment. We gather in the shadow of Yom HaShoah, having paused to remember the six million Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust and the herorism of the survivors, our parents and grandparents who rebuilt Jewish life after the war. This is an Acharei Mot moment as Europe once again is in the grips of war, threatening the lives of millions as millions of other refugees once again crowd train stations across a continent steeped in so many centuries of blood. And this is an Acharei Mot moment in the sense that Robert Oppenheimer perceived. I lived the first decade of my life in the explicit shadow of nuclear annihilation, a threat that I have been able to ignore for my entire adult life until recent events.  

Human beings did not create life on earth, but we have “become Death” and we have the capacity  to end it. The Torah suggests ways to live in the aftermath of death: we cultivate the psychological wisdom to be aware that some of our instincts are destructive and we ignore them at our peril. The Torah suggests that our collective identity become an expanded circle of responsibility rather than a mechanism for self love. And with wisdom and luck and help from the Holy One, may we merit בְּזֹאת יָבֹא …אֶל־הַקֹּדֶשׁ in these ways may we come to access God’s sacred space.