And Aaron was Silent...

I don’t know what to say about one of the central aspects of last week’s Parsha. Nadav and Avihu, sons of Aaron, having been newly invested as kohanim, fill their incense pans and enter the Mishkan unbidden; their pans are filled with "אש זרה" (aish zarah), a foreign fire, and they are instantly struck dead. The haftarah echoes the sidra with a similar story, one wherein a soldier named Uzah attempts to steady the Ark as one of the Ark bearers stumbles; Uzah, too, is instantly struck dead.

Do you want to guess how much the sages wrote about these two incidents? The answer (SPOILERS!) is, technically speaking: a lot. The justifications for the deaths suggest that Nadav and Avihu were drunk, or that they were actually more holy than Moses and Aaron, or that their sin was really one of delivering halachic decisions in the presence of Moses, or that their deaths somehow acted as the last sanctification of the Mishkan. Some of these discussions carry a measure of reasonableness for me, while others—the human sacrifice one, for example—just make no sense whatsoever.

Of course, there’s more to the story. Before the deaths of his sons, Aaron is about to make the first sacrifice on the altar, but when he gets up to approach the altar, he hesitates before going forward; Moses exhorts him on, saying, “Do not be afraid—you were chosen for this job!” Aaron moves forward and performs his function, and all is well. You can rest assured that many poskim point out the difference between Aaron’s bidden, thoroughly-instructed sacrifice and his son’s spontaneous, uncalled-for aish zarah.

For me, I don’t feel the need to try to justify what happened. I’m horrified by it, and I’m almost entirely uncomfortable with the incident; I cannot help but feel that this is one of those moments where the Torah cannot be taken literally, and even if the deaths are a metaphor, I’m still not sure I’d be comfortable with them. It leaves too much room for blaming the victims, and that’s not a road that I want to travel down at all.

And so I’m left feeling uncomfortable after reading this section of the parsha, and I think that the discomfort comes from an underlying realization: no matter how much I try to understand, no matter how much I think I know, God remains God. By that, I mean that God—infinite, omnipotent, ubiquitous—remains inscrutable to us. In Mishlei, the sage writes, “The fear of Hashem is the beginning of wisdom.” and I’ll admit that “fear” of God has always struck me as a strange way to express the relationship. My mom used to talk about this idea in terms of great respect, that fear is really a deep and abiding respect for God, and I think she was on to something. Respect, certainly, and if not fear, than at least a discomfort, one that comes from knowing that God remains inscrutable.

If there’s any comfort to be had from this inscrutability, I think it comes from the sense that I am not responsible for everything that happens in the universe. I’m not entitled to an explanation—in fact, not only am I not entitled to an explanation from the Eternal, I probably couldn’t even understand any explanation offered. Certainly this lack of knowing contributes to my discomfort with the incidents in the Torah and Haftarah, but perhaps I can learn only to be comfortable in my discomfort.