Shemini 2024

Margaret Holub - April 6, 2024

When I was a baby rabbinical student back in ancient days I gave a sermon (that’s what we called them then — the word drash hadn’t yet been invented) about the Tent of Meeting. I don’t remember what parshah - oops, I mean Torah portion — I was sermonizing about. But I talked about how Moses always placed his tent between the huge encampment of the Israelites and the ohel moed. It’s as though he wanted to live somewhere between the community and God. Moses, I said then, was the existential man, a solitary: not quite part of God but not quite part of the people either. He was, to borrow a beautiful phrase that Rav Soloveichik used for Adam, “the lonely man of faith.”

After my sermon my beautiful, kind, wise teacher, Rabbi David Ellenson — who died just a few months ago — came up to me and said kind of ardently — “But Moses loved the Jewish people!” I wondered about that then, forty- some years ago. And I guess I still do. Did Moses love the Jewish people? Moses is a curious figure — nowhere more than in Vayikra, and, nowhere more in particular than in Shemini. The whole working of the mishkan is the purview of Aaron and his sons. It is they who wear the fancy robes, administer the sacrifices, do the juju. Moses does none of this. But he LURKS. He is behind everything. And he has a very particular, not always easy, kind of energy. I’m curious about this.

Back in Tzav Moses instructs his brother and nephews in all the details of the sacrificial rituals. Then Moses anoints the altar with holy oil where they — not he — will preside. In the beginning of Shemini Aaron and the sons start doing the ritual themselves, with all the pomp and drama. I’ve been wondering over the past couple of weeks, when Moses was dressing Aaron and his sons in all the ceremonial garb, how he felt in his regular jeans and sneakers. It’s been bothering me.

There are relatively few places in Torah where Moses addresses Aaron directly — lots of verses where God tells Moses to pass a message on to Aaron, but just a few where Moses on his own initiative addresses his brother. Most of these are in Shemini:

At the very beginning of our parshah, “Moses summoned Aaron and his sons and the elders of Israel and said to them, take for yourself a young bull…” and so on. They do so according to his instructions.

A few verses later “Moses said to Aaron, Come near to the altar and perform the service of your sin offering and your burnt offering and provide atonement for yourself and for the people. Then perform the service of the people’s offering and provide atonement for them, as HASHEM has commanded.”

Aaron does so. Everything works splendidly.

Then it doesn’t. Aaron’s sons bring forth eish zarah — alien fire. A fire comes forth in turn from HASHEM and burns up the two sons of Aaron right there and then.

Moses again speaks to Aaron. Imagine for a moment the tone of voice that Moses might have used here: “Of this did HASHEM speak: I will be sanctified through those who are nearest Me, thus will I be honored before the people.” Vayidom Aharon — Aaron was silent. I would be too.

Moses takes charge here, organizing the removal of the bodies of Nadav and Avihu, forbidding the family of Aaron to mourn, reminding them that the anointing oil is still upon them.

Moses speaks again to Aaron, and to Elazar and Itamar, his still-living sons, commanding them to proceed with the offerings. They three of them are terrified: they offer up the animals but refrain from eating the trumah, the part designated for the priests. Moses demanded an explanation. Finally Aaron speaks: After what happened yesterday I was scared to eat the trumah — do you think HASHEM would approve?

Vayishma Moshe vayitav b’aynav — Moses heard, and this pleased him.

The difference between the two men is so palpable here: Aaron emotes, grieves, fears, holds silence, importunes. Moses, his brother, uncle to the two dead priests, has a completely different mien. Moses takes charge. He is attentive, responsible, but in no way comforting or even blaming. He is implacable. Icy.

Here’s a thought experiment: imagine a map that tracks Moses and Aaron through their adult lives. They go back and forth to Pharaoh together, cross the Red Sea together, traverse the desert together. From the time they join together to confront Pharaoh, their paths on the horizontal plane are just about identical.

Now try to imagine that map in 3-D: when you do it starts to look very different. Aaron stays on the horizontal plane. Moses starts his life being drawn up out of the water. Pharaoh’s daughter names him Moshe because he was pulled up from the river to dry ground. God through Moses causes the Red Sea to open up (my favorite childhood joke: Jesus and Moses are up in heaven, and they decide to go back to earth to relive their greatest miracles. Moses splits the Red Sea and says, :”Look how dry that ground is. Look how straight those walls of water are…” Ask me later if you want to hear the punchline…) It’s not clear how many times Moses ascended Mount Sinai — Professor Baruch J Schwartz, in an article for thetorah.com, makes the case that it was as many as eight times. He goes up and down, repeatedly, each time to be in the intimate company of HASHEM.

Think particularly about the 3-D map of the first time Moses ascends the mountain to receive Torah. I have climbed Jabil Musa, the mountain said by tradition to be Mount Sinai. It’s a little like climbing the Washington Monument — totally vertical. The main path up the mountain has 3750 steps. You can imagine that 3-D map like the graph of an oscilloscope, up and down, up and down…

Meanwhile back on the ground, Aaron builds the Golden Calf and dances with the Israelites around and around. Imagine the two lines — Aaron’s footsteps in the desert sand, circling round and round; Moses going straight up and down.

In her commentary to Vayikra the great Avivah Zornberg makes the case that the whole book of Leviticus is haunted by the specter of the Golden Calf. She writes of that moment in Shemini when Aaron is afraid to eat the terumah: Aaron’s numbed astonishment is carried over, according to a surrealistic midrash, into the guilt and shame that fill him when he begins to officiate in the Mishkan: “Some say that Aaron saw the altar in the form of an ox and he was afraid of it.” Shame becomes fear that threatens to paralyze him in his role as High Priest.

Zornberg wrote another book, a biography of Moses. In this biography, so- called, she speaks of Moses’ astonishing verticality — how he lives his life going up and down to God. Of receiving Torah she writes:

This revelatory process is figured in Moses’ repeated movement from the top of the mountain to its base. Ascending to the summit of Sinai, he disappears from the view of the people. Descending to its base, he transmits the messages of the divine; he speaks what he has heard. Reluctantly at first, he parts from the ineffable conversation at the summit and returns to the human world.

Moses’ biography, whether you read it in Torah or as channelled by Avivah Zornberg, is so peculiar and so moving. He too is passionate, emotive, fearful, demanding, cajoling, affectionate, blissful — but all of this in relationship with Hashem, the unnameable, unknowable Mystery. With people, he shows hardly any warmth, hardly any humanness at all.

As I was prepping for this davar I was taking notes on the back of an envelope, noting those various places in Torah where Moses spoke to Aaron…..

At some point I flipped over the envelope and saw that it contained my Catholic Agitator, the newspaper of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, where long ago I was a community member. The Catholic Worker was and still is a bunch of communities that live in the poorest places in the country, welcome unhoused people into their homes, feed them and so on. The Catholic Worker movement has something like a motto — it comes from Father Zossima in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov: “Love in reality is harsh and dreadful compared to love in dreams.” Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker, called her autobiography A Ahrsh and Dreadful Live. The gist of that quote, for Father Zossima and for the Catholic Worker, is that the love in dreams may be sweet and rewarding. But there is another kind of love which is severe, which calls for difficult service and may provide little pleasure or relief to the one who loves. The Christmas that I was at the LACW there was an exchange of homemade gifts. I remember one gift: a t-shirt on which was stenciled, “LACW — harsh and dreadful.”|

And this little connection from my envelope provides a clue to me about the nature of Moses’ love.

Aaron is kind of easy to understand in his way. His love, like most love, is horizontal. He is with the people, comes and goes with them, is protective of them, loves them. I can only imagine that he also loves the ceremony and the outfits and the power to bless and please and delight. He performs and dances for their satisfaction and his own.

Moses’ love is made of more difficult stuff. He is in love with God — a harsh and dreadful love if there ever was one. And this love demands that he serve the people — absolutely without reward. Does he love them? If you give up your life of safety and privilege and risk everything for someone else’s — or a people’s — benefit, that is certainly a powerful kind of love.

I circle back to the comment of my beautiful and loving teacher Rabbi David Ellenson of blessed memory. And I think at this moment — 42 years, I think, after we had this conversation — that we were both partially right. Moses was the lonely man of faith. Unlike Aaron he did not find joy or ease in mingling with am yisrael. Moses never danced — with the Golden Calf, God forbid, or with anyone else. He kept his distance. He was a vertical man. And this too is a kind of love, a willingness to come back down to the ground, to speak the word of the Divine to our unruly and difficult forbears, to lead them through harrowing passages, to see them forward and to depart silently when his work is done, expecting no gratitude.