Leviticus - Cycle One - 0901-1147 - Shemini

For many our world is about living beings, longer life, life beyond earth, the look of life, no matter if you get blessed by a fashion magazine, a super organic food, or by the most creepy crawly scam on the circuit. We cling to life and hope to find a prescription that keeps our hearts beating. The dead only get in the way of it.

News of death punches us in the gut. We want to shout enough is enough. We feel abandoned, guilty, angry, depressed. How hard it is seeing someone you love dead or dying. I can’t imagine bringing your sight to your dying sons nor feeling flames jumping out at you just when being brought closer to God.

Let’s change angles now. In Tsav being a priest is not about the priest. It’s about priesting. Maybe then Shemini is not about the human. It’s about human-ing. It’s about using our bodies as receptacles of God and gifting in the purest form. It’s about defining acts of reception and transmission (kashrut, vision, speech, smell, emotional and physical pain and joy) and keeping a high level of purity to enable the flow. It’s about God as action and getting beyond the lordliness of our defined roles, man or priest. The rules determine whether or not we remain in the human story and if we don’t, the tragedy is outweighed by our part in the divine action, as well as by our continuity in more stories, human or beyond.

Let’s look at Shemini. It’s the eighth day after the installment ceremony. For seven the priests are cleansed. For seven Moses takes down and puts back up the mishkan. The priests are as pure as humanely possible. The offerings are done as in Tsav. The sin offering, the burnt offering. Blood and smells are flying. Fire is rolling on the altar. The mishkan is blessed; the people are blessed God’s glory (9:6) is revealed (a flash of lightning Josephus) and the people throw themselves on their faces (9:24). Let’s keep going. There’s force, rush, the feverish grip of the continuum. Something must rise from all this heat, from the beating hearts of the flames. Something more. The sons make an unauthorized offering. They are drunk on God. Perhaps the more we receive the more we transmit the more the transmission embraces us. To stay human we want to know that moment of embracing and avoid it. But the objective is not to stay human. Man was created by Torah (Zohar) and the whole Torah is the holy name of the Holy One. Moses in 10:3 explains to Aaron this is what God means with…and I will meet with the children of Israel and it will be sanctified through my honorable ones (Exodus 29:43, Rashi). Moses is describing a meeting, an epiphany, a universal moment among all living men. I believe we call it messianic consciousness. Here God meets with Nadav and Avihu (but not all the children of Israel) and they go up in transparent fire for no man can see me and still exist (Exodus 33:20).

Aaron’s silence after something so horrifying and exquisite, so sad, shows he is avoiding the gut reaction. Aaron, still human, especially in this moment of crisis must watch what he brings in and gives out. Aaron is doing the next thing to get closer to God as are Nadav and Avihu as are we all. To get beyond the body obsession and to be human-ing, that is both our salt (Vayikra 2:15) and our blessing, at times our tragedy and the way of divine love. And even if it is hard to understand, it’s clear in Shemini that life is not the golden ticket. Neither is tragedy, death, kashrut or the lines of Torah. There isn’t a golden ticket and to try to create one only leaves you on your belly, sliding along (11:42).

There is the eternal God alone.

So, may we guide each other with patience and love when the creepy crawlies flap a chameleon tail. May we love each other through tragedy, joy, life, and death. May we know who we are and watch what we eat and how we speak. And may we continue Torah-ing until we are God-ing with eternal joy in the one breathing flowing warm divine spark of all mankind.