Leviticus Cycle 6 Shemini

On Boundaries 

Here’s the lesson of Shemini:  We might have an urge to step hard on the gas. Especially if a wind is already pushing us forward.  Truth is though, the wind might stop.  Another thought, we just might crash.

Now, let’s jump to a poem I’ve been thinking about all week.

It’s called Zone by Apollinaire. Zone is a word we see in French airports. It means No Entry. Apollinaire was a colleague of Picasso, Chagall, Stein, etc.  He’s known as one of the fathers of surrealism.

But there’s more.  In his poem,  Apollinaire (among other things) refers to airplanes as Christ-like figures trying…yes really trying…but never quite getting as high as Christ.

You can imagine what it might have been like in the early 20^th century. You look up and these strange white cross-like machines are flying above your head.

Why am I referring to airplanes? Well, it’s March 2014. A Malaysian jet with more than 200 souls on board has simply disappeared.  Did it crash? Was it zapped by terrorists? We don’t know.  It's so sad. It makes you wonder if Apollinaire may have been right, that there are boundaries. To expound on this, if we’re going to try and superficially reflect God  (wherever we wander) we might want to check to see if the accompanying boundaries parallel our (technological)  reflection.

Now for Shemini. No doubt the parasha Shemini is surreal and zone-plenty. In short, it opens our eyes to a few boundaries itself. 

It begins with the priestly sacrifice for the consecration. Soon (in linear time) in Acherei Moth, we will see that Aaron (once a year) is to sprinkle the mixed blood of the sacrifice of the copper altar (the animal altar) onto the incense altar beyond the partition. This is huge symbolically. It’s  taking our nefesh bahama (animal soul) and raising it to the level of the nefesh elohim (Divine soul).

 God tells him to do this.

 God though never tells Aaron or Moses to do it the other way around. In other words we don’t want to take our nefesh elohim and force it into our nefesh bahama. I see it this way:   Let’s not shove our prayer downwards. If (for example) we feel a certain intimacy alone on a mountain, we don’t want to feed it to the catfish, the lobster, the pig or the camel. We’ll only manage to merge two unlike substances and confuse these poor beings as well as ourselves. We will only end up distorting a mundane reality that we need to keep as clear and clean as a bell.  In a similar vein, we don’t want to bring this state-of-intimacy incense to the community animal altar, which is by the way, the conventional prayer service.

What we do want is to bring the conventional prayer service to the mountain. But if we bring mountain-energy to the schul we just may find that we’re a bit too expansive for the status quo. As  it has been inferred by several rabbis, we have a choice.  We can jump in and take part in that animal altar sacrifice and work to bring it to the incense altar (as does Aaron)….or just go to the incense-altar on the mountain and be it.

Nadav and Abihu force the mountain on the schul. They do it when Moses and Aaron aren’t looking.  They bring that incense-altar-incense to the animal altar (Exodus 10-1). They cross the boundaries. Our rabbis have historically applauded or admonished them for this (depends on the level of pardes).  I personally don’t think though that this is about right or wrong, good or evil.  Catapulted by the flow of the sacrifices and by the temporal symbolic cross-over from seventh to eight day, they cross a boundary and therefore can’t retain their human forms. I feel sad that they die.  But Nadav and Abihu are symbols and this is what happens. This is what we learn from all of them: When we do this, we get that. When we look away from this,  what might happen is that.

I wonder what Apollinaire would have thought in terms of the missing jet. It certainly raises a question. If we can’t follow something as gigantic and financially sacred as a plane, if there’s a way that it can slip from our sight, then we may want to take heed of the advances we are experiencing as a world-people and concurrently catch up with ourselves in terms of practical ground. Our advances (no doubt) are exponential and amazing. We need to have some humility though. I mean, it might feel like we’re moving forward but if the wind stops (even for a moment) we just may feel the tragic reverberating universal crash.

 And while Nadav and Abihu crash upwards, a plane only crashes down.