SHEMINI
Shemini (Eighth, Leviticus Chapters 9-11), has two parts. The first, in Chapters 9 and 10, is the horrifying story of the death of Aaron’s sons because of some kind of ritual mistake. Chapter 11 is the beginning of the laws of kashrut, which detail how to eat. We begin with a detailed list of what beings are acceptable to eat beings and what are not.
Everything is proceeding according to plan in Chapter 9 on the eighth day (hence the title of the parsha) with the ordination of the priests. YHVH’s glory appears before the assembled congregation who promptly fall on their faces in fear (9:24). Then everything goes wholly wrong when Aaron’s two oldest sons, Nadav and Abihu, make some kind of ritual mistake and offer “unfitting” fire or some kind of fire that they weren’t commanded to do (10:1). Fire comes out from YHVH and burns them to death. Aaron, after his sons are killed right next to him, is commanded not to do the acts of mourning and to stay right where his sons were killed, lest he die. (10:6-7). Moses actually then reprimands him for not eating one of the sacrifices he is supposed to eat. (10:16-18). Aaron is silent through all this, but finally he has had enough and pushes back, as I will discuss below (10:19). Moses accepts this and backs off (10:20). And that’s the end of the narrative of the death of Aaron’s two oldest sons (with no appearance of any female family members, it should be noted) and we abruptly shift to the beginnings of the laws of Kashrut in Chapter 11.
I’m going to discuss four themes.
The stage of reincorporation in a rite of passage and the danger associated with it.
The concepts of tameh and tahor, ritual pollution and ritual purity
The limits of ritual practice/religion as expressed by Aaron On what basis are animals kosher or not kosher?
Reincorporation is the stage of a rite of passage or an initiation where the initiate returns to his/her community and takes up their new status. The easiest way to understand this is to consider a newly married couple returning from their honeymoon. They are absorbed into their existing community, but now they are a married couple and they are regarded differently than when they were just dating, especially if they weren’t living together.
If it is a transformational initiation (not all rites of passage are) then they begin offering their gift discovered during the liminal or in between period to the community. In our day, finding a community and a way to express one’s unique gifts can be totally problematic. In more traditional societies, the community to which the initiate returned was well defined. How easy it was to offer the gift discovered during the liminal period probably varied with the nature of the gift received, how well the initiate listened to the elders, the general state of the community etc.
The text around Nadav and Abihu’s death is so bare that it is impossible to know what their offense was. Had they had been granted a vision of some kind of new approach to which YHVH objected, or did they just make a simple mistake? Were they drunk? (there’s the prohibition against drinking beer and wine before offering sacrifices inserted into the text after their death (10:9). Here’s the text as a whole. “And Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Abihu, each took his fire holder, and they put fire in them and set incense on it. And they brought forward unfitting fire, which he [YHVH] had not commanded them, in front of YHVH. And fire came out from in front of YHVH and consumed them. And they died in front of YHVH.” (10:1-2).
What’s the lesson we are supposed to learn? Obey YHVH in all details? Some would like that to be the lesson. And that fits with the general tenor of the text. But if you believe as I do that obedience is not a path to spiritual growth, what might we make of this story?
Let me offer a different, less literal reading. I read this story as a myth rather than something that historically happened. I see it as a myth warning us of the difficulty of bringing our gifts to a given community. We might fail to find a community. We might fail to find a way to express these gifts. What happens if we can’t find a community or a way to express our gifts? Then we can’t successfully transform ourselves and, in a certain sense, part of us, the part that saw the possibility of something different, the part that saw a wider place from the narrows of where we were, that part dies, just like Nadav and Abihu did.
What role do you think obedience should play in spiritual development? What’s your experience with reincorporation and its challenges? Have you struggled determining your gifts? With finding a communal context in which to express your gifts?
YHVH gives a new law to Aaron while he is sitting grieving his sons that priests may not drink beer or win when they come to the tent of meeting. YHVH says it is an eternal law, in order to distinguish between the sacred (kodesh) and the profane (khol), between the ritually polluted (tameh) and the ritually pure (tahor). Tameh and Tahor are confusing concepts, and it isn’t my purpose to go into detail about what can make you ritually polluted and how you can rectify the situation. These details are a key preoccupation of Leviticus. But I want to give us some context so we might understand these critical concepts as we work through Leviticus.
To be ritually polluted or pure is NOT the same thing as being morally polluted or pure. I’m not saying there’s no overlap, but the focus of our text here and in following chapters is going to be under what conditions you can offer a sacrifice and what conditions require purification in order to be able to offer a sacrifice. This is about ritual impurity and moral impurity.
Menstruation, for instance, makes a woman tameh (ritually impure) and not even this patriarchal text is going to argue that menstruation is any kind of moral failing. Contact with the dead makes one tameh, and that is in no way a moral failing. We often fail to understand the distinction between ritual and moral purity and pollution because we simply lack the concept of ritual pollution.
Tameh and tahor are often translated into English as opposites, such as impure and pure or unclean and clean. However, the two words do NOT share a common root in Hebrew and are not mere opposites of each other as these typical translations suggest. That’s why I have chosen polluted and pure as my preferred translations.
Why is this important? Our ancestors are suggesting that the two states are not exactly opposite of each other. Being ritually pure is important so that you can have access to the sacrificial system without which you lack essential tools to be in proper alignment with the divine and with your community—but being polluted doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you. If you feel morally polluted, but you are ritually pure, guess what? you can (and should) rectify your moral pollution by offering sacrifices. That’s an essential part of this system.
Let me offer a few examples. I tend to feel polluted living in suburbia—that’s actually a metaphor that I sometimes use. But is it a ritual pollution or a moral pollution? If I conceive of it as a moral pollution, then I need an equivalent of sacrifice to cleanse myself of the moral pollution and I can offer that equivalent to sacrifice if I am ritually pure. In this situation, maybe I’d offer some kind of prayer confessing my sins for living in suburbia, offering some kind of repentance for my sin, promising to do something different and asking the divine for help.
However, if living in suburbia is more akin to a ritual pollution, then the requirement to cure the ritual pollution would look really different. The prayer I offered in the previous paragraph would be irrelevant, because there’s nothing wrong with me that can be addressed through prayer. I need something more like a period outside the camp in a cabin to clean off the taint of having been in contact with suburbia, akin to the period outside of the camp proscribed for coming into contact with a corpse.
Here's another example. You have a really toxic boss. Your skin itches, perhaps literally, at work. You’re polluted, but it is akin to ritual pollution because there’s nothing wrong with you that not being in the presence of the toxic boss doesn’t address. Now you might have some issues to work through around why you tolerate it or how you didn’t see it coming, but the core of that itchy feeling lies with being with the boss and is cured by not being around him or her.
Here's another example. You keep having problems in your intimate relationships. After blaming it on the series of people you’ve been involved with, you come to realize that you are the common denominator. If you conceive this as a kind of moral pollution, you get to work on yourself through the equivalent of sacrifice which would be prayer, introspection and some kind of different action. But if it were ritual pollution, then you’d just need to not date for a while and then start up again.
There’s also a question here about the whole metaphor of pollution and purity. Our ancestors viewed this literally for sure. But it is worth asking how useful these metaphors are for us.
Is the distinction between ritual and moral purity and pollution clear to you? How useful are the metaphors of purity and pollution? Where in your life do you feel ritually or morally polluted, where do you feel ritually or morally pure?
Aaron’s response to Moses after Moses expresses his anger towards Aaron’s surviving sons for not eating the sin offering as they were supposed to do argues for a limit to religious law and obedience. “And Aaron spoke to Moses. “Here today, they brought forward their sin offering and their burnt offering in front of YHVH. When things like these have happened to me, if I had eaten a sin offering today would it be good in YHVH’s eyes? (10:19)
This is remarkable, at least to me. We’ve had a lot of text arguing for a really tight identification between holiness and following all the details of the law. No one has questioned that connection at all. Moses argues with YHVH a lot, but never , but challenges this core nexus between law and holiness. And here is Aaron, a man who is far more acted upon than actor, questioning this very connection in his great grief. He doesn’t complain about not being allowed to let down his hair and tear his clothes, the traditional signs of mourning. He doesn’t protest against having to sit next to where his sons died because he still has YHVH’s anointing oil upon him (10:6-7). But finally he has had enough. He asks Moses if really, following the letter of the law would be the appropriate thing to do.
Two related themes of fidelity and responsibility occurred to me when I was responding to the questions I raise in this commentary, a practice I always do. First, while I am no fan of any kind of blind obedience to human created laws, obedience might be viewed as a kind of corrupted and rigid version of fidelity and responsibility, as in the ability to respond.
I believe in fidelity to the more than human world, particularly to land. I believe in fidelity to my tribe of Jews, though I obviously diverge from any kind of mainstream Judaism and I don’t believe in supporting the Israeli government no matter what they do. Aaron in this parsha proves himself to have fidelity to his experience of grief, above the demand for obedience. This strikes me as an important lesson.
The second theme is responsibility, as in the ability to respond. Most of us have lost much of our ability to respond to the more than human world because we don’t understand it. By understand, I don’t mean having an ability to explain it in terms of scientific reasoning. I mean more like what is meant by the German verstehen, meaning to grasp something. I sit outside in morning prayer watching the birds and the squirrels. I simply don’t understand them, as I imagine our ancestors must have because they lived lives amongst the more than human world where their very existence depended upon understanding the world around them. Me? I sit there wondering if I am supposed to laugh or cry at what I observe.
Does the connection between holiness and following law make sense to you? What if any, do you see as the limits to law? To what do you believe you owe fidelity? What about your ability to respond to the more than human world?
“Speak to the children of Israel, saying, “this is the animal that you shall eat out of all the domestic animals that are on the earth: everyone that has a hoof and that has a split of hooves, that regurgitates cud among animals, you shall eat it. (11:2-3). The text isn’t as explicit about why, for all its details, leading to lots of speculation. There’s absolutely no reason, contrary to Maimonides, to claim that the prohibitions have anything to do with health (the trichinosis argument about pork). First, pork isn’t the only thing that is excluded and archaeology shows that other native populations of Israel ate pork. Do we really want to embrace an argument that our ancestors were more observant about the health impacts of eating pork than their neighbors, without any shred of evidence to support it? Same with the hygiene arguments for Kashrut.
One widely accepted view is the one put forth by Mary Douglas, a British and non Jewish anthropologist in her wonderful book Purity and Danger. Her argument is that permitted animals were the ones viewed as proper food for a pastoral people. (p.54) Chewing your cud and having a split hoof is characteristic of cattle, sheep and goats, which are the valued animals for a pastoral oriented value system. Pigs have a split hoof but don’t chew their cud, so they are out. Camels chew their cud but don’t have a split hoof, so they are out. Not everybody agrees with her, of course, but it is where I would start.
The important question, in my mind, is what our food ethics should be rather than getting lost in the details of kashrut. Right now our food is produced in a highly systemic fashion where cheaper is better and costs are pushed away from food and onto society as a whole (e.g. water pollution of animal concentration camps). Our food system is an inequitable disaster.
How do you eat in integrity? What are your food ethics? How well do you actually manage to live by them? How do we transform society so that our values are expressed in our food?
QUESTIONS
What role do you think obedience should play in spiritual development? What’s your experience with reincorporation and its challenges? Have you struggled determining your gifts? With finding a communal context in which to express your gifts?
Is the distinction between ritual and moral purity and pollution clear to you? How useful are the metaphors of purity and pollution? Where in your life do you feel ritually or morally polluted, where do you feel ritually or morally pure?
Does the connection between holiness and following law make sense to you? What if any, do you see as the limits to law? To what do you believe you owe fidelity? What about your ability to respond to the more than human world?
How do you eat in integrity? What are your food ethics? How well do you actually manage to live by them? How do we transform society so that our values are expressed in our food?
Nadav and Abihu