Between hope and humanity

It should have been a great celebration. The Tabernacle, Israel’s first house of worship, was complete. For seven days, Moshe performed the inauguration. Now, the eighth day, the first of Nissan, arrived. The Priests, led by Aharon, were ready to begin their service.

It was then that tragedy occurred. Two of Aharon’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, brought “strange fire, which [G-d] had not commanded them.” Fire “came forth from the L-rd” and they died. There then follow two scenes between Moshe and Aharon.

The first: “Moshe then said to Aharon, ‘This is what the L-rd spoke of when He said, “Among those who are near to Me I will show Myself holy; in the sight of all the people I will be honoured.”’ Aharon remained silent” (Lev. 10:3).

Moshe then commanded their bodies to be removed, and forbade Aharon and his remaining sons to engage in rituals of mourning. He gave them instructions to prevent such tragedies from occurring in the future, and then proceeded to check whether the sacrifices of the day had been performed. He discovered that Aharon and his sons had burned the sin offering, instead of eating it as prescribed:

“When Moshe inquired about the goat of the sin offering and found that it had been burned up, he was angry with Elazar and Itamar, Aharon’s remaining sons, and asked, ‘Why didn’t you eat the sin offering in the Sanctuary area? It is most holy; it was given to you to take away the guilt of the community by making atonement for them before the L-rd. Since its blood was not taken into the Holy Place, you should have eaten the goat in the Sanctuary area, as I commanded.’

“Aharon replied to Moshe, ‘Today they sacrificed their sin offering and their burnt offering before the L-rd, but such things as this have happened to me. Would the L-rd have been pleased if I had eaten the sin offering today?’ When Moshe heard this, he approved” (Lev. 10:16–20)

The psychology is enthralling. Moshe tries to comfort his brother, who has lost two sons. He tells him that G-d has said, “Among those who are near to Me, I will show Myself holy.” According to Rashi, he said, “Now I see that they [Nadav and Avihu] were greater than you and me.” The holier the person, the more G-d demands of them.

It is as if Moshe said to Aharon: “Do not give up now. We have come so far. I know your heart is broken. So is mine. Did we not think — you and I — that our troubles were behind us, that after all we suffered in Egypt and in the battle against Amalek, and in the sin of the Golden Calf, we were finally safe? Don’t give up, don’t lose faith, don’t despair. Your children died not because they were evil but because they were holy. Though their act was wrong, their intentions were good. They merely tried too hard.”

But despite Moshe’s consolation, “Aharon remained silent,” lost in grief too deep for words.

I

n the second exchange, Moshe is concerned with something else — the community, whose sins should have been atoned for by the sin offering. It is as if he had said to Aharon: “My brother, I know you are in a state of grief. But you are not just a private person. You are also the High Priest. The people need you to perform your duties, whatever your inner feelings.”

Aharon replies: “Would the L-rd have been pleased if I had eaten the sin offering today?”

We can only guess at the precise import of these words. Perhaps they mean, “I know that in general, a High Priest is forbidden to mourn like an ordinary individual. I accept that. But had I acted on this inaugural day as if nothing had happened, as if my sons had not died, would this not seem to the people as if I were heartless, as if the service of G-d meant a renunciation of my humanity?” This time, Moshe is silent. Aharon is right.

In this exchange between two brothers, a momentous courage is born: the courage of an Aharon who has the strength to grieve and not accept any easy consolation, and the courage of a Moshe who has the strength to keep going in spite of grief.

It is the birth of an emotional configuration that will characterize the Jewish people for centuries to come. Jews are a people who have had more than their share of suffering. Like Aharon, they did not lose their humanity. They did not allow their sense of grief to be dulled, desensitised. But neither did they lose their capacity to carry on, to hope. Like Moshe, they never lost faith. But like Aharon, they never allowed that faith to anesthetize their human vulnerability.

That, it seems to me, is what happened to the Jewish people after the Holocaust. There were, and are, no words to silence the grief or end the tears. We may say — as Moshe told Aharon — that the victims were holy, that they died in sanctification of G-d’s name. Surely that is true. Yet nonetheless, “Aharon remained silent.” When all the explanations have been given, grief remains, unassuaged. We would not be human otherwise.

Yet, like Moshe, the Jewish people found the strength to continue, to reaffirm hope in the face of despair, life in the presence of death. A mere three years after coming eye to eye with the Angel of Death, the Jewish people, by establishing the State of Israel, made the single most powerful affirmation in two thousand years that Am Yisrael Chai, the Jewish people lives.

Moshe and Aharon were like the two hemispheres of the Jewish brain: human emotion on the one hand; faith in G-d, the covenant, and the future on the other. Without the second, we would have lost our hope. Without the first, we would have lost our humanity.

It is not easy to keep that balance, that tension. Yet it is essential. Faith does not render us invulnerable to tragedy but it gives us the strength to mourn and then, despite everything, to carry on.