Dvar Torah on Parshat Shemini

This week, we read the portion of Shmini, which means "the eighth". It refers to the eighth day of the opening of the Tabernacle in the desert, which was actually its first day of regular activity, after seven days of inaugural rituals and sacrifices performed by Moshe, Aharon, and the other priests. On this celebratory 'opening day', we are told that the following tragic event took place: "Now Aharon's sons, Nadav and Avihu, each took his pan and placed in it fire, and placed on it incense, and brought it before the Lord; a strange fire which he had not commanded them. And a fire went out from before the Lord and consumed them and they died before God. And Moshe said to Aharon: this is what God was referring to when he said 'with those close to me I will be sanctified, and before the entire nation I will be honored', and Aharon was silent."

The story is a terribly difficult one, and Moshe's consolation to Aharon, in which he seems to say that the deaths of his sons had been predicted by God, and are in some way a sanctification of God and His Tabernacle, is hard to make sense of. I would like to focus on Aharon's reaction to the tragedy and to his brother's somewhat opaque words of explanation and comfort: "...and Aharon was silent." Although it is obviously difficult to interpret silence, I would like to suggest that his non-response may be telling us something not only about God, the Temple, and sacrifices, but also about parents and children in general.

It is remarkably unclear what exactly Nadav and Avihu did wrong when they offered their 'strange fire' before the Lord - there are many hypotheses about what their sin or mistake was. I would suggest, however, that Aharon's silence is a function of his role as parent, not as high priest, and tells us this: ultimately, there are things that one's children do about which parents have nothing to say, decisions that children make that are beyond a parent's ability to intelligently or productively comment on, explain, judge, influence, or take responsibility for.

In Jewish tradition, when a child turns bar or bat mitzvah, there is a somewhat strange blessing for the parents to recite - "Blessed be He who has exempted me from being punished for this one." The idea is that our children, when small, are our responsibility; they are our responsibility to such a degree that we deserve to be punished for anything they may do wrong. Once they reach adulthood, however, this is no longer the case, and parents are no longer liable for the acts of their children. At the age of 12 or 13 (maybe a little later than that nowadays, I'll grant you), parents need to begin to understand that children must, and will, go their own way, whether they like it or not; the "Blessed be He who has exempted me" blessing tells us that.

I think that Aharon's silence is a similar expression of distance from the acts of his adult children. At some point, Aharon's silence tells us, parents need to understand that they ultimately have nothing to say about the decisions made by their children, for better or worse. Whatever it was that his sons were doing in the Tabernacle, whatever place it was that they had arrived at in their lives, Aharon, their father, was not there, it was not his place, and, therefore, as a father, he had nothing to say about it. His silence is the only possible response to the fact that his children had, on their own, come to a very strange, for him, religious decision, one that he could not agree with, accept, or even comment on. Whether this is a good thing - as Moshe seems to argue - or not, is beside the point. For Aharon, the point is that he understood that his sons had acted as children ultimately must: independently, and there is nothing a father or mother can say or do to change that.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix