Community Blog

     Shabbat Shalom. This week’s Torah portion is a grotesquely fitting story for our Yom HaShoa theme. While the first chapter of Parashat Shemini (Leviticus 9) tells of a series of successful sacrifices, the second (Levitucus 10) tells of another sacrifice gone horribly wrong. After Moses, Aaron, and Aaron’s sons are given the instructions for proper sacrifice, they perform each of the required sacrifices (seemingly the firsts in the fully consecrated Mishkan). They slaughter some prescribed animals, sprinkle the blood, put the correct organs on the altar in the correct order, offer the meal offering with the oil, and so on, and a fire comes forth from the Lord and consumes the burnt offering. God is clearly pleased. Then, two of Aaron’s sons come forward with a “strange fire” in their sacrificial pans and when the fire of the Lord comes forth this time, it consumes the two young men. 

     The rabbis offer many explanations for why this was a reasonable and necessary response to the strange fire. Of course, it is unfathomable that God made a mistake or acted unjustly! So Nadav and Avihu must have deserved their fiery demise: because they were arrogant in assuming their sacrifice would be worthy to God when God had already articulated quite clearly what sacrifices God expected; because they were drunk when they offered the strange fire; because they had already been told explicitly not to offer this fire. None of those things are clear in the Torah text itself, and even if they were, I am not convinced any of them warrant the violence they were met with. 

     The word “shoa” means “catastrophe”. It appears in the Bible, usually in conjunction with the destruction of the Temple and/or the sacking of Jerusalem, and in Medieval Hebrew it was used to mean disaster generally speaking. Samuel ibn Naghrela, the great Talmudic scholar and statesman who lived in Moorish Iberia in the 11th century, wrote this poem: “Angered by difficulty\And angered by want of sin\And there is shoah hidden in good\And good hidden in shoah."

     Many Jews prefer this term over “Holocaust,” which comes from the Greek term for a burnt offering. The 6 million Jews and millions of other Europeans killed by the Nazi regime were not sacrifical animals. They were human lives. Many of them fought back heroically, contrary to some narratives that referred to victims as “sheep led to slaughter”. In fact, the date of Yom HaShoa is directly linked to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest single attempt of Jews to liberate themselves from the Nazi oppression. While it was the largest and remains the most famous example, it was not the only one. 

     One of the most pressing questions of the 20th century was, and perhaps remains still, nearly a quarter of the way into the 21st century: Where was God during the Shoa. Elie Weisel holds God accountable for allowing it to happen in his play “The Trial of God,” which later became a movie called “God on Trial.” But of course there are no clear answers, and any answer that passes for satisfactory must be interpreted by each individual. Just as the scene with Nadav Avihu, it is unfathomable that God would choose to act so violently against God’s covenantal people. And although Nadav and Avihu did not fight against God in their moment of death, they also are not sacrificial animals, but human beings whose lives were cut short for reasons we may never understand. 

     While one of the refrains of Yom HaShoa and Holocaust education is "Never Again!", such things do happen again. In modern Hebrew, the word shoa is used to describe the genocides in Armenia that preceded our Shoa, as well as the ethnic cleansings in the Balkans and in Rwanda in the 1990's. As each of these events, and others like them, unfolded and continue to unfold, they remain unfathomable. It is beyond comprehension that people can enact such violence against each other, and heartbreaking that a just and loving God would allow it. But to me, that doesn't mean things are hopeless.

       God has been unknowable since the beginning of time. We will never understand the full scope of the physical universe or the Divine intentions behind it. But just as Moses and Aaron and Aaron's remaining sons must continue to try to serve this unknowable God even after what happened to their nephews and sons and brothers, so must we try to continue to work toward a world where mass violence or horrific burnings truly happen never again! A perfect world may be out of reach but a better world is certainly possible, as long as we do not despair when confusing tragedies occur. We mourn, we commemorate, we can cry and shout our frustration, but then we rally. We regroup and plan for that better future, and we take decisive action to make it happen. Whether that's consoling the distraught, providing better education and clearer instructions, more equitably distributed resources, or dismantling harmful stereotypes, we can redirect our sorrow toward hope and hard work. 

     May we offer up the truest offerings of our hearts, may we honor the memories of our martyrs, and may we work to make a better tomorrow for all. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.