Community Blog

Shabbat Shalom! It is time to count the Omer. The blessing can be found on page 570, and tonight we are counting Day 13. The Kabbalistic realm for this night of the Omer is Yesod SheBeGevurah, which Rabbi Jill Hammer translates as “Connectivity within Harshness.” The Biblical woman for this combination of Divine Attributes is the daughter of Yiftach. Although she does not get a name in the Book of Judges, where her story appears, the Talmud names her She’ilah (the Questioner). Judges 11 tells of a judge and general of Israel who promises God that if God will grant the Israelites victory over their enemies, he will sacrifice the first creature that comes out of his gate to greet him when he returns from battle. His daughter is the first out the gate to greet him. The Bible tells us she bargains for three more months of life, to go into the hills with her fellow maidens to mourn for and with her, and then she returns and allows herself to be sacrificed. Her friends continue to gather for four days every year to sing songs in those same hills in memorium of their martyred friend. The Talmud tells us she tried to bargain for her life altogether, offering challenging questions and astute arguments for why her father should not kill her, but a promise to God is a promise to God, and Yiftach insists on following through, despite his own expressed mourning as well. 

Our Torah portion this week is Parashat Shemini, one I would classify up there with the Akeidah as among the most challenging pieces of scripture we have. The first half of the parasha is about the death of two of the sons of Aaron, who immediately offer a “strange fire” - something other than what God has just spent the last eight chapters telling Moses and the priests to offer as sacrifices in the Mishkan - and the Divine fire consumes them rather than their sacrifice. Similarly, the Haftarah for this week, II Samuel 6:1-7:17, tells of the death of Uzzah, who is struck down by God for touching the Ark as it is carried toward Jerusalem following David’s conquest.

I have often struggled to find meaning in these deaths, and struggled to accept the traditional rabbinic justifications of these Divine punishments. However, this week, a d’var Torah was published by The Blogs section of the Times of Israel depicting a new [to me] framing. Naomi Graetz brings forth the verse, “Then Moses said to Aaron, “This is what HaShem meant by saying: Through those near to Me I show Myself holy, And gain glory before all the people.” And Aaron was silent,” and Sforno’s commentary on this verse: “[Aaron] consoled himself after having been told that the death of his sons represented a sanctification of the name of the Lord.” Rashi agrees with Sforno’s reading that Nadav and Avihu are martyrs rather than sinners, as he highlights the phrasing “through those who are near to me,” indicating that God considered Nadav and Avihu close to the Divine, chosen and holy. 

Graetz then cites her own late husband, Rabbi Michael Graetz, who played with the Hebrew word “lo” in his siddur eretz yisraeli for the Aleinu. Lamed-Aleph spells “lo” meaning “no,” whereas as Lamed-Vav/Cholem Malei spells “lo” meaning “his.” So rather than the traditional translation for 

שלא (שלו) עשנו כגויי הארצות ולא (לו) שמנו כמשפחות האדמה 

(that He has not made us like the nations of the lands, and has not positioned us like the families of the earth), this Israeli siddur reads, “who made us for His sake like the nations and for His sake to be like the families of the earth”. Similarly, the living Graetz in this week’s Times of Israel blog, suggests switching up the “lo” in this week’s parasha, so that rather than the verse reading, “and they offered before God alien fire, which had NOT been commanded to them,” it would read, “and they offered before God alien fire, which they had been commanded to bring HIM.” 

One of the contributing factors to my discomfort with this parasha is that most years, it also falls on the same week as Yom HaShoa, and the idea of fiery human sacrifices is just too real and horrifying to think about. In her Omer Calendar of Biblical Women, Rabbi Hammer says that Yiftach’s daughter She’ilah represents yesod shebegevurah because “in spite of her own pain she is able to connect with others and create relationships that surpass the limitations of her own life.” We can read the deaths of Nadav and Avihu, and maybe even of Uzzah and She’ilah, through the lens of martyrdom and being gathered to God, as Graetz suggests, because these are theoretical people of a semi-mythological ancient world. It is much harder to swallow that explanation about the very real victims from our own families and communities within living memory. However, one of the lessons from the Holocaust has been the study of resilience in times of suffering. Stronger than age, fitness, faith, or nearly any other factor that you might think of, the strongest indicator of resilience (that is, not only survival of the camps, but moral fortitude against the lasting trauma and the likelihood of passing down that trauma to future generations) was the strong foundations of family and community. Survivors who felt loved by their families before the Nazi occupations and deportations and those who were able to stick with at least one family member or close friend in the camps, had much higher rates of emotional resiliency compared to survivors who reported having difficult home lives before the camps or who felt completely alone during the Holocaust. That is yesod shebegevura - connectivity within harshness, or foundations of strength. The ability to find light and hope even in the darkest of times is what allows us to move forward through life. 

God forbid we should ever need the kind of fortitude the characters of these three Biblical stories needed, or that our people in 1940’s Europe needed, but we certainly need strength to get through any struggles of our own lives, and the current political climate is not greatly reassuring to those of us with epigenetic trauma. May we have the strength of Aaron, to strive to see the goodness in our families, and to be willing to fully accept a terrible reality even with a broken heart. May we have the strength of Uzzah, to reach out and steady that which looks precarious, even at risk to our own lives. May we have the strength of She’ilah, to ask challenging questions and build relationships that outlast us. May we have the foundations of faith in an interconnected world that Sforno, Rashi, and Rabbi Graetz exhibit, to seek out love in our difficult texts rather than victim-blaming and defaulting to an easy harshness toward the cruelty of the world. And may we build resilient communities that will outlast us all. Amen and Shabbat Shalom. 

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