Imagine the most awesome and splendid of occasions accompanied by the most fabulous and incredible fanfare and it would approximate the scene that was when Moses had nearly completed the week-long introductory period of the Mishkan (Tabernacle). Before this preliminary phase had finished, though, tragedy hit: Nadav and Avihu, the two eldest sons of Aaron, were struck down by a divine decree while in the Mishkan (Leviticus 10:1-2).
Opinions abound as to the events leading up to their death. Based on a very straightforward explanation of the text, we often learn in 3rd grade that the sin was that they brought the wrong fire — but was that really deserving of death? Throughout the entire Tanach, we come across very few people who ‘merit’ such an immediate and direct death through miraculous intervention — what was it exactly that Aaron’s sons did that made it necessary for God to react in such a striking fashion?
Tying these early verses of chapter 10 into those at the end of chapter 9, Rashbam (grandson of Rashi) explains that they brought the wrong fire but that it was due to their lack of sensitivity towards taking the opportunity to glorify God’s name, much like the great violation of Moses, for which he was barred from entering the Transjordan (Numbers 20:7-12). Rashbam explains that the first offering of the day was the incense and that while for each of the first 7 days of the introductory period of the Mishkan, a flame was brought manually to serve as the source of fire upon the alter, the fire for the eighth day was to be different in that it was to come from heaven. Although it happened much later in history and so comparison might seem mystically anachronistic, Rashbam draws a parallel to the incident of Elijah upon Mouth Carmel (I Kings 18:19-39) in which God’s glory was manifested publicly by the arrival of a divine fire. Rashbam explains the events of Leviticus 10:1 as having occurred prior to Leviticus 9:24 — Aaron’s sons did not allow God’s name to be glorified in a befitting manner and so the exact same terminology is used in both verses “vateitzei aish m’lifnei Hashem vatochal…” — to refer to “a [single] fire [that] came from the Almighty and consumed” both the offering on the alter (9:24) and the sons of Aaron (10:2).
The Ba’al HaTurim (mentioning it at Leviticus 6:5) explains the sin as having undermined Moses’ teachings. The verse there speaks of the biblical requirement to feed the fire despite it being supplied by divine origin — related dispute as to how many pyres were upon the alter, such that perhaps different fires were fueled by different sources — and Aaron’s sons chose to decipher the meaning of the various written laws and oral instructions themselves rather than defer to Moses, their teacher.
The Sforno takes an entirely different approach, claiming that Nadav and Avihu sought to capitalize on the newness of the divine presence by doing an entirely new thing — sacrificing a completely unprecedented and unprescribed incense offering — that, ultimately similar to position taken by Ba’al HaTurim, was not what Moses had instructed them to do. But what consumed them was a fire emanating from the golden alter from within the Mishkan, not the one and the same fire that descended to consume the offering on the copper alter in the courtyard as explained by Rashbam.
The question is, though, what sort of punishment is this? According to the Ba’al HaTurim, drunkenness was a factor, in addition to what he calls 5 other distinct (yet somewhat overlapping) violations, but unlike Rashi and the Sforno, no mention is made about the level of Nadav and Avihu’s piety.
Rashi quotes the Sifra d’Millui’m as explaining that Moses comforted Aaron by relating that God had told him that there would be those through whom a sanctification would occur and seeing how his sons perished in a divine fire, it must have been that they (Nadav and Avihu) were greater (than Moses and Aaron). Similarly, the Sforno refers to Nadav and Avihu as “two tremendous righteous people.” But neither Rashbam nor Rashi maintain that they were drunk — the latter merely quotes R’ Ishmael, who explains as such.
What this amounts to is a divide along the Akivan/Ishmaelian fault line. The mystical Akivan stance, echoed by Rashi and Rashbam, promotes the talmudic equivalent of Obama-esque socialism:
“Aish l’fanav tocheil u’sviva nisara me’od,” “devouring fire precedes Him, it stormed around him fiercely” (Psalms 50:3)
Suggesting a play on words, the talmud (Bavli Yevamos 121b) explains this verse as referring to the righteous (s’vivav, those who surround and are in intimate recess with God) and how He reckons all minutiae with His righteous ones down to a hair’s breadth (k’chut ha’sa’ara, from nisara). Nadav and Avihu were righteous (and perhaps supremely so, as Rashi states in his comment to Leviticus 10:3, d”h hu asher dibeir) but, as humans, erred, and so had to pay the ultimate price because similar to the Democrat’s message of “more from those who have more,” the saintly are judged on such an absurdly high level that even the most slightest disturbance in spiritual equilibrium can have a colossal impact, and so, much like what happens to Moses later on, failing to recognize the potential for a great sanctification of the divine name ends up as Nadav and Avihu’s fatal error.
And according to the Sforno, too, who says that Nadav and Avihu were attempting to greet the incoming divine presence with loving spontaneity in the form of an additional incense offering, explains that they perished in an instant because their level was of such refinement that this action, however intended, was deemed recklessly uncalculated and worthy of the ultimate punishment.
According to the Ba’al HaTurim, though, Nadav and Avihu were guilty of 6 violations and are not described as men of anything more than average piety. In line with the Ishmaelian perspective, the Ba’al HaTurim appears to side with those who were referred to as Dorshei Reshumos — those anonymous sages who sought to solve the enigmatic — who explain that people are judged on the majority of their deeds as explained in the talmud (Bavli RH 16b):
“There are 3 types of people who are judged on Rosh HaShana: the fully wicked, the fully righteous and the moderates.” And who are the people in these categories? Rashi explains that resha’im g’murim (fully wicked) refers to those who have “mostly transgressions,” while those who are called beinonim (moderates) are “half against half,” and we can extrapolate from there that tzadikim g’murim (fully righteous) refers to those who have “mostly merits.”
We are thus bidden to rest not on our laurels but to consider it as though we are hanging in the balance, as a moderate, such that any additional positive or negative achievement will swing us completely in that respective direction, in line with the Ishmaelian view that God deals with us charitably and does not reckon all minutiae down to the most subtle infractions. But for Nadav and Avihu, who according to the Ba’al HaTurim, racked up quite a list of serious transgressions including working by themselves without not seeking guidance from Moses, appearing in the Mishkan while drunk and (perhaps in general) chasing after financial gain in relation to the priesthood and not having children (which, to be fair, must be referring to an active role they had in avoiding offspring). This creates a picture of Nadav and Avihu not as the sterling characters painted by Rashi and the Sforno — making them more similar to Chofni and Pinchas than to Moses and Aaron! It is no wonder, then, that when they acted out in this most egregious manner in public display at the opening ceremonies of the Mishkan that God struck them down — for they were hardly even beinonim.
Check out more about R’ Akiva and R’ Ishmael at 4Torah.com.
i was thinking this week, something that i realized must be true but i never thought of it in this fashion… let me see if i can put it out in words.
imagine a builder who creates buildings, who has a large supply of bricks, that does his work in secret— his work is public but the builder is unknown. a real life analogue would be bansky, the street artist.
this builder creates buildings of all sizes all over the country, using differing amounts of bricks, some entirely of bricks, some with no bricks at all, some half bricks, etc. he varies his forms. but his greatest work of all is a skyscraper entirely created of bricks.
one day a person looks at the brick skyscraper and imagines to himself, there are so many bricks in this building, i have never seen this many bricks in my entire life. but if the builder who created this building and all the others used this many bricks, it is impossible that the person who created this building has a smaller supply of bricks.
now look at it this way, the builder of course is HaShem, and the buildings are us. the bricks are our sense of kindness, fairness, mercy, etc.
it was at this point i realized that if HaShem was able to instill in us a degree of these parts of our yetzer tov, it is impossible for HaShem to have less of these attributes than everyone who has ever existed combined, Moshe, R’Hillel, Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, any human you can spit out as the kindest, fairest, most merciful, etc., G-d was the one who made them all and thus his degree of these attributes is infinitely more than any one of these men.
because of this, there’s only one conclusion you can draw: if presented with the entire situation, there is not a human who has ever existed who has the capacity to find any of HaShem’s judgements unfair, unkind, or unmerciful. i’m not talking about having the right to or the audacity to, i’m saying it’s physically impossible for a human to see them as unfair.
thus, if we ever are presented with a judgement that HaShem has done and we see it as unfair or unkind, either the event did not happen and is way G-d chose to metaphor an entirely different situation, or we do not have all the information, or both.
i thought it might be helpful to put these sorts of situations in context. obviously, with what we are given the judgement seems completely unfair and unkind to most people, so we must not have all of the information here.
i think part of viewing a situation like this as unfair is that we have no idea what will happen after death. we do know there is an afterlife but the details are sketchy. for all we know, HaShem, having an entire view of everything so clearly, death could possibly be the equivalent to a “time-out” for us. ultimately we do not know and will not know until we die.
but i guess overall it’s important to know that G-d doesn’t make the wrong decision or an unfair decision. it’s not wrong to view some of these things as unfair given the information that we have, possibly because the Torah was not written as an easy book. as the most important book ever written it was controversial then and it is now, it is meant to spur discussion and inspire understanding until the end of time.
1) Dan, your analogy is a poor one, but that’s because it’s quite difficult to make an analogy of this magnitude about God — anything we speak of necessarily remains quite dissimilar to his ways and his being, so don’t take offense. The fact that a builder has a finite quantity of bricks and when he’s done with using them has to go fetch more before building again makes it very dissimilar to God because we cannot possibly fathom the notion of character traits as raw materials and God as a supplier of these traits who’s, in any analogy, need to restock his inventory. What may very well come out, I’m saying, is that you’ll reach a conclusion with your analogy that won’t necessarily follow logically to God because of any of the possible flaws that come about when relating the finite to the infinite.
2) I wasn’t making a comment as to the unfairness, per se, of the deaths of Nadav and Avihu — I was just commenting on the apparent fierceness with which God killed them. There’s a system in place for reward and punishment and if God doesn’t follow the system, in what sense is that system meaningful? If a guy picks his nose on Shabbos and elicits a little bleeding, which is certainly a davar she’eno miskavein and certainly not a p’sik reisha, and then died in the most miraculous event that clearly presents itself as God having fully intervened to execute this guy with some hithero unknown manner of divine judgement, what does that say about the laws we thought we had? God made a system of laws and he’s supposed to work within them.
When viewing the various commentators, though, we can see there was a heterogeneity of approaches to who Nadav and Avihu were, and thus what their sins were and ensuing punishments.
So when I spoke of fairness, I meant not to refer to, say, Aaron’s hidden despondency that resulted from losing half of his offspring, but rather the apparent inordinate degree of divine justice meted out in this situation.
But in respect to that point, your comment is very well taken. Have a great Shabbos!
now look at it this way, the builder of course is HaShem, and the buildings are us. the bricks are our hate, spite, envy, etc.
it was at this point i realized that if HaShem was able to instill in us a degree of these parts of our yetzer hara, it is impossible for HaShem to have less of these attributes than everyone who has ever existed combined, Nero, Ghengis Khan, Stalin, Pol Pot, any human you can spit out as the meanest, unfairest, most hateful, etc., G-d was the one who made them all and thus his degree of these attributes is infinitely more than any one of these men.
It works both ways, no?
The greatest secret that the evil hides is that it doesn’t exist.
> The greatest secret that the evil hides is that it doesn’t exist.
Care to expand on that?
yeah, but after Shabbos 😉
Great point, G*3 — I missed that one.
It’s pretty standard. People attribute all good things to God, while bad things are either our fault or just kind of happen.
I think the model should work the other way around — bad things are attributed to the perpetrators, as are the good things, although we generally don’t refer to those who promote goodness as perpetrators.
And this answers your question of why people should attribute good to God more than bad, for things are then generally equally attributed to man or chance.
I agree with G*3. Could you name something good that happened to the Jews, in history, that is stated happened because the Jews deserved it and not because of G-d’s mercy? However, every time something bad happened to the Jews there has always been a reason given in which this happened because the Jews did something bad.
We can’t name anything in history that conforms to anything you’ve just said because we are not imbued with prophetic insight into the causes and effects that make this world go around.
The general examples you gave come about as a result of the profound effects of the mussar movement on yeshivish Judaism — shiflus ha’adam, perhaps best translated as “the lowliness of man.” So things that appear bad are because we did something wrong (and usually blamed on women and homosexuals) and anything that goes right had nothing, of course, to do with our merits.
It’s not limited to the yeshivish world and the mussar movement. It’s a general religious trend. A couple of years ago when that plane landed on the Hudson, it was hailed as a miracle. The media named it “Miracle on the Hudson,” passengers thanked God for landing safely, and religious figures praised God’s goodness and greatness. The skill of the pilot and crew was secondary to God’s role in saving the passengers. The birds that fouled the engines? That just happened.
You’re right — the guy who makes the winning touchdown kneels to thank sweet baby Jesus but never thanks him for dropping a pass.
But I don’t see it that way and I don’t think you do either, G*3. It must just be one of those popular, socially-acceptable things, like saying ‘bless you’ after someone sneezes…and I don’t do that either.
I don’t think that death is a harsh punishment, especially a sudden death. Death would be a harsh punishment if and only if there would had been no afterlife, if it would had been the end of everything. Prolonged illness, poverty, death of children, childlessness, an abusive spouse – all of these seem much more painful to me. The question is: who really got more punished here – Aaron or his sons, who being at least fairly righteous for sure didn’t end up in some seedy corner of Olam Haba?
*”would have been” of course, caffeine didn’t start to work yet 😉
To begin, it’s a fairly well established matter of dispute whether they were righteous or not and the opinions of the commentators can be seen through their comments when they’re not as explicit as, say, Rashi, Rashbam and the Sforno.
And we’re very detached from the situation to be able to peer into Aaron’s head. Had Nadav and Avihu been righteous and this strictness of culpability perhaps caught Aaron off guard, it would have been very different from Aaron’s established perception of these two sons as OTD as a result of their chronic misappropriations and improprieties, as perhaps suggested by the Ba’al HaTurim’s words.
> Had Nadav and Avihu been righteous and this strictness of culpability perhaps caught Aaron off guard, it would have been very different from Aaron’s established perception of these two sons as OTD
Either way, it’s a good question. Why was a tzaddik like Arron made to suffer the loss of two of his children? There must be some meforash who gives an answer. Probably something like, it was partly Aron’s fault for not teaching them properly.
Are you suggesting that they be spared in deference to Aaron, regardless of their merits?
Everything’s connected — if there’s one position and I get the job, that means you don’t. That therefore connects our wives, because now mine gets to go on vacation and yours doesn’t, and so on and so forth. An entire chain reaction ad infinitum based squarely on the decision of the employer because we share an affinity for the same baseball team. The mystic might maintain that God played a part in everything that happened to you today, from being 3rd in line at the gas station to passing the railroad tracks at exactly 9:17 and not getting that job, but from a rationalist perspective, free will is responsible for most of the moving and shaking and it’s difficult to exactly pinpoint where God forced a hand.
Are you suggesting that Hashem doesn’t take all the ripple effects into account, and judges the person as if he exists in a vacuum? God’s omniscient, right? He should be capable of making everything balance so that each person is affected justly.
We’re not talking about something that involves free will, like an employer’s decision to hire me or you. (Which is anyway more random than most people think. It’s affected by all sorts of non-rational things, like how well the HR person reviewing resumes slept the night before. Surely God could tinker with it.) What happened to Nadav and Avihu was, literally, an act of God.
Yes, but we are not privy to how many cogs and sprockets there are in God’s decision machine. You may take issue with me saying there are very few, but I take just as much issue with you asserting that there is one for every element in the universe and another for every connection between each element.
The notion exists in Judaism that one should involve oneself in the needs of the community, for the more others rely upon a person, the more that person is saved from divinely ordained harm. It’s a nice idea but, again, we can never know how much that’ll work, so it could be a focus, but it certainly shouldn’t be the main focus — it’s akin to synagogues and prayer groups taking great pains to hold tehillim rallies for the success of the Israeli Army or for the so-called shidduch crisis and the army deciding that it will not upgrade to better weapons and the singles shrugging their shoulders in desperation and not broadening their perspectives.
I’m saying that since we cannot know how God works, we should leave as little as we can up to divine intervention. We should go to school, get a good job, be responsible in family planning and finances because God may play a role but we won’t know if and when and how. To do otherwise is foolhardy.
This post misses the key point.
In the mishkan, bot G-d and man coexist. Both of them have to negate themselves to some extent (tzimtzum) to allow that to happen. So G-d limits his infinity so that the shechinah can exist in a space. And the cohen has to limit his humanity, his individuality.
The role of a cohen is to serve Hashem in his home on earth – the Mishkan and Beis Hamikdash. In this role, every cohen must entirely subsume his individuality behind the requirements of his office; he must not deviate one iota from the prescribed role; this is the human tzimtzum that Rabbi Sachs identifies that was necessary in order to allow coexistence with Hashem’s shechinah.
So Nadav and Avihu were not punished, or unrighteous. By expressing their individuality, they simply created the conditions under which they could no longer coexist with G-d.
In concept, it is no different than talking about someone who steps in front of a moving bus. That the person dies does not mean that G-d punished him. Death is merely the natural outcome of a suicidal act.
The post can’t miss the point, Seriously??, because the post defines the point that we’re discussing.
To begin, God limiting his infinity is a purely Akivan notion — R’ Ishmael would not agree, yet you take it as a given premise, even though it’s quite evident from the general trend of my divrei Torah to emphasize the intellectual superiority of the Ishmaelian perspective.
And I find it odd how you say I missed the point — what you’re saying is merely a different spin on things. I’d say you missed the point, seeing how the dvar Torah was based on the commentaries of Rashi, Rashbam, the Sforno and the Ba’al HaTurim and all of them explained the deaths of Nadav and Avihu as punishments and one of them can be said to call them unrighteous, as I explained in the post.
In summary, you might as well have said, “DRosenbach, you missed the point because Ramban explains it in another way…” which would, of course, be a ridiculous thing to say.
Somehow you have a knack, for all the sources you quote, to miss the underlying one: the Torah itself!
The *point* is to understand why Nadav and Avihu were killed. This is explained in my comment.
But you seem to want to prefer to spend lots of time quoting other people, and filter everything you see through the assumption that your superior intellect unerringly sniffs out Akivan idiocy, then go right ahead.
But none of this makes you right.
The Gemara gives 4 reasons why Nadav and Avihu died – and they are all the same: they improvised.
None of these apply to us. As people who do not serve in the Beis Hamikdash, we are *encouraged* to use our creativity and individualism, our unique senses of style.
It is quite silly to insist on pigeonholes and labels for everyone who disagrees with you, especially on *this* site!
If you’re not inclined to appreciate the way I explain the Torah you are free to read someone else’s dvar Torah. That being said, you’re still free to read this even if you don’t agree.
But to come here and week after week complain that my perspective is too focused on the Akivan/Ishmaelian divide is what’s quite silly — for that’s the general trend of my posts.
Altogether, you’re free to do what you want but I’d prefer you not post responses that are consistently in line with the premise, “you’ve missed the point and this is what you should have written.”
Have a good day! 🙂
My objection is not to your post (you are, after all, quite clear that you insist on seeing the Torah world only through a certain white/black filter). My objection comes from your kneejerk need to label anyone who disagrees with you as an Akivan Mystic of Inferior Intellect. It gets old.
Of course I want to share my thoughts, which I think are consistently more true to the Torah. People should be given a selection of answers from which to find something that works for them.
This has nothing to do with me. I’ve explained the dissonance between Rashi, Rashbam and the Sforno on the one hand and the Ba’al HaTurim on the other — and taking into account that only the latter maintains a position that Aaron’s son’s were drunk — as being in line with the Akivan/Ishmaelian divide l’shitaschem (according to their respective positions). And it doesn’t get old because it’s way more applicable than people appreciate, seeing how pervasive the Akivan perspective is among school-age children for the last X number of years, while at the same time, the Ishmaelian viewpoint has been tamped down to such an extent that even when it’s allowed to see the light of day, most people don’t appreciate that it’s even Ishmaelian and aren’t shown how it’s largely inconsistent with the mainstream Akivan approach.
So perhaps you can take your negativity elsewhere. Or maybe you should ask Heshy if you can post your divrei Torah outright, rather than posting them as rebuttals to mine. His email address is available on Facebook.