Lev. 9:1-11:47
Précis: On the final day of the week-long ordination ceremony, Moses instructs Aaron and his sons on the proper rituals. Aaron makes his offering. Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu offer “strange fire” before God. They are slain. Moses tells Aaron that he must not engage in normal mourning rituals. The Priests are prohibited from drinking alcohol while they are engaged in their sacred duties. Next, God tells Moses and Aaron to instruct the people about the animals they are permitted to eat (part of the laws of kashrut). A general warning to guard against defilement and to be concerned about ritual purity is given.
Lev. 10:1-2 “And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer, and put fire in them, and laid incense on them, and offered strange fire before Adonai, which He had not commanded them. And there came forth fire from before Adonai, and devoured them…”
In this verse, we read about the death of Aaron’s sons by fire. During the past week, we observed Yom HaShoah – Holocaust Remembrance Day. There is indeed an obvious connection, when so many died by fire (and other means). Nadab and Abihu died for inexplicable reasons, and as I have pointed out in prior years, the Sages are at odds as to the rationale for their deaths.
On the other hand, those who died in the Holocaust were killed for a simple, obvious reason: they were Jews. I wanted to share the following excerpt from Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews by Melvin Konner (Viking Compass, 2003), which I first shared almost twenty years ago.
During the Holocaust, he notes that Jews continued to ask their religious leaders questions of appropriate ritual and ethical actions. One authority, Rabbi Ephraim Oshry of Lithuania, buried his notes in tin cans; they were retrieved after the war and published. These pronouncements on Halacha (Jewish Law) reveal the importance of ritual, even from the depths of Hell. They also reveal the pragmatism of religious authority in a time of unbelievable stress. The following are excerpts from his rulings:
He ruled that critically ill patients were forbidden to fast on Yom Kippur.
He ruled that a Sukkah could be built with boards stolen from the Germans, and that tzitit could be made from stolen wool.
He ruled that garments of martyrs could be worn by survivors.
He ruled that contraception and abortion were permissible in the ghetto, since pregnancy was punishable by death.
He ruled that under extreme constraint one could eat in the presence of a corpse.
He ruled that the daily blessing thanking God ‘for who has not made me a slave’ could be recited by slave laborers because the freedom meant was spiritual, not physical.
He ruled that the risk of putting a mezuzah on a doorpost of a ghetto home need not be taken, because the dwellings were temporary.
He ruled that a man whose left arm had been cut off for stealing food could have someone else put tefillin on his right arm.
He ruled that a ghetto prisoner could risk death by attempting to join the partisans in the forest.
A boy asked if he might be permitted to don tefillin, although his Bar Mitzvah was three months away, since there was a good chance that the Germans would murder him before that time. ‘Tears gushed from my eyes…I ruled that the precious child who had such a great desire to merit the privilege of fulfilling the mitzvah because he feared that he might not live to fulfill it if he waited to reach 13, certainly had authorization.’
The rabbi did in fact survive the war, and afterwards, in another ruling, he stated that it was prohibited for a survivor to remove the camp tattoo, because to do so it would help fulfill the wish of the Nazis that their efforts to exterminate the Jews be forgotten.
