Parashat Shmini

Reflection by Adam Treistman, teacher & Israel Community Manager

"As this week’s parsha starts, it looks like we’ve finally reached the moments of wholeness and flow. The Mishkan, the desert tabernacle, is consecrated, the Cohanim priests are in the midst of their service; everything is going according to plan. Fire descends from heaven, a sign that Hashem is accepting the Peoples’ sacrifices and closeness. It is a moment of atonement for the sin of the golden calf.  

Until Aaron’s sons - in a burst of burning and deadly and perhaps drunken spiritual desire -  break the system. They offer before G?!d incense and an “alien fire,” which was not asked of them. In the next pasuk, 'a fire goes out from Hashem and consumes them, and they died' (Leviticus 10:2).  

Aaron’s reaction to this moment is one of the more striking lines in the Torah. It says 'וידם אהרן`, And Aaron was silent. In the midst of the intensity of the seeming contradictions - closeness to Hashem and death, atonement and punishment - Aaron was silent.    

We often perceive silence as passivity, as the opposite of action. But silence can be full of power. Aaron is known as the one who 'loves peace and pursues peace',Pirkei Avot 1:12. In his silence, he was mourning, surely, and also he was actively preventing himself from jumping to interpretation, attempting to understand, reacting to something he cannot control. He was clearing space within himself. Indeed, Rashi reveals that the silence of Aaron is what allowed him to ultimately come into closer connection with the Divine, when God later speaks directly to Aaron to reveal the process of service in the Mishkan”.

What does it look like in our own  lives, in our own practice, to hold space for silence?

Shabbat Shalom from Or HaLev