TORAH SPARKS
Parshat Shmini
April 15, 2023 | 24 Nissan 5783
Torah: Leviticus 9:1-11:47 Triennial: Leviticus 9:1-10:11
Haftarah: II Samuel 6:1-7:17
Breaking Brotherhood
Bex Stern-Rosenblatt
Parashah
Rebecca, sending her son away, cries out, Why should I mourn both of you on the same day? Jacob, thinking his son is dead, refuses to be comforted, saying, I will go down to my son in mourning. David, hearing of his son s death, cries, saying, My son, my son, if only I could die in your place. And Aaron is silent.
Aaron has not always been silent. When we first met him, it was his ability to speak that made him special. He is to be the mouthpiece of Moses. Moses tries to refuse the calling of God, protesting that he is slow of speech. God responds that Aaron will do the speaking, defining Aaron by his ability to speak, saying, ki dabber yedabber hu, for he really really speaks. Immediately after this, it will be Aaron who speaks to the Israelites, saying all the words which God has said to Moses.
However, Aaron s speech fades over the Book of Exodus. As Moses gains confidence, Aaron is less necessary. The balance shifts and Moses speaks increasingly. At first, we find Moses and Aaron speaking together, confronting Pharaoh together, instructing the Israelites together. But by the time we have crossed the Sea of Reeds, Aaron has just one final moment of serving as the mouthpiece of Moses. Moses gives him the dubious honor of assuring the Israelites that they will have enough to eat when they complain about provisions. By the time manna appears, Moses takes back the microphone.
Aaron also speaks during the Golden Calf episode. With Moses absent, he serves once more in the capacity of mouthpiece, both for the people and for a higher power. Of course, he does not do this particularly well. Therefore, he loses his ability to serve as the mouthpiece. What we have been reading for weeks now is the silencing of Aaron. His role is transformed. He will no longer be the prophet of Moses, the voice speaking to the nation. Rather, he will be the high priest.
Aaron becomes a symbol. He becomes the wearer of clothes that do the speaking, the breastplate that he wears will carry the names of the tribes of Israel which he is no longer required to verbalize. He will become the performer of rituals that do the speaking, sacrifice as the new method of communication between Israel and God. This new role is a role which can be passed down with a simple transference of clothes. Aaron the person, the big brother of Moses, is no longer necessary.
The loss of Aaron as a brother is devastating for us. The story told in Genesis is of brothers learning to get along. We read in Midrash Tanhuma that, all brothers hated each other. Cain hated Abel . . . Ishmael hated Isaac . . . And the tribes hated Joseph . . . But Moses and Aaron, of whom it is said: Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together. (Psalms, 133:1) They loved and cherished each other. We go down to Egypt through the hatred of siblings and come out of Egypt due to the love and cooperation of Miriam, Moses, and Aaron.
In our parashah, Aaron s sons are dead. Moses cannot mourn for his nephews. He cannot see the pain of his brother. All Moses can see is the high priest. And as high priest, Aaron is silent. The clothing and the rituals of the high priest have nothing to say about this situation beyond a concern for their own purity. When Aaron does finally speak, it will be in a language Moses gets, a language of doing right in the eyes of God. Moses will understand this. But he will not understand Aaron s grief, he will not reach out to comfort his brother.
As the story continues to unfold, Moses will become increasingly remote from the people. He learns to speak so well that he speaks the entire Book of Deuteronomy. But he forgets how to listen to the people, how to understand what it is to be human. We will complain a lot over the next book and a half. Moses will not get it. And Aaron, who understood us too well, who empathized with our suffering to such a degree that he made the Golden Calf for us, he will remain silent.
Silence = Fury
Vered Hollander-Goldfarb
Haftarah
If one could listen to the soundtrack of this parashah of inaugurating the Mishkan (Tabernacle), it would probably be a great cacophony. Animals and cheering crowds, fire and singing. But then there is the silence of Aaron when he learns of the death of two of his sons. Of all the sounds of this parashah, the deafening silence of Aaron pierces our ears.
Aaron s sons die as they enter the holy space during the inauguration to offer incense that did not belong. In the aftermath of the event Aaron functions in a double role: he is both their father and the Kohen Gadol (High Priest) on whose watch this happened. Aaron responds with silence.
The haftarah is set in the early days of David as king over Israel. He is creating a new concept: a capital city. Jerusalem is being developed into the seat of the government, but that is insufficient. David seeks to make it the religious center as well, and to that end decides to relocate the Holy Ark from its temporary dwelling to Jerusalem. On the way the Ark begins to slip off the cart and Uzza who has helped care for the Ark reaches out to stop it. He dies on the spot. David, who has orchestrated the grand event, is furious.
Just as Aaron s silence offers the opportunity for many understandings, so does David s fury. The reader and the commentators are left wondering about the reason and the object of that fury.
R. Joseph Kaspi insists that Heaven forbid that David was infuriated by the LORD s action! Rather, he was infuriated by Uzza s action which caused the LORD to do what He did. (II Samuel 6:8). If it was so obvious that David was not upset with God s action, perhaps R. Joseph Kaspi would not have felt a need to point that out
But there is another possibility, as explained by Malbim: David understood that they had not handled the Ark with proper respect by placing it on a wagon and was upset with himself for this failure and all that resulted from it. Malbim came to this understanding by reading the Hebrew carefully, noticing the language that did not have an object for the anger, and so concluded that it was directed inward.
This changes the story a bit. David does not direct the blame elsewhere; he does some painful internal reckoning. In the parallel account in I Chronicles 15 it is stressed that when the Ark is finally brought to Jerusalem, it is not placed on a wagon but rather carried on the shoulders of the Levites. Some lesson was learnt.
This haftarah invites us, the readers, to
re-evaluate the events of the parashah and reconsider our understanding of
Aaron s silence. There was undoubtedly great pain in that silence, just as in
David s fury, but the cause and the meaning of the silence might be more
complex than initially meets the eye.
Chocolate-Covered Afikoman
Ilana Kurshan
Adventures in Mishnah with My Kids
Pesachim 10:8
On the night after Pesach, my husband is transferring our year-round dishes from the hallway back into our kitchen cabinets, and I am putting my son to bed by reading him our nightly Mishnah. We are learning the tenth and final chapter of masechet Pesachim, which is about the ritual of the Seder the four cups of wine, the recitation of Hallel, and the obligation to view ourselves as if we have gone out of Egypt.
We began learning this chapter last week. I had thought that our study of Pesachim would enhance our Seder experience, but a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. On erev Pesach, we had our usual lunch problem what to eat when you ve already had to get rid of all the Hametz but you re not yet permitted to eat Matzah? When I tried to ply my children with the lunch fare I remembered from my own childhood every year on this day plain yogurt with chocolate syrup Matan resisted, reminding me of the opening Mishnah in the chapter (10:1): On the eve of Pesach, close to the time of Minchah, a person should not eat until it gets dark. Matan insisted he could not eat yogurt because he wanted to come to the Seder hungry. I feared that his devoutness would lead to the short-tempered bickering that is an inevitable consequence of hunger, but there was nothing I could say to change his mind.
Now, seven days later, Pesach is over and I ve promised the kids fresh pita for breakfast tomorrow morning, but first Matan and I are learning the penultimate mishnah (10:8) in bed. We re all exhausted from the holiday, and rather appropriately, this mishnah is about falling asleep what happens if some of the people at the Seder doze off at the Seder while eating the Paschal lamb? After a heavy meal of meat and wine, it s not hard to imagine that some of the diners might retire from the table and snooze for a bit. Are they allowed to wake up and resume eating, or is this akin to eating the Pesach sacrifice in two different places, which is forbidden? The rabbis explain that as long as the majority of the diners remain awake at the table, the meal can continue. Matan reminds me that his younger sister kept falling asleep at the table but refused to go to bed until the Seder was over, so we carried her to the couch instead. According to the majority rabbinic opinion in the Mishnah, this would not have been a problem, because she was the only person at our Seder who fell asleep. Had everyone retired to the couch, it would have been forbidden to resume.
The other topic of this mishnah is the Afikoman. The Mishnah states rather tersely, One does not conclude after the Paschal lamb with an afikoman. Today we think of the afikoman as the final piece of matzah eaten at the end of the Seder, once it has been hidden and then hopefully relocated. After eating this final piece of matzah, we do not eat anything else at the Seder so that the taste of this ritually significant food will linger in our mouths. However, as twentieth-century Talmud scholar Saul Lieberman demonstrated, the original meaning of Afikoman had nothing to do with matzah; rather, Afikoman was a Greek word referring to the practice of drunken revelry at the end of the Roman symposium. Diners would eat sweets, drink wine, and burst into one another s houses to prolong the festivities. The Tosefta a compilation of rabbinic sources contemporary with the Mishnah associates the Afikoman with the nuts, dates, and other dessert-like foods that were often eaten at the end of a meal, arguing that it is forbidden to eat any such delicacies after consuming the Paschal sacrifice. The Mishnah s prohibition on concluding with an Afikoman was an attempt to differentiate the Seder from the Roman symposium by outlawing sweets at the very end of the meal and the revelry associated with their consumption.
It was only in the post-Talmudic period that the Afikoman became identified with a ritual requirement to eat matzah at the end of the meal, but Matan likes the notion of Afikoman as dessert. Maybe, just to show that we know what Afikoman really means, we should start a new custom of eating the Afikoman with chocolate spread so it tastes like dessert, he suggests. I remind him of all the chocolate spread we consumed on our matzah throughout the entire week of Pesach not to mention the marshmallows and macaroons after nearly every meal. I try to convince him that eating a plain piece of matzah when we conclude the Seder meal is enough. Dayenu.