Parshah Commentary

Living in a post-Temple world, we are used to treating the idea of animal sacrifice metaphorically rather than literally. Indeed, our tradition understands the very pillars of Jewish practice since the Temple’s destruction as symbolic stand-ins for ritual slaughter. According to the Talmudic sage Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi, each of the thrice-daily prayer services is a substitution for a sacrifice that had been offered daily at that particular time in the Temple, while the Talmudic tractate of Menachot engages in an extended discussion of how various ways of studying Torah are equivalent to particular Temple rites. But according to the medieval commentator Ramban, the Jewish metaphorization of sacrifice goes back much further, to the practice’s very origins: He teaches that the animal is presented in place of the true offering—the sacrificer’s own body. The goal of the process is, Ramban writes, for the penitent to realize “that his blood should really be spilled and his body burned, were it not for the loving-kindness of the Creator, who took from him a substitute and a ransom—namely, this offering—so that its blood should be in place of his blood, its life in place of his life, and that the chief limbs of the offering should be in place of the chief parts of his body.”

This tendency toward understanding sacrifice symbolically makes the visceral violence of the story at the opening of our parshah, Shemini, all the more shocking. Last week’s reading ends with Moses telling Aaron and his sons that they must wait within the entrance of the Tent of Meeting for seven days as an “ordination period,” after which the Mishkan will be officially inaugurated; our parshah opens “on the eighth day” following this wait. At first, everything seems to be going well. Moses gives Aaron meticulous instructions, which he and his sons fulfill faithfully, and then, the Torah tells us, “the Presence of God appeared to all the people.” But immediately after the finally successful establishment of the Mishkan, tragedy strikes: “Aaron’s sons Nadav and Avihu each took a fire pan, put fire in it, and laid incense on it; they offered before God a strange fire, which had not been enjoined upon them. And fire came forth from God and consumed them; they died before God.” The Torah’s tersely opaque account raises the question: What was so wrong in what Nadav and Avihu did that they deserved death? A midrash in Vayikra Rabba offers a dizzying list of possibilities. Perhaps they arrogantly offered a halachic ruling in the presence of their teacher, Moses; or they entered the innermost sanctum of the Mishkan; or they offered a sacrifice that had not been commanded. Maybe they brought the wrong fire, or didn’t properly consult with one another. Or else they were drunk, were not wearing the right vestments, had not performed the proper ablutions, were unmarried, didn’t have children—and so on. While each suggestion is exegetically grounded in some detail in the Biblical text, none seem to explain the severity of the punishment.

But when one closely examines the verses themselves, there is the hint of a startlingly different reading: that Nadav and Avihu—rather than being punished for some impropriety, ritual or otherwise—are themselves the sacrifice. In the verse immediately before Nadav and Avihu bring their offering, the Torah tells of the first successful sacrifice by Aaron and his sons: “Fire came forth from before God and consumed” the offerings. Just two verses later, we read that “fire came forth from before God and consumed” Nadav and Avihu. Since the exact same words are used to describe the consumption of the animal sacrifices and of Aaron’s two sons, we might venture that the very same mechanism takes them both. More evidence for this interpretation emerges from scrutinizing key terms in the verses that follow. When Moses attempts to comfort Aaron (“This is what God meant by saying: ‘Through those near to Me [b’korvai] I show Myself holy’”), he uses a word to refer to Nadav and Avihu that shares a root with “korban,” meaning “sacrifice.” Later, Aaron’s two surviving sons are referred to as “ha’notarim” (“those who remain”); “notar” is also a technical term in the laws of sacrifice to refer to meat that has passed the prescribed period during which it can be consumed. Lastly, Nadav’s name itself shares a root with “nedava,” the term for a type of sacrifice offered voluntarily. Here, it seems, we have the literalization of what was once metaphor: If for Ramban, animal sacrifices stand in for human sacrifices, in this instance, human sacrifices instead stand in for animal ones.

Rereading the story of Nadav and Avihu in this moment of global conflagration, I found it impossible not to consider it in the context of the precious lives lost to warplanes raining fire from the sky in Jabaliya, Beirut, Tehran, Haifa, and beyond—and also of Aaron Bushnell, who set himself aflame to protest the genocide in Gaza. Even as Bushnell made the most painfully literal of sacrifices, giving up his own life, wasn’t his act—like its many antecedents, from the self-immolations of those protesting the Vietnam War, to those advocating for a free Tibet, to those calling attention to climate catastrophe—still in some sense fundamentally symbolic? And yet it has, or could have, a material meaning. As Erik Baker writes of Bushnell, “The purpose of lighting yourself on fire . . . is to scream to the world that you could find no alternative, and in that respect it is a challenge to the rest of us to prove with our own freedom that there are other ways to meaningfully resist a society whose cruelty has become intolerable.”

As I reflect on all this, I think of the prophetic tradition, in which God’s messengers repeatedly have visions of a future divine reckoning coming in the form of fire. “The Sovereign God of Hosts will send a wasting away of [the Jewish people’s] fatness,” prophesies Isaiah, “and under its body shall burn a burning like that of fire, destroying frame and flesh.” “I am putting My words into your mouth as fire, and this people shall be firewood, which it will consume,” God says through Jeremiah, who later describes “a raging fire in my heart, shut up in my bones; I could not hold it in.” I imagine Bushnell identifying with Jeremiah’s feeling, and that many of us might as well. For indeed, “the fire is coming,” the desperation and urgency are real. But still, the prophets’ words are also metaphors, and perhaps metaphor—which comes from the Greek term, via Latin and Old French, for “to carry across”—is exactly the work we are summoned to: bridging the literal and the symbolic, connecting abstract ideals to what we must do in this world.

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.