Parshah Commentary
Parshat Acharei Mot
Death appears twice in the opening verse of this week’s Torah reading, Acharei Mot: “The Lord spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they came near before the Lord, and died” (Vayikra 16:1). Following the traditional interpretive axiom that any redundancy in the Torah must be meaningful, the Rebbe Rashab of Lubavitch (1860–1920) reads this repetition as revealing that Aaron’s sons didn’t simply die for the sin of coming near the Lord unbidden. Rather, they deliberately invited death; they entered the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctum of the Tabernacle and the place of most intimate proximity to God, to indulge in a premeditated experience of mystical death.
“Death,” says Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo, “is the separation of soul and body. The philosopher desires such a separation.” As the scholar Michael Fishbane writes in The Kiss of God: Spiritual and Mystical Death in Judaism, what is true for the philosopher is also true for “the God-intoxicated soul.”
To feel the weight of our corporeality—to experience the lonely individuation of bodily existence, the limits of our physical capabilities, and all the many failures and tragedies of earthbound human life—is to be estranged from the soaring ideas and ideals of our own souls. For Aaron’s sons, apparently, the painful estrangement of embodiment was acutely felt. They sought to abandon this-worldly failure and embrace the idealized divinity of the soul instead. “While the kiss of death generally draws near to the righteous,” writes the Moroccan Kabbalist Rabbi Chaim Ben Attar (1696–1743), Aaron’s sons “drew near to the kiss of death . . . Although they sensed death coming, they did not withhold themselves from drawing more intimately into embrace, delight, affection, love, dearness, longing, sweetness until their souls expired from within them.”
Can such surrender to the embrace of God also be a sacrilegious act? For Rashab, the answer is yes. Even if Aaron’s sons welcomed death as the culmination of spiritual rapture, the Torah is quite clear that they also suffered death as punishment for sin. “Their fundamental sin,” writes Rashab, “was precisely that they died through divine intimacy.”
In speaking of death and its meaning, we are always already talking about life, and vice versa. So perhaps we can better understand the sacrilegious yet sacred nature of mystical death through a verse about life, which we encounter close to the end of this week’s reading. “You shall guard my statutes, and my judgments,” God instructs. “Man shall enact and live in them” (Vayikra 18:5). The famous imperative to break Shabbos when necessary to preserve life derives from this verse. But the Hasidic master Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev (1740–1809) interpreted that same verse in light of the Talmudic injunction that “whoever wishes to live should kill himself.” He writes, “Whoever wants to live shall disregard his bodily concerns and, instead, cause his thought to cleave to the Creator, blessed be He. And this is the meaning of ‘kill himself’—he shall ascend from his own egocentrism, and as an automatic result he shall live, for he shall cleave to the Life of all life.”
For Rabbi Levi Yitzchak, metaphorical rather than literal death is the condition of true life. Transcendence of bodily selfishness frees the soul to act in accord with God’s will, transforming the body into a vehicle for the revelation and actualization of divine vitality. From this perspective, the sense of existential estrangement between body and soul is not to be overcome through the soul’s release from the body, but redirected into the body’s rejuvenation by the soul. Indeed, Rashab emphasizes, soulful “ascent” is justified precisely to the degree it motivates a “return” to the embodied praxis of mitzvot—of making this world a home wherein God and humanity can live together.
Eli Rubin is a contributing editor at Chabad.org and the author of Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism, forthcoming from Stanford University Press.
