Shabbat Shemini

Written by Rabbi Professor Marc Saperstein Tuesday, 21 April 2009

“Strange Fire”
Our parashah contains a passage of deep poignance and painful paradox. It begins in Leviticus chapter 10 with an account of Moses’ final instructions to Aaron and his sons for the initiation of the priestly functions on the eighth day following their formal consecration. In the remainder of the chapter, everything seems to proceed perfectly, with Aaron’s sons appropriately assisting him. We can imagine the elation that Aaron must have felt on this occasion, performing a unique role together with his sons, fulfilling God’s commands on behalf of the entire people in their presence.

Then, something goes terribly wrong. Within a few moments, Aaron’s two eldest sons, Nadav and Abihu, are lying dead, consumed by fire. The biblical narrative informs us only that “Nadav and Abihu each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and laid incense upon them, and they offered before the Eternal strange fire, which God had not enjoined upon them. And fire came forth from the Eternal and consumed them; thus they died before the Eternal” (Lev. 10:1–2).   

The insistence that the fire came from God shows that in the understanding of the biblical author, this was not just a tragic accident. What was the sin that justified such a catastrophic event? What failing could have provoked this instantaneous punishment, so devastating to Aaron and terrifying to the onlookers? Where the Bible is cryptic and ambiguous—referring merely to אש זרה , ‘strange fire, which [God] had not commanded them’— the Rabbis enter to fill in the gap. And there is no consensus among them.

One interpretation is that the two eldest sons entered the sacred precincts intoxicated, thereby generating the God’s command to Aaron, “Drink no wine nor any intoxicant , you or your sons, when you enter the Tent of Meeting, that you may not die” (Lev. 10:8) . Another is that ‘they expounded the Law in the presence of Moses,’ failing to express proper humility by recognizing his superior authority. In another reading, the sons were guilty of an intemperate desire to replace the older generation, saying to each other, ‘When will these old men [Moses and Aaron] die? How long must we wait to lead the congregation?’ Still another attributed to the sons such arrogance because of their father and uncle that they thought no woman could be worthy of marrying them. And there is the suggestion that out of sincere devotion to God, they simply used their own initiative and made an offering that God had not commanded. 

Whatever the original meaning of the passage, the beguiling phrase “strange fire” has been frequently used in internal Jewish conflicts for polemical purposes. Throughout the ages, this phrase “strange" was employed as a rhetorical weapon to attack Jewish practices of which the writer disapproved. In the twentieth century, the intensity of antagonism by Orthodox rabbis against movements of Progressive Judaism led them to mobilize the account of the death of Aaron’s two sons, Nadav and Abihu, in this polemical manner. I will cite examples from sermons delivered in three different countries.

On 26 April, 1914, the recently inducted Chief Rabbi Joseph H. Hertz, who came to England from the United States, delivered a sermon entitled ‘The “Strange Fire” of Schism’ at the Lauderdale Road Sephardic Synagogue in London. After mentioning the different rabbinic interpretations of the passage and quickly reviewing various ‘sects and schisms’ of the Jewish past, Hertz turned to the ‘Radical schism of recent generations’: a movement ‘started by men who rushed into the Sanctuary in a state of intoxication—intoxicated with the verbiage of German Rationalism and mid-nineteenth century cosmopolitanism’.

These founders of the ‘Reformed Jewish Church of America’ placed a ‘pathetic reliance on the efficacy of “strange fire” for kindling the spirit in modern Israel . . . banishing the Sepher Torah from [their] synagogue, abolishing Sabbath and Festival, and hailing even the most blasphemous vagaries of that form of Higher anti-Semitism called Bible Criticism as final and definitive truth! At a distance, the pomp and brilliance of American Reform Judaism may be dazzling. At a nearer view, its light is seen to be but a phosphorescent sheen, the accompaniment of disintegration and decay. . . . “Strange fire” devours, cremates the soul, even when the body remains intact.’ Spiritual death is the inevitable result.  (1) 

In the late 1930s,the American Orthodox Rabbi Harris L. Selig, a product of the Volozhin Yeshiva and director of the United Yeshivas Foundation in New York, gave a sermon in New York called ‘The Tragedy of Aaron’. As with Hertz, in his unpacking of the meaning of “strange fire”, his allusion to Reform Judaism is unmistakable. “In the service of God . . . alien influences must be prohibited—strange fires, strange thoughts, derived from other sources. These profane belief, and diminish the sanctity of tradition. . . . The introduction of strange forms and customs in synagogues and temples does undermine the spiritual fundaments of a nation. . . . The integrity of its religion, its unique inner fire, comprises the true spirit of our people. Once we begin to employ strange fires and intrude novel ideas upon our faith, alien to its genius, we can be assured that its spirit is moribund, soon to perish utterly. The children will inevitably forsake their own and reach out for the faiths from which the strange fires were derived.” (2)
 
Louis Rabinowitz was a distinguished scholar of medieval history as well as an Orthodox congregational rabbi. Following the Second World War, he became Chief Rabbi of the Federation of Synagogues of the Transvaal in South Africa. In a sermon on our parashah delivered in the late 1940s, he focused on the rabbinic comment that Nadav and Abihu ‘expounded the Law in the presence of Moses and Aaron’, presumptuously arrogating to themselves improper authority. This interpretation opens the gates to a litany of sectarian movements throughout Jewish history that have “attempted to contaminate the pure oil of the lamp of the Lord by the admixture of foreign polluted doctrine. Samaritans, Sadducees, Essenes, Jewish Christians, Karaites, Shabbatai Zvi’ists, Frankists, and lastly Reformists’, all guilty of  setting up their own intellect as the arbiter of behaviour rather than accepting the authority of appointed leadership.
 
It is the last-mentioned group, the ‘Reformists’, that represents the challenge of the present for Rabinowitz. In his sermon he says that the ‘Reformists’ may claim to be the wave of the future, but “Inexorably and inescapably, they must die before the Lord and be dead to Judaism. . . . Show me Reform Jews of the third generation in any appreciable numbers and I will withdraw all my strictures. The apathetic son of the Orthodox Jew becomes a Reform Jew, and the son of the Reform Jew becomes a Christian. . . . They are our own children who are committing spiritual suicide before our eyes. We cannot be indifferent, we grieve and we mourn, our hearts bleed, but we carry on; we carry on with the true service of the Lord.” (3)  As with the previous two rabbis, the biblical text, expanded by the rabbinic comments, provides here a foundation for an unrestrained attack against diversity within the tradition.

We vigorously repudiate the accusation that Progressive Judaism—in its openness to change, its acceptance of the critical insights of modern scholarship, its commitment to a blending of rationalism with spirituality, its desire to cherish tradition in dynamic inter-action with the needs of the present, its insistence that the prophetic impulse must accompany the ritual life—is ‘strange fire’. The Jewish tradition has never been frozen and unchanging, it has always adapted in response to influences from the outside environment and evolved in accordance with the needs of the Jewish people. The condescending prognostications of these Orthodox rabbis in the first half of the 20th century that the children of Reform Judaism will ‘inevitably forsake their own’ and become Christians have turned out to be manifestly untrue. The numbers of Progressive Jews around the world are increasing; the trend is toward a greater openness to the best of the tradition in fruitful counterpoint with the best of contemporary culture.

Whether because of personal failings or misguided sincerity, tragic losses occasionally occur. Even the household of the High Priest was not immune. It trivializes a passage of deep anguish to use the rhetoric of “strange fire” in order to castigate and demean those whose approach to Judaism is different from our own.