Dear friends,
I hope you are enjoying deep, fulfilling Pesach time as we move through our Passover holiday. And I hope to see you this Thursday at 9:30 am for our last day of Pesach services, with Yizkor. On Friday, we’ll observe Yom HaSho’ah, with particular resonance this year, as we marked the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation just two-and-a-half months ago. Our Temple youth will take a very active part in leading Friday’s service, joined by local interfaith clergy and a wonderful guest speaker, author Helen Epstein, who will speak about her mother Franci Rabinek Epstein’s survival of the Sho’ah and its camps. We also thank Phil Platcow, who led a beautiful Shabbat Chol HaMo’eid service on Saturday, and Torah readers Sandra Kassin-Deardorff, Wilson-taty Kapanga-Ndjibu, and Sam Platcow. On this upcoming Shabbat morning, member Bob Bender will lead the beginning of our morning service. And in lieu of sponsoring kiddush, Barbara Berg has generously donated on the occasion of her husband Joel Berg’s second yahrzeit; this week’s Torah study (Saturday at 1:00 pm) will be dedicated to Joel.
Our Torah portion this week is parashat Sh’mini. It begins auspiciously: Aharon and his sons make all the sacrifices they’re supposed to, and the people rejoice. But in Chapter 10, Aharon’s two enthusiastic sons, Nadav and Avihu, bring their own sacrifice, uncommanded—and instead of accepting it, God blazes up in anger and they die in the fire. While some commentators suggest that Nadav and Avihu may have been drunk (God says, several verses after the catastrophe, “don’t drink strong drink when you prepare to make sacrifices to Me”), there’s no clear reason for their deaths. Torah doesn’t tell us why they perish; it tells the pain Aharon and the whole community feel, commanded to mourn together, but not God’s motive.
We’re in the middle of a catastrophic time. Jews throughout history have searched, as humans will, for concrete reasons to explain communal catastrophes. The Sho’ah is the clearest example of this, but I think we ask ourselves similar questions as we grapple with the plague of coronavirus. Was there a secular procedure, a civic institution, or a holy commandment that we got wrong? Is this disease, this great leveler, a Divine response to the disastrous inequalities of financial and social resources that our society has tolerated for far too long? Does it come to teach us to care more actively, more lovingly, for each other?
We simply don’t know. Uncertainty is the hardest thing to bear. But sometimes the explanations we reach for are too quick, and can cause their own harm if we run with them. We’re in a period right now where we have to hang tight and wait for more information about coronavirus—more testing, more resources—before we can draw conclusions, make plans, and start to move about safely again. When Torah tells us that, after the deaths of Nadav and Avihu, Aharon was silent, it gives voice to the debilitating pain of loss—and I think it also suggests, gently, that there are times when we need to give ourselves the space of silence and inaction in order to discern the best way forward.
This Pesach, we keep ourselves at home, we stay in, so that we can gather information. With our pause in movement, like Aharon’s pause in speech, we’re buying time. We hold back so that we may move forward together, healthy and free.
Stay home, wash your hands, and reach out virtually at every opportunity. I hope to see and hear you all this week.
Mo’adim l’simcha—may these be times in which joy arrives,
Cantor Vera