1. And take to you Aaron your brother, and his sons with him, from among the people of Israel, that he may minister to me in the priest’s office, Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar, Aaron’s sons. 2. And you shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother for glory and for beauty.[Exodus 28:1-2]
We also read of the censer this week:
9. You shall offer no strange incense on it, nor burnt sacrifice, nor meal offering; nor shall you pour drink offering on it. [30:9]
Yet, in a few weeks we read the rather puzzling and disturbing verses in Leviticus 10:
1. And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took each of them his censer, and put fire in it, and put incense on it, and offered strange fire before the Lord, which he commanded them not. 2. And there went out fire from the Lord, and devoured them, and they died before the Lord. [Leviticus 10:1-2]
Many commentators have thought about this incident, the Midrash alone is full of differing explanations of what happened at that first tragedy in the Mishkan. I’ve written on several occasions about the incident and given more than one interpretation myself. Yet this week as I read the portion, I couldn’t shake a feeling. We read at the end of Exodus 28:
42. And you shall make them linen breeches to cover their nakedness; from the loins to the thighs they shall reach; 43. And they shall be upon Aaron, and upon his sons, when they come in to the Tent of Meeting, or when they come near to the altar to minister in the holy place; that they bear not iniquity, and die; it shall be a statute forever to him and his seed after him. [Exodus 28:42-43]
As this verse comes right after the verse about wearing underwear, it may be related to that. However it also closes the chapter about the priestly garments, so it may be about all of the priestly garments. Here and in 28:35 we read that the garments have a protective function.
35. And it shall be upon Aaron to minister; and his sound shall be heard when he goes in to the holy place before the Lord, and when he comes out, that he should not die.[Exodus 28:35]
Nadab and Abihu had to have known all this, which makes their actions even stranger. I’ve argued in the past that either they were intoxicated, as the text in Leviticus 10 seems to imply, or that this was a selfless act of protection, they did this as self-sacrificing heroes. What I’ve never discussed before is a question that never occurred to me before: What if they didn’t want to be priests?
At the core of that question, and at the core of this week’s portion is the role of clothing in the world. In once sense, one that the text does mention twice, it is protective. One can imagine that working directly with the Divine Presence in the temple was a dangerous affair. Today, On days where the wind whips temperatures cold enough to cause frostbite or hypothermia, hats gloves, and long johns have such a purpose from danger.
On another, as Exodus 28:43 above suggests there is the issue of modesty. The priest wore linen breeches to prevent their genitals showing during work hours. Such an issue was also brought up earlier in Exodus when we are told not to make steps but ramps up to the altar. There is more possibilities for the function of clothing suggested by the phrase “beauty and glory,” occurring in Exodus 28:2, and 28:40. Clothes can make us more attractive or cause us to pay attention to someone.
The word glory also shows up as my glory, speaking of the Glory of the Lord, a phrase which shows up several times in Exodus. The word for glory, kavod, has many meanings. Kavod may also mean honor. I’ve thought about this and looking at several versus where the word shows up, I’ve come up with another possible translation for kavod: Identity. Closely related to clothing’s use for beauty, is its use in identifying people. The high priest was identified as the high priest by wearing these garments. The other priests were identified by wearing parts of this whole ensemble. We know a police officer by his blue uniform, a soldier by her fatigues. I know who works in Starbucks by their green aprons and janitorial staff by a uniform with too many pockets, chunky keychain and a mop.
When we see a police officer in their dress blues, we identify with them differently than if they were in riot gear. We might not judge a book by its cover, but we do by the shirt on someone’s back. To wear a crown or an ephod tells someone that you are a king or a priest. What’s more the act of putting on a uniform is the act of accepting that identity. Yet when I first learned the word kavod, it found it very meaningful that along with honor, it also meant heavy. To paraphrase Spiderman, with great honor comes a heavy responsibility. Part of that weight is that we are no longer identified as a human being but a job. As heavy as all that gold, cloth, and stones in the ephod and the rest of the priests’ garb, the weight of no longer being a human being must be crushing.
Thus we come back to Nadab and Abihu. We know nothing of their personal lives, not even an indication of marital status. Some Midrash takes such silence as a comment that they were single, but that too cannot really be known. We therefore cannot say anything about who these two men except they were the sons of Aaron. Thus I’ll make a supposition. They believed they knew their identities, and were living that life. Though I doubt these scenarios were their true identities, I can use stories for these two to illustrate my point. Let’s suppose Abihu was a serious musician who played harp solos for his singing cousins the sons of Korah. Let’s further suppose Nadab was deeply in love with a widow. When the clothes and responsibilities of the priest and the high priest were given, who they had become, the musician and the lover, were now lost to them. Nadab was forbidden with associating with his fiancé. Abihu had to put down his harp permanently and start bossing around his friends and band mates. Their lives and dreams were banned, denigrated and devalued. Such change must have hurt – a lot. In one sense when they were told about the priesthood and their new responsibilities, about those clothes and that new identity, it was then that they lost their lives.
Again from the biblical story it is hard to determine what happened in the Mishkan when these two offered strange fire. But I believe that kavod in their eyes was translated oppressive weight. They might have intentionally offered strange fire knowing it would end their lives, removing them from the hopeless situation they were in. Yet I think more likely was the second possibility. With the loss of their identity, their heart wasn’t in their job, and they made mistakes which led to their death. Suicide wasn’t a conscious option for them but happened because they did not focus on living and performing their new job well. In either case, they died rather than be a priest.
As much as this explanation seems to make sense to me, it is also very disturbing. The one who changed Nadab and Abihu’s lives in the first place was God. God messed up their lives as they knew it. That is the disturbing contemporary question: Is God forcing us to live a life that is in accordance with God’s wishes, but in doing so giving us an identity that is not genuine? If someone works incredibly hard to fulfill a dream, something that for them is their primary purpose in life, and then it falls apart, what are they to do?
I really have no answer to that question. The best I can do is a partial answer, but of some things I am certain. Nadab and Abihu’s solution was the completely wrong one. Dying either by intentional or unintentional suicide accomplishes nothing. Nadab and Abihu had another problem, which I believe the weight of their uniforms blinded them to. To live in a uniform is to live within a limited belief structure, to the stuff we’re given. Anything outside that structure doesn’t exist, or is seemingly impossible to do. Yet maybe that is where we need to strive for. People are people, not their occupation. People extend beyond their uniform. A man is more than the sum of his clothes. Yet we forget that, and we forget that while circumstances might be bad now, that too will change. As I said last week, our Nefesh is permanent. Our identity is concrete. Yet clothes also hide that identity within the limits of what we expect out of someone wearing those clothes. It’s outright bizarre to see a uniformed police officer dancing down the street to music on his iPod. We expect them to be serious if not gruff. Those are limits placed on cops, though even when the uniform comes off, those limits remain and many do not act differently in a t-shirt and blue jeans.
Sometimes limits are important. Where Nadab and Abihu went wrong is making limits where there are none, and thinking the situation hopeless and impossible to change. In reality, maybe God is challenging us to overcome our limits, and to grow in ways we would not otherwise. We can fail to rise to that challenge, and collapse under the weight. We could also start to get creative, and change. In the process we can even end up changing the expectations of entire world.
In a story that I have repeated often in the last few weeks to those who would listen, I tell people about the DVD I bought in Disney World while I was there in early January. The DVD is of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Most have never heard of Oswald, but he was Walt Disney’s first fully animated character in 1927. Disney had put together a team of animators, some who would go on to their own fame, like Friz Freleng and Tex Avery, known for their work on Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry among many other cartoons for Warner and MGM. In a contractual loophole, Disney lost all the rights to Oswald and access to all his animators. Yet on the train home from that meeting in New York to his home in Los Angeles, he began to doodle. One of those doodles looked at lot like Oswald but with round ears. He named this mouse Mortimer, but we know him today as Mickey.
There is a quote from Disney found in many places in the park, one I have on a poster on my office wall “I hope we don’t lose sight of one thing, it was all started by a mouse”
I disagree. It all started with getting beyond a rabbit. Let us not, like Nadab and Abihu did, forget that.
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