Shmini 5769: A Diet of Alien Fire

This week we have the last of the sacrifices for the dedication of the Mishkan with a glorious ending. But then tragedy strikes:

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 alien 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]

Following the aftermath of Nadab and Abihu’s death, we have the prohibited and permitted species to eat, the core of the rules of kosher food.
I’ve looked at this portion in so many ways, as a food safety person, and as an exegete trying to figure out what Nadab and Abihu were doing. Yet, there is something that I’ve never written about when it comes to this portion, tying together those two seemingly different ideas. It has to do with pants.
I just bought my first size 40 waist pants. Now individual bodies change and vary so what size pants any given person never wanted to own might be different. But for me it was a 40. It was upsetting, as upsetting as realizing the reason I felt uncomfortable all the time is that none of my clothes fit. So I’m going on a strict diet.
I did this once before, and in the last five years have been slowly slacking off. But that diet was successful, losing 35 pounds rather quickly, maintaining that weight for three years, and then gaining them back over the last two. Thinking of what I did then and what I’m going to do now made me think of aish zarah, alien fire. I’m thinking of Nadab and Abihu’s alien fire differently. Aish zarah is what we don’t have to offer or do. It’s the kind of fire that is superfluous. Removing alien fire is really the most basic weight loss diet – literally.
Basically, calories measure fire, they measure the amount of fuel burned. Different kinds of foods have different amounts of fuel, and contribute to the fire that is our life force. In such a view alien fire would be the calories we don’t need. My first attempt at a diet happened around the same time as the Atkins Diet craze. While I did not do the Atkins diet, Atkins did focus on what I thought might be a target for a diet: my intake of carbohydrates. What I did do was limit my intake of carbohydrate to a specific limit. I had found I have a very large intake of carbohydrates. Most of the things that I was eating I really didn’t need to eat. Much of my carb intake was aish zarah, so I focused on cutting that, with rather stunning results.
The first time I did this diet, I thought of carbs in a parallel to the last part of this portion, the permissions and prohibitions of eating different species. Very much like a pig in this week’s portion, carbs for me were a spiritually forbidden food. To look at a piece of cake was like looking at bacon. Not only were they forbidden, they weren’t even appetizing or even something that made sense to eat. And so, stripping hundreds of grams of carbohydrates a day from my diet, I lost most of the weight in a mere three months. I kept to that philosophy of excessive carbs as trief. In the months after that, such an attitude kept me at a low weight. Eventually I somehow faltered however, and lost my way, only to slowly gain everything back.
In the wake of a Passover that fell during Easter I’ve though a lot about eating, and the significance of our eating patterns and how we get ourselves into the inconsistencies that got me heavy again. For Passover, we change our normal patterns of eating. For some this could easily become a very simple low carb diet. Eat the one required piece of Matzah a day, and restrict all other carbohydrates and you’re observant of the Mitzvah. Instead, any given way of using potato starch and eggs shows up in recipes. But what really gets me is the people who in being Passover observant, go out and order a lobster dinner but refuse to have a bread basket on their table. Of those who did go to Easter events, how many ate ham while munching on their matzah? Such absurdity happens all the time. My favorite personal example was the time, many years ago, when I picked the bacon out of my clam chowder. Picking out the Bacon in a prohibited cream base with prohibited shellfish simply doesn’t make sense. It was in the wake of that I changed some of my own observances.
My own current observance of kashrut is far from strict or traditional observance. I eat no red meat for example, even kosher red meat as I more strictly adhere to “you shall not eat its blood” Yet I do eat poultry and fin fish, though I do not eat shellfish. I follow the logic of a minority opinion in the Talmud that of Yossi of the Galilee who believed the prohibition of dairy mixing with meat did not extend to poultry. It may not be according to the rules we read in this portion, but in my observance, and in my own way I say “I love you God” by not eating these things.
As much as I enjoyed bacon and lobster when I was far younger and rather agnostic, I don’t either crave them or miss them now. They are food for other people in my mind, not for me. So too I must think about the excessive things I put into my body. Many of them taste incredible, like a big hot fudge brownie sundae. But to have one frequently is alien fire, and damaging to me. I can enjoy myself, and can find things that taste good, and are indeed on my diet such as a small piece of 70% dark chocolate, or a sprig of broccoli.
One of the big problems with diets is our insistence that the things we are giving up are good, when often their long term effects is about as opposite from that as we can get. But maybe by looking at “I can’t live without Bacon” or “I can’t live without chocolate cake” we are looking at the issue wrong. Hillel taught that our bodies are the vessels for a bit of the Divine which is our souls. It is up to us to care for that vessel, out of respect not just for ourselves, but for its passenger, the nefesh, that bit of God in us. To eat healthy is to say “I love you God” as much as not eating Ostrich or Ham or a Cheeseburger.
I guess for the last two weeks I’ve been saying the same thing: Do not complain that you cannot eat something, but bless that you have the ability and holiness to refuse to eat it.