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Vayikra
shemini יִני ִמ ְׁש
£The Enigmatic Deaths The Enigmatic Deaths The Enigmatic Deaths
££
of Nadav and Avihu
of Nadav and Avihu
of Nadav and Avihu
One of the Torah’s deepest stories is the tale of Nadav and Avihu’s
enigmatic deaths, as described in the portion of Shemini. This
story can be understood on many different levels, fueled by equally
authoritative, though seemingly contradictory, interpretations
offered by the Sages and later commentators regarding the nature
of their intentional or unintentional sin and the meaning of their
deaths. The Torah tells the story in just three verses:
The sons of Aaron, Nadav and Avihu, each took his fire
pan. They put fire in them and placed incense upon it,
and they brought it before God, a strange fire that He had
not commanded them. A fire came forth from before God
and consumed them, and they died before God. Moses
said to Aaron: “Of this did God speak, saying: ‘I will be
sanctified before those who are nearest Me; thus, I will be
honored before the entire people.’” And Aaron was silent.
(Leviticus 10:1-3)
While the text seems quite clear about the nature of Nadav and
Avihu’s sin – offering “a strange fire that He had not commanded
them” – the obscurity of the phrase “strange fire” and the fact that
this tells us nothing about their motivation, left the field open to
many interpretations. Furthermore, Moses’ remarks to Aaron that
God had told him that He would be sanctified by those closest
to him and thus be honored among the people also raises many
questions. Indeed, the Sages provided many reasons for Nadav and
Avihu’s behavior and explanations for what exactly they did wrong.
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and creation, Jewish tradition relates to the Hebrew letters as
prototypes of spiritual energy, the building blocks through which the
world is constructed and maintained. As we learned in the portion
of Bereishit, God’s speaking the world into existence teaches us the
connection between Divine speech and the creative process.
The first letter in the Torah, a beit, is written especially large in our
Torah scrolls, and has the numerical value of two. This is a remez, a
hint, to the dualistic nature of the world: infinite and finite, spiritual
and physical, soul and body, life and death, day and night, man and
woman, sun and moon, and so forth. The question naturally arises:
why does the Torah begin with the second letter of the Hebrew
alphabet, beit, and not the first letter, alef?
The Zohar answers with the following parable or derash (Introduction
to the Zohar, 23). When God decided to create the world, all the
letters came to Him asking for the merit of being the first letter in
the Torah. Each letter, beginning from the end of the alphabet,
came before God and argued that it should be first since a certain
word with positive connotations started with it. God countered these
arguments one by one by explaining that certain words with negative
connotations also started with these letters. God disqualified all the
letters until the letter beit successfully argued that the people of the
world would praise their Creator with the word baruch (blessed).
Since the first letter of the alphabet, alef, had still not made its case,
God now offered it a chance to argue, even though He had already
accepted the beit. The alef, instead of complaining that it had not
been given a proper chance, answered that since the beit was already
chosen, it would forego making an argument. God replied that since
the alef displayed such humbleness, it would merit becoming the first
letter of “anochi,” the first word in the Ten Commandments.
The two tablets containing the Ten Commandments were kept in
the ark in the Tabernacle’s Holy of Holies, and later in the Temple’s
Holy of Holies in Jerusalem. Even before Moses inaugurated the
Tabernacle, God had told him that He would speak to him from
between the two cherubs on top of the ark. The Holy of Holies in
the Temple represents the central point, the spiritual vortex, around
which the entire world revolves. Alluding to the alef’s crucial role,
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