The Temple and Its Discontents
Why Do Joy and Suffering Come Together?
But isn’t it written: “And it came to pass [vayhi] on the eighth day” (Leviticus 9:1), [which was the day of the dedication of the Tabernacle?] And it is taught “On that day there was joy before the Holy One, Blessed be God, similar to the day on which the heavens and earth were created.” It is written here, “And it came to pass [vayhi] on the eighth day,” and it is written there, “And it was [vayhi] evening, and it was morning, one day” (Genesis 1:5). (Talmud Megilla 10b)
The opening word of parashat Shemini is “vayehi”—”and it was.” The Talmud debates the tonal significance of this word. Does vayehi suggest grief and tragedy or does it suggest something positive and joyous? A case can be made for both readings. The word vayehi concludes the creation of the first day of Creation, a time of tremendous joy. But a long list of vayehis also introduce terrible events throughout the Bible, including the Akeida story when God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac.
The double valence of vayehi raises a question: is this story a tragedy or is it a celebration? On the one hand, Shemini begins with the dedication of the Temple, a moment of festivity. On the other hand, it contains the horrific death of Nadav and Avihu, a catastrophe. Biblical texts, like life, often contain moments of joy and tragedy together. We don’t get to separate occasions for joy from occasions for sadness simply because their admixture is confusing and inconvenient. For some, joy is the difficult emotion; for others, sadness. But vayehi contains it all. We are celebrating a moment that feels like the beginning of the world and we are witnessing an event that feels like the end of it all in one parasha.
By setting up a parallel between the Creation story and parashat Shemini, the Talmud offers us a new perspective on both. Three equations help visualize the point:
Creation = Dedication of the Temple
Sin and Exile = Death of Nadav and Avihu
Post-Eden Life = The Temple after Tragedy
1. The Creation of the Temple is akin to the Creation of the world! Human agency is a kind of repetition of divine agency. Religious life fulfills and continues the divine mission. It’s the reason for which the world was created. The Temple is an accomplishment that blends aesthetics, morality, and spirituality. It is good, just as light is good.
2. But good things don’t remain good forever. Enter Nadav and Avihu. Whatever you think of their error (or non-error), their actions transform an uplifting spectacle into a catastrophe. This parallels the Fall, whereby human beings violate the one command that would have kept them contained, safe, innocent. Once done, there is no going back.
3. Life goes on. Now, life is hard, labor is toil. The Temple persists, but it’s not the same. Religious life no longer feels like Eden. Tragedy and shaken faith have to be incorporated into it.
Is the Creation of the world still worthy of celebration knowing that it will be botched? Yes, of course. In fact, we are celebrating a world we know will be botched, because the failures are part of what make life interesting, they are part and parcel of the creative dimension. The human being is “very good”; the human is “made in the divine image”; the human is also disobedient and boundary-crossing. These are not distinct features of the human being. They are different ways of describing the same phenomenon.
Likewise, the Temple is a site of collective joy and meaning and a sight of pain, disappointment, mourning, shock. Before, the modern debate about whether religion is a force for good or bad we already had one word—vayehi—that announced the source of the debate: the human being is itself marvelous, capable of great and terrible deeds. The same creative force that leads to the building of the Temple in the first place leads to its destabilization by Nadav and Avihu. Virtue and vice, strength and weakness, come from the same place. We are very good and that’s why we stray. We stray and that’s why we are very good. Nadav and Avihu are very good, yet the consequences are very bad.
The priestly way is to constrain. In so doing, it tamps down on the things that make life exciting and interesting, but it also protects us from the things that make life too exciting and interesting. It’s a kind of insurance policy against the worst, the cost of which is that it prevents us from realizing the best. Not for nothing are Nadav and Avihu seen as both examples of terrible rebellion and as spiritual geniuses who bucked prescribed law; either they are Nietzscheans who got burnt to a crisp or they are Nietzscheans who were unperturbed by common-sense morality and found God in a holy fire, like moths drawn to a flame. The priestly world is not Nietzschean, and the lesson of Nadav and Avihu is an admission of this: they are priests who couldn’t handle and didn’t want to be leveled down, didn’t want to be cogs in the Temple-machine. Depending on frame and inclination they are anti-authoritarian heroes or they are narcissistic punks who put themselves above everyone else. Or they are both. Vayehi.
“Sovereign is the one who decides on the state of exception,” says Carl Schmitt. Nadav and Avihu decided on a state of exception, and were thwarted. Their implicit ploy for sovereignty (“the rules don’t apply here, to us”) was rejected. They were not authorized to declare the exception. (Midrashim suggest that their rebellion was not just against God, but against Aaron, their father and the high priest). They thought they were beyond the rules, above the law. But the impulse to suspend the rules is not always bad. Sometimes, there really is an emergency and it requires making exceptions. But the point of our story is that one should exercise caution when doing so. One cannot be cavalier about the state of emergency. One should not turn the exception into the rule. Exceptions can be exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. One must know what one is risking. The young boys are not brave, but reckless, because they don’t appreciate the risk they are taking. They don’t say, “In spite of the risks, we will go anyways, on principle.” They enter the Temple on a whim.
It is a staple of Greek tragedy that what’s good for the group and what’s good for the individual are in conflict. This may be the case in our tale as well—it’s a story about an institution that works for the public but that doesn’t work for two individuals. Institutions can’t serve everyone. They can’t be perfect or perfectly inclusive. Their legitimacy is always contested and protested. Nadav and Avihu are a kind of collateral damage of the Temple. If we’re going to consecrate this thing, we need to recognize the price. This is the post-Edenic awakening; the realization that nothing is free. The good doesn’t hang on trees anymore, but involves the conflict between competing goods and values. To say yes to the Temple is to say yes to a world in which the boundaries that grant it a sanctity are also too constrictive and too severe for some. The alternative—a world in which everyone is free to worship whenever, whoever, and however, and we are all Nadav and Avihu coming and going as we please, may feel liberating for individuals; but it will also not be one in which there is a Temple, commitment, priests, organized ritual, communal spectacle. It will be the world of DIY, a world of new age religions in which the line between self-fulfillment and consumerism is thin.
One reason the Nadav and Avihu story continues to resonate and challenge is because neither authoritarianism nor liberalism has perfectly resolved the inherent tension in human life that Rav Soloveitchik describes—between being both solitary beings with unique points of view and communal, social beings for whom “it is not good to be alone.” The Temple exists because it is not good to be alone. It falls and damages because so long as we are together the pull to conformity often squeezes out our need for self-expression and creativity. Getting the balance right may well be impossible, but struggling with it in the best way we can, and empathizing with both horns of the dilemma is a good start. Vayehi tells us everything we need to know. Woe unto us if we are alone. And woe unto us if we are not alone.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh
P.S.—I’m delighted to share a new episode of Meditations with Zohar, in which I talk to philosopher and classicist Zena Hitz about authenticity, faith, learning for its own sake, moral fragility, Socratic irony, how to save the humanities, and much much more.
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