This is a week of exhaustion. Coming down from the exhilarating feeling of liberation on Pesach, and the work that goes into preparing for and celebrating the holiday, and the disorientation of returning to life as usual, we are faced, only days later, with the solemn day of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. As we head into Shabbat we can anticipate the continued somberness of Israel’s Memorial Day, yom hazikaron, followed immediately by Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. It is an emotional rollercoaster.
This year, on the Shabbat in between all of this, we read parshat Acharei Mot. This week’s reading begins with a warning given to Aaron, after the death of two of his sons, who came too close to God and died, not to enter the Holy-of-Holies whenever he wants, so that he will not die. Instead, he is to enter the Holy-of-Holies only one day of the year to atone for the sins of the people, on Yom Kippur.
Like the rollercoaster of days of Jewish memory, ancient and modern, this parsha seems to come at us in an unexpected moment, one that we aren’t fully prepared for. We first read about the death of Aaron’s sons weeks ago, five weeks this year because of Pesach’s intervention in the regular Torah reading cycle. At that time Aaron was warned not to arrive drunk for service in the mishkan, and since then we’ve read two parshiot full of unrelated laws of the priesthood. All of a sudden, now, we are reminded again of the tragic death of Nadav and Avihu, and given instructions for the extensive Yom Kippur sacrificial service.
The order of things in the Torah is not always clear. Were this warning to Aaron and the previous one given close in time, or with as great a separation as their placement in the text suggests? Were the instructions for the Yom Kippur service given as Aaron was grieving, or sometime later? The mishkan was supposed to be set up for its dedication on the first of Nisan, the month in which Pesach falls, not quite a year after the Israelites left Egypt. If so, Aaron’s sons would have died in Nisan, about as far from Yom Kippur as possible. So why is their tragic death connected to that day and its service?
Each year, when Yom Hashoah arrives just as I’m catching my breath from Pesach, I wonder why, of all the proposed dates, it was decided to hold this observance now? (For more on that, there is an excellent article to read here.) This year, a student asked me a different question; why is this holiday different than the others, like Hanukkah, where they tried to kill us but we survived and we celebrate? I have not yet answered that student and hope to discuss it further with him and learn from his perspective. I think what we share, in our questions, is a sense of the jarring nature of this powerfully sad day of memory, like the jarring reemergence of Aaron’s painful loss.
To read about Yom Kippur right after learning about the death of Nadav and Avihu, and for Aaron to be expected to take it in at that moment, I think, would have been overwhelming in the wake of the traumatic event. But our traumas to do not fade in a linear fashion. They come back to us, to remember, to reinterpret, to deal with in new ways and with varying intensity over time and through the generations. They take us by surprise, and mix in between our joyous moments. Some of our traumas turn out well enough that over time, and through the generations, we remember primarily the victory of our survival. Others bring us back to the pain and sorrow at their core despite years and generations of separation, and are re-triggered again and again by recurring injustice in the world.
Reading Acharei Mot, in this moment, in this year’s arrangement of the weekly cycle, the Yom Kippur service of atonement strikes me as a necessary repair of a breach caused by the death of Aaron’s sons. It is a trauma that cannot be healed in the immediate moment. But maybe six months later, healing can begin. Healing must begin if the people is going to move forward. And there must be a process to continue the repair of the relationship between Israel and God if there is to be a Jewish people.
In our time, too, faced with these dark days, on the tail of our redemption, this untimely reliving of trauma we often place out of the center of our consciousness, we have an opportunity to remember and to continue the process of healing the rift. And this healing will allow us to celebrate next week that, as my student pointed out, we survived and have found and built places to thrive. And, moving forward from there, we can return to our ancient march, from the liberation at the sea, to the foot of Mount Sinai.
Shabbat Shalom. May this Shabbat bring peace, comfort and rest.