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If you have never read Harold Kushner’s 1981 book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, I have two suggestions for you:

1) Read it. 

2) Keep a copy handy for future reference.

Because, quite frankly, bad things happen to good people all the time, and grappling with this in a void can be daunting and exhausting. So it is hardly surprising that this week’s Torah portion, Sh’mini, is best known for this little tidbit in Leviticus 10:

Now Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and laid incense on it; and they offered before the Eternal alien fire, which had not been enjoined upon them. And fire came forth from the Eternal and consumed them; thus they died at the instance of the Eternal. Then Moses said to Aaron, “This is what the Eternal meant by saying: 

Through those near to Me I show Myself holy,

And gain glory before all of the people.”

And Aaron was silent.

Um. Gain glory? By consuming two young men by fire because they didn’t get a sacrifice right?

If this story bothers you, get in line. Through the ages, rabbis and other commentators have offered myriad explanations for this shocking punishment. For Rashi, in the 11^th century, it stood to reason that the brothers were probably intoxicated, and that God was sending a message that all commandments were to be followed to the letter. Less than a century later, Ibn Ezra theorized that the two brothers had inherent character flaws and were unfit to serve as priests. In the 13^th century, Ramban posited that their crime was in acting by their own initiative, rather than consulting Moses or Aaron for instructions. Fast forward to the 19^th century, when Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch wrote that theirs was a sin of overzealousness or religious enthusiasm without proper reverence. Modern readers sometimes reinterpret these commentaries as a struggle between traditionalism and progressivism or as a cautionary tale about religious zealotry.

Clearly, we are not the first to grapple with the concept of divine justice…

Further complicating this millennia-old discussion is the question of mourning. Upon witnessing the death of two of his sons, Aaron remains silent. A few verses later, Moses gathers Aaron and his kinsmen and tells them, “Do not bare your heads and do not rend your clothes, lest you die and anger strike the whole community.”

The command for Aaron not to mourn his sons publicly adds another infuriating layer of complexity to the narrative. How could a loving and compassionate God demand such emotional detachment from a grieving father? Does God really expect total submission, even in the face of tragedy? Few progressive thinkers have any tolerance for this view today, especially given the heinous tragedies that seem to strike so randomly and that most of us have experienced personally or witnessed from a distance. Surely, God is not an intransigent tyrant hell bent on punishing humans for the slightest lapse in judgement! Surely, there is room in this life for learning from our mistakes!

All the same, our innate desire for causality and justice compels us to seek explanations for suffering and death, even leading to judgments about the moral worthiness of the afflicted. And given the thousands of years of conjecture about Nadab and Abihu’s guilt, might one even say that this desire to justify the premature passing of others is, um, tradition?

What if we removed all reverence from the story and tried a different lens? What if we agreed that Nadab and Abihu died needlessly, that textual evidence indicates that they didn’t deserve this fate, and that their family members were unfairly muzzled in the wake of their deaths? Upon threat of death, no less? Why look for reasons to justify their deaths? Is there room in our understanding of the world for unwarranted suffering? 

I, for one, hope that we will always see the death of innocent people as horrifying, tragic, and unjustifiable. I hope that we will never agree on a reason why one human deserves to die and another to live. I hope we will always cry, bare our heads, and rend our clothing when we see death come too soon for someone with their whole life ahead of them. I hope that we will never allow someone to shame us into staying silent in the face of tragedy. And I hope that I am not alone.

Shabbat Shalom!

Rebecca Abbate