The days ahead will bring a total solar eclipse launching the Hebrew month of Nissan, a full moon launching Passover and, in all likelihood, some kind of reckoning in a Mideast on fire.
These times of heightened energy naturally can focus us on Big Things – our highest priorities, ultimate concerns, what transcends us, faith and also faith’s discontents. After all, there’s a lot on fire nowadays….
So what’s with God? Where’s God in all this?
Parashat Shmini 5784 (2024)
As I prepare to head north for the 2024 total solar eclipse, I’ve been watching videos of past eclipses. The view is otherworldly: As day becomes night, the solar corona, usually invisible to the naked eye, dances for just a few fleeting moments of perfect celestial alignment.
The videos depict not only sight but also sound. Crowds buzz with anticipation, thrills rising in a crescendo until Baily’s beads usher totality and a peak rush of cheers and applause – then silence.
Nobody speaks: there are no words. The familiar inverts: sunset occurs midday, and in all directions at once. Bright goes dark. What’s usually unseen rivets. And the silence isn’t mere quiet: it’s alive, poignant, even pregnant. This phenomenon transcends all cultures, all creeds, all nations. For once, the seemingly irrepressible human mouth and human mind go quiet.
Moments later, the celestial process reverses and everything returns to “normal,” except us. Most everyone who views a total solar eclipse reports feeling forever changed.
We all know “peak experiences” that lift us out of our usual selves. Like the sun’s wispy corona during totality, we catch a glimpse of what’s unseen – the beyond and within that the bright and loud normalcy of routine, habit or hiding otherwise conceal.
This week’s Torah portion presents a different kind of peak experience, another inversion of the usual way of things. Aharon, kohein gadol (High Priest), sees his sons Nadav and Avihu offer on the altar “a strange fire that YHVH did not command them, and fire came forth from YHVH and consumed them. They died before YHVH… and Aharon went silent” (Lev. 10:1-4).
Everything about this scene is backwards, harrowing and indicting of a God we yearn to call “good.” Sacred rites portend death instead of life. A parent mourns children instead of the other way around. The High Priest of Israel is laid low by the God to whom he dedicates his life. And amidst incomprehensible grief, Aharon goes silent.
The Odyssey of Theodicy
This theodicy challenge to God echoes across time: how can God be all-knowing (omniscient), all-powerful (omnipotent) and just if bad things happen to good people? How could God “allow” the Temple’s destruction? exile? Black Death? Inquisition? Holocaust? childhood cancer? any cancer? freak accidents? natural disasters? genocide?
The question has haunted history, prodding humanity to find or make livable answers. To solve the theodicy puzzle, folks of most every religion (and none at all) have scuttled one of theodicy’s premises : God is not all knowing, or not all powerful, or not just, or we’re not good.
In the last of these, we deserve what happens. Rather than blame God, our ancestors blamed their own behavior (classically, lashon ha-ra / bad speech) for the Temple’s demise and their failure to keep mitzvot for the Black Death and Inquisition. In grief, we feel guilt for another’s suffering: we could have done something to stop it. In this sense, Nadav and Avihu disobeyed and thus deserved to die – a twist most moderns can’t accept because it depicts God as punitive or vengeful.
So we try again: God is good but limited by natural laws or self-restraint (in mysticism, tzimtzum or self-contraction) to make space for humanity and free will. Like touching a live wire, Nadav and Avihu died not as a penalty but as a natural consequence. Their choices had natural consequences, and God couldn’t stop them any more than God could stop the Holocaust, childhood cancer, freak accidents, natural disasters or climate change.
But again a problem: if so, then why do we pray? What’s the point of praying for another’s healing (or our own) if God can’t or won’t intervene? Some can’t accept this answer. Others shift to praying for qualities – awareness, love, resilience, strength – rather than results.
And on and on it goes. Like a koan whose impossibility reveals the inherent limits of mind and thereby releases us from its clutches, the impossibility of fully answering theodicy’s challenge is part of the human condition – and can become our saving grace if we let it.
Spiritual Silence for Transformation
What could Aharon say? What could Job? The Book of Job is theodicy on steroids: the Book portrays God to know Job as good yet cause him to lose everything but his own life. Fully 41 chapters develop one intolerable theological explanation after another until Job, at the end of himself, hears God speak. Job has an epiphany: divine Mystery transcends self, and only by allowing self to be transcended can we truly sense God. He says to God, “[Until now] I merely heard of You with my ears, and now I see You with my eyes” (Job 42:5).
Job figured it out and went quiet. Job knew in his bones that God transcends neat categories and defies curt explanation, but could experience God as ever present by stripping away the thick veils of self. He discovered anew that God is the power of transformation and futurity Itself. As God told Moses at the Burning Bush: “I will be what I will be” (Ex. 3:14) – the All-ness of All – and Moses went quiet.
And Aharon went quiet – a self-transcending quiet, a total presence amidst, not a silencing of the small. (This silence is the source of shiva tradition’s to sit quietly until a mourner chooses to speak.) It’s much the same silence, I imagine, of a total solar eclipse. I hope to find out.
Sometimes we transform from big burning bushes so bright that everything else fades. Other times we transform from shadows cast onto our lives so dark that in time we transcend ourselves and glimpse the usually invisible. We hear Elijah’s “still small voice,” or Mother Theresa’s “God who cannot be found in noise and restlessness.”
We hear, we see, and we are changed.
David Evan Markus 