This past weekend, we read what may be one of the most difficult stories in the entire Torah: Nadav and Avihu, Aaron’s sons, the two righteous and holy priests, offer a “foreign fire” to God, and are immediately killed for their transgression.
Why was such a seemingly minor sin followed by such a severe sentence? The rabbis, no surprises there, spent millennia trying to parse the true nature of Nadav and Avihu’s failing, and their answers are many and varied. But tonight, as we begin to commemorate Yom Hazikaron La’Shoah ve’Lagvura—the day of remembering both the Holocaust and the heroism of those who stood up to the Nazis—immediately after reading the story of Nadav and Avihu, one startling interpretation comes to mind.
Aaron’s sons, the contemporary Israeli rabbi Ya’akov Medan teaches us, were righteous. Their intentions were indeed good; they wanted to worship God. But for all of their piety, Rabbi Medan explains, they suffered from one critical flaw: they were impatient. They wanted the uncertainty to end. They thought that after the Israelites had lived through so many travails—generations of enslavement, weeks of miracles and plagues and tribulations, months of erring in the wilderness—they deserved certainty. They needed to know that their troubles were over. They needed to see with their own eyes God delivering his promise and ending their collective suffering. And so, they rushed to offer an additional sacrifice that God did not command them, so eager were they to see God’s response and know that their troubles were over.
But God works on His timeline, not ours, and so, for their all-too-human anxiety, they were punished.
There could hardly be a more timely or pressing lesson for us all. We, too, tend to look at our challenging moment in Jewish history and assume that it may never get better. We, too, are eager for God to give us clarity, certainty, something, as the saying goes, we can take to the bank. But the story of Nadav and Avihu is a reminder to have faith, even—or especially, during the darkest times.
So is the Jewish calendar itself. Slightly more than a week after commemorating both the martyrs of the Holocaust and the brave partisans who fought the Nazis, we will mark Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, remembering the brave men and women who had given their lives to make the first sovereign Jewish nation in millennia a reality. And then, as the sun sets on that somber day, Israelis and Jews everywhere will wipe away the tears and rush to party and celebrate Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day.
The proximity of these momentous events isn’t a coincidence, and the lesson they teach us couldn’t be more stark: we may be impatient and anxious and weary as we stave off hatred and persecution, but even—or especially—when the night is darkest, we must still have faith and remember that great light is always just around the corner, and that the short stretch that began with telling stories of courage and destruction will end with raising our glasses to freedom and joy. It’s the eternal Jewish story; all we have to do is believe.
