Omer Day
14: Unlock Your Heart
By Alden Solovy
This is part prayer, part
insight, part inspiration. It’s about the yearning for a certain kind of
nobility that comes from allowing G-d’s gifts to enter our hearts, the kind of
nobility that requires self-confidence, self-care, and self-discipline. I use
this prayer for the 14th night of the counting of the Omer, Nobility in
Discipline (Malkhut Sheb’Gevurah).
Unlock Your Heart
Come,
Unlock your heart,
Open the gates
So your soul may enter.
Splendor.
Radiance.
Awe.
Let the spark of holiness
And the gift of humanity
Meet in the core of your being.
Wisdom.
Glory.
Truth.
Let the echo of the ages
And the yearning for tomorrow
Sing a duet of eternity.
Mystery.
Majesty.
Wonder.
Then, dear sisters and brothers,
Your hands will become a fountain
of blessings,
And your eyes will become wells
of love.
Your words will resonate with Torah,
And your deeds will glorify G-d’s
Holy Name.
Acharei
Mot
This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Acharei Mot, which
literally means, “After the deaths,” situating this narrative a few weeks back,
immediately following Parashat Shemini. In Parashat Shemini, as we are reminded
at the beginning of Parashat Acharei Mot, Aaron’s sons Nadav and Avihu “came
close to G‑d and died (Lev 16:1).” The
Midrash Tanchuma responds to this line in Acharei Mot by quote Ecclesiastes, “Everything [happens] to everyone, the same lot [falls] to the
righteous and to the wicked” (9:1).
Of course, not everything really
happens to everyone, but anyone is vulnerable to terrible tragedies, regardless
of their innocence. It is unclear what Nadav and Avihu’s crimes really were,
and it is something Jews having been struggling with for thousands of years. Why
did God strike down these boys? We may ask ourselves similar questions to the
struggles in our own lives or to the horrors of the world – poverty, starvation,
climate change, bigotry, war, and genocide. The Torah describes the deaths of
Nadav and Avihu as from the “fire of the Lord,” but God is fairly silent on the
matter. It’s generally taken to mean that God very intentionally killed them. In
today’s misfortunes, we may have a more sophisticated understanding of God and
the world and know that God created ordered and a set of rules of nature,
including humankind’s free will. Accordingly, we have natural disasters and
famine and illness, and we have to contend with the evil of others, and there’s
little God has to do with the every day goings-on of our lives. Perhaps the strange
fire that Nadav and Avihu brought into the Mishkan in Parashat Shemini caused
some kind of explosion and the fire that killed them was also in accordance
with the laws of nature. Laws that God created, thus it is still “a fire from
the Lord,” but God’s intention to kill them is removed from the narrative. If the
righteous and the wicked alike are subject to heartbreak and pain, it is hard for
me to believe that God has an active role in doling out such catastrophes.
I recently reread Howard Kushner’s When
Bad Things Happen to Good People in which he argues that we should reframe
our cries of anguish in tough times from, “Why is God doing this to me?!” or “Why
would God let this happen?!” to “How can God help me endure this?” He invokes German
theologian Dorothee Soelle several times throughout the book, but it is in the
final chapter that I found the most useful piece of advice or theology. Soelle introduces
the concept of “the devil’s martyrs.” She swivels from the common honor
bestowed upon those who die in the name of God, the righteous whose unfaltering
faith inspires others even as those left behind mourn their loss, whom we
normally call martyrs. She suggests on the flip side that if the death of a
loved one, or the knowledge of a tragic mass death across the world, causes
someone to lose faith in God or humanity, to lose hope and love in themselves, then
their loss is martyrdom for the devil. Kushner says, “It is not the circumstances
of their death that makes them witnesses for or against God. It is our reaction
to their death” (p.151). Both Soelle and Kushner ask that we honor the dead by
carrying on in life with love and forgiveness in our hearts. Even if we cannot
forgive the source of our pain per se, we can forgive the world for containing
evil, God for creating laws of nature that allow for sadness and pain, and
ourselves for any survivor’s guilt we feel. We can share the love that we have
been given by so many in our lives and we can pass that on to more people,
building up a new world of love to combat hate and to comfort those with little
else to comfort them.
In Parashat Acharei Mot, after the
time-setting reminder, the Torah gets right back into Sacrifice Mode and Aaron
goes right back to living his life, serving God and the People of Israel, and
performing the first of what becomes the ancient Yom Kippur ritual with the
scapegoats. Nadav and Avihu died trying in their fervor to get close to God,
and Aaron best honors their memories by helping the community get closer to God
as well. This is how he ensures that they have been martyrs for God and not the
devil, despite the reasons they may have died.
This week, as we remember the millions who
died in the Shoa and as we rest on our first Shabbat since the latest antisemitic
terror attack in this country, even as we mourn and feel the fear and anger in
the world, we also are resolute in our commitment to fight bigotry wherever we
see it. We honor those who have died in genocide by fighting fresh genocides,
like the current situation in Burma. We honor those killed by hate crimes by
ensuring that all identity-based discriminatory violence is seen for what it is
and given the proper justice. We honor all our ancestors and loved ones who
have gone before us by loving and embracing this broken world, and vowing to work
to fix it. May we do them proud, and may their memories forever be a blessing.
Amen and Shabbat Shalom.
