What’s with the fire? (Shemini)

Another Passover has passed, we burned and placed a lamb shank (or chicken bone) on our seder plates to represent the Pesach offering, and now we are faced with the burning of The Brothers Nadav and Avihu in this week’s Torah reading,...

Yes, Moses’ nephews are burned up, consumed by fire, in one big POOF, for having made an offering to God without God’s approval--a rather harsh punishment, wouldn’t you say?

The question is: what were they doing? Were they jumping the gun? Getting ahead of themselves? Being too ambitious before their time? 

If you’ve been watching the latest season of Shtisel on Netflix (spoiler alert, I’m sorry, but I can’t help it), you saw Kive’s nightmare of his father burning his beloved paintings of Kive’s dead wife. Kive is unable to move forward and let go of his wife--or the paintings that represent her, even though he has met a new woman who seems very promising. 

Then, in a final acceptance, Kive is able to paint his new love, but in the painting, he engulfs her in flames. 

It’s a really strange scene. You’re not sure exactly what it means, confusing in the same way that they never tell us--in the whole season!--how his wife died! (Infuriating, not to mention really weird!)

The new woman seems pleased with the painting and its imagery, not disturbed and confused like I was. 

Thus, we must conclude that it’s a good sign--a sign of burning up the old, and perhaps a new kind of burning passion for her. 

As we know, fire and burning things up can be good or bad, if you want to qualify it. 

Fire can be destructive when out of control, becoming over-ambitious itself. We talk about symbolically burning bridges. 

Or it offers warmth, pleasing odors, digestible food, and healing.

Fire transforms things from one state to another. 

There’s the middle ground, too: a tiny flame that never goes out, like the pilot light on an old stove, there to ignite things as needed, always available in small doses. 

A few chapters ago in Torah, the commandment was given to keep the fire on the altar burning; an eternal flame that we, today, symbolically place above our Torah ark in the synagogue. 

I’ve been thinking about what I have burned up and how I have possibly been transformed during this Passover season. 

I’m also asking, have I been overly ambitious, pushed too hard, in a race against time to “accomplish” things in an effort to be “successful” according to society’s standards? 

The fact is, I really crashed at the end of Passover, and I’m still recovering, four days in; it’s given me time to contemplate the above questions: what can I realistically do at this point in my life, with the amount of energy I have, in this time in history? 

I’m still learning the lesson of how to find my balance, in a world totally out of balance, and to find what people like to call a “new normal.” I struggled with it before, and now it’s even harder, to know how far I can push myself and when I need to stop and say no. 

Passover this year was a lot for me. I mean, A LOT. Like I said, I’m still feeling the effects of it, and it’s frustrating.

But then I went out for a walk today, a beautiful day in New York. A lot of the blossoms are early, and I wanted to see what had bloomed, and what might have been messed up by the extreme heat a week ago (80 degrees!) and the extreme cold that followed (below 30). 

I was sure that the crab apples, which I look forward to every year, were not going to come.

Yes, I was worried: another sign of the imbalance in the world that gets me down. 

To my shock, I found the flowers, especially the magnolias (click to see them!!) to be more perfect than I’ve ever seen them in previous years. Somehow, they came through it all. A gift in the midst of chaos.

So the question that remains is, how do I/we find the balance?

And speaking of fire: How do we find balance between the destructive aspects of it--the over-ambition, over-passionate kind, the personal kind--and also the passion driven by the anxiety to fix everything, NOW, in the world, because it’s all so urgent---and the soothing, constant, transformative kind that helps us move forward slowly by an eternal flame?

After a conversation with an old teacher and friend, the word emunah, or faith, comes to mind. Not hope, as she said, which points to a lack of faith, but a pure and complete faith. 

A faith that, despite the pain in the world, everything is for a higher purpose, and that, despite the urgency of the problems, the fire we have to put out might lead us to rush, which can become destructive in itself.  

As many have repeated, slowing down is one of the lessons we are supposed to be learning from this pandemic. 

So, to help the healing along, we each have to keep our personal fire burning, at just the right level, on our own altars. We need to each find our personal glow that offers a good balance of an energy waiting to catch and grow slowly: an eternal flame that has the potential to transform our lives and the world.