Eating, the Holy

1.
When we bring a sacrifice to God, the text says, God eats of the sacrifice. And we eat of that sacrifice as well.

And in the telling of the sacrifices, the text repeatedly uses the language of eating.

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To come to a world in holiness is to incorporate it totally. It is to ingest.

2.
Aaron's sons bring strange fire that God did not commanded them, upon the altar in the dwelling-place of God.

This is what kills them.

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Soon afterward, God commands that the priests may not do sacrifice when they are drunk. They must distinguish between holy and unholy, between clean and unclean.

They must know what is fit for the holy, and what is not fit for the holy.

They may not ingest what will lead them astray.

They must stay alert to strange fires.

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Then God says the Laws of kashrut: We may eat clean things; we may not eat unclean things.

3.
God is in the world. So the world is holy. So we partake of the world fully--we ingest it--as a holy place.

But we may only partake of the world (we may only ingest of it) in the ways that God has seen fit.

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All of life is not very different from standing at God's altar.