TorahParsha

How can we eat consciously?

for Parshat Shemini

 

i

During the priestly coronation, two of Aaron’s sons die.

Moses says to Aaron: Do not mourn your sons. Continue the ceremony.

The rest of the people will cry instead of you.

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Aaron and his remaining sons do not eat of a coronation-day sacrifice.

Aaron says: such things as these have happened to me—if I had eaten of this sacrifice today, would it be good in God’s eyes? 

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Then God speaks of kosher food.

God tells the people: These are the animals which you shall eat.

 

ii

Eating, you bring the world beyond you into yourself.

If you cannot tie yourself to this world beyond yourself, it is not possible to eat.

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The people, who cry for Aaron’s sons—who bring Aaron’s tragedy to themselves—are told: you shall eat.

Aaron, who may not cry for his sons, cannot eat.

 

iii

This is the Truth that opens the Laws of what is kosher.

We open our discussion of eating food—the most self-focused of all acts—by saying: Even now, especially now, I am bound to the world.

 

 

 

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Shabbat Shalom, Abe

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Please pray for the infant Ayelet Yakira bat Chaya Hinda Matel Nechama, and register for bone marrow for Ayelet. Please pray for the premature infant  Baer Yakov ben Emunah, who has finally come home from the hospital. Please also pray for Ahuvah Rachel bat Orah and for Rachel Tovah bat Yehudit Esther.

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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.