Two threads of flame came out of the Holy of Holies. The threads divided into four strands. Two strands of fire entered Nadab’s nostrils; two entered Abihu’s. According to the rabbis, “their souls were burnt, although no external injury was visible.” Moses ordered two of Aaron’s cousins to drag the dead men out of the camp by their tunics.
Different rabbis give different reasons for the brothers’ deaths. Some say they were drunk; some say they hadn’t even washed. Some say they were so haughty, they’d refused to marry any woman in the camp. Others say that the brothers died because they were impatient and presumptuous: Neither son had even asked their elders’ permission to do what they’d done.
Presumptuousness, impatience, haughtiness, uncleanliness, drunkenness. All plausible. But their deaths were extraordinary. Too extraordinary to be explained away by gossip.
The sages answer: The brothers died as they did because, as priests, they’d been held to the highest standard. In fact, say the rabbis, the brothers had done one of the worst things any priest could do: They’d entered the Holy of Holies unauthorized. Equivalent to someone, now, walking unprotected and unauthorized into the containment vessel of a nuclear reactor, then diving into the coolant pool. Would anyone who did that come out alive?
As with the two stories about how we came to accept the Torah at Sinai, there are other explanations besides the usual ones offered by the rabbis.
Consider: The sages all agree that the brothers were extraordinary men. They did what they did out of an excess of religious devotion. Overwhelming piety caused them momentarily to forget the laws. Some rabbis even say that their deaths were sacrifices that expiated the sins of all Jews, past, present, and future.
So: If Nadab and Abihu were neither villains nor the worst sort of fools, what were they?
Rabbis who lived long after the destruction of the Second Temple tell a story about four sages who went into “the garden.” The garden in the story is called Pardes. Pardes may be the Garden of Eden; it may also be Paradise. It may also be the very center of all the great secrets, the core cosmology, the place where the “what comes before, what comes after” questions are answered.
The rabbis taught: “Four sages entered Pardes, and they are: Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Aher, and Rabbi Akiba. Rabbi Akiba said to them, ‘When you arrive at the stones of pure marble, do not say, “Water, water.” ’ Ben Azzai looked and died. Ben Zoma looked and lost his mind. Aher cut the shoots [of the plants that grew in Pardes]. Only Rabbi Akiba entered in peace and left in peace.” There is always a price for entering the Holy of Holies. Jewish mystics—Kabbalists—interpret Ben Azzai’s death as a metaphor for a transcendent experience. Azzai’s soul left his body at the moment of his revelation. His soul left him, but it did not return. As for Ben Zoma: He simply went crazy. Aher, the one who “cut the shoots” of the plants (that is, Aher tried to destroy the ideas inherent in the revelations), the commentators say became a heretic. Only Akiba—the great Talmudist, the great scholar and teacher, the great interpreter of the Law, written and oral—only he is said to have survived both the hallucinations (“pure marble” is not “water”) and the revelations.
Back to Nadab and his brother: What if they were like Ben Azzai? What if they were ecstatics whose souls left their bodies and didn’t return? In all of Leviticus, Nadab and Abihu are the only great ones who didn’t follow the rules. In fact, they are the only ones who acted with the kind of intense religious spontaneity and devotion that we, here, now, in this century, consider the authentic mark of true, deep religious feeling.
Leviticus is an ancient text. Its present is not ours. But what if Nadab and Abihu had lived in our present? What if they were as modern as we are? They paid a price, but did they deserve it?
Leviticus doesn’t care. They died because they broke the rules. They died because God killed them.
If spontaneous gestures are forbidden, even to priests, how are the rest of us supposed to behave? “Know the rules and obey them” is the only answer Leviticus gives. Inside a palisade of laws, surrounded by a tangle of rules—that is the only clear, safe space that Leviticus offers us.
Leviticus divides the world into the clean and the dirty. “Live outside in the filth,” Leviticus says, “and you’ll surely die.” All things animate and inanimate are separated into the pure and the impure. All things physical are linked to all things spiritual. The laws of kashrut separate flesh edible from flesh inedible: Clean animals are distinguished from dirty ones; permitted fish from forbidden ones; loathsome birds from lawful ones. “Eat filth and you will become filth.”
Chapter after chapter, verse after verse are devoted to a skin disease called tzaraas. It’s a disease that no one now can identify any better than they can identify some of the birds, reptiles, and insects that Leviticus classifies as forbidden. One hundred years ago, rationalists and empiricists tried—and failed—to prove that tzaraas was a form of leprosy. But the sages have always known better:
The blemishes of tzaraas reveal a disease of the soul. Slander and selfishness, promiscuity and thievery, false oaths and pride—these produce a white spot the size of a large bean. That spot can grow. “And the person with tzaraas…his garments shall be rent, the hair of his head shall be unshorn, and he shall cloak himself up to his lips; he is to call out, ‘Contaminated, contaminated!’…He shall dwell in contamination; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.” Chapter and verse describe dozens of procedures to identify tzaraas, track its progression, and then cleanse anything and everything, anyone and everyone that may have been touched by it. After the contamination and cleansings of tzaraas, Leviticus begins a new list of filthy things—all human, all reproductive: menstrual blood and discharges, ejaculations and oozings.
I spent days and then weeks reading and rereading all the rules and laws and decrees of Leviticus. Rules about forbidden relationships that outlaw incest as well as homosexuality; rules that forbid the eating of blood and fat from even kosher animals but also include prohibitions against wearing clothes that combine wool and linen. “We hear and we will obey.” But as I read those rules, one after the other, I began to feel as if I were falling into a tangled morass.
Almost as soon as Aaron’s cousins had finished dragging the bodies of Nadab and Abihu out of the camp, Moses ordered Aaron and his two remaining sons to complete the cycle of sacrifices they had begun. Aaron and his sons complied, but Moses noticed something amiss. God had already ended two lives because of a mistake. Moses wanted no more errors. He reproached the priests; they answered him. Moses immediately understood he had been wrong to scold them. The priests finished their sacrifices.
In the text, the words used to describe Moses’ reproach are “Moses inquired insistently.” His scolding was wrong, but his questioning was the right thing to do; you have to pay attention, or you’ll die.
The rabbis say that those words occur exactly at the middle of the text of the whole Torah. “Insistent inquiry” is at the center of the Torah. “This teaches us,” says the sage Degel Machaneh Ephraim, “that the entire Torah revolves around constant inquiry; one must never stop studying and seeking an ever broader understanding.”
If this is so, then permit me my own “insistent inquiry.” It won’t take long.
In Leviticus, the way in which nearly every rule, law, and decree was taught to us was from the top down: God told Moses; Moses told Aaron. Once Moses instructed Aaron, he would summon Aaron’s sons and then repeat—to Aaron and his sons—what he had just explained to Aaron alone. After this, Moses would summon the elders. To them—and to Aaron and Aaron’s sons—he would repeat what he’d just taught the priests alone. Which was itself a repetition of what he’d just taught Aaron face-to-face. Finally, Moses would summon all the people and teach them in the presence of all the great men what he’d taught everyone else. We were almost always the last to know.
Again and again, throughout Leviticus, that’s how we learned the laws. Except, say the sages, in Chapter 19: “God sp
oke to Moses, saying: Speak to the entire assembly of the Children of Israel and say to them…” Only in Chapter 19 did God tell Moses to teach us all—every one of us—at once.
What did God tell Moses to teach us? “Say to them: You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.” How, then, did God tell us to be holy? These were his instructions—in order:
Honor your father and mother. Observe the Sabbath. Don’t worship idols. Conduct every sacrifice—in particular the peace sacrifice, the one you make to express love and thankfulness—with great presence of mind.
Leave a portion of every harvest, a corner of every field, for the poor. Don’t steal. Don’t deny something that’s true. Don’t lie about anything. Don’t cheat anyone. Don’t rob anyone. If a man works for you, pay him what you owe him as soon as he’s done.
Don’t insult the deaf. Don’t trip up the blind. Do justice: Don’t favor the poor just because they’re poor; don’t favor important people just because they’re important.
Don’t gossip. Don’t stand aside when you see someone in danger. Try to save him. Don’t hate your own brother. Don’t take revenge on people. Don’t bear grudges against people close to you.
After all this, God told Moses to tell us: “You shall love your fellow as yourself—I am God.”
Moses told all this to us at the same time. After being the last to know the other rules, these rules we learned, every one of us, standing together, as we’d once stood, all of us, assembled at Sinai.
The question remains: How do we live? Alone, in a clearing, with exile on one side and obliteration on the other, caught between two kinds of law, how do we conduct ourselves?
Nadab and Abihu represent an answer. But they didn’t survive, any better than Ben Azzai survived in the story about Pardes. You remember: In that story, only the great sage and scholar Akiba lived to tell the tale. Knowledge and clear-mindedness saved him. But the rest of us are not sages. Not even close. My ancestors may have helped write Leviticus, but I can barely remember, let alone live within the bounds of, all the laws.
What choices do we have left?
Listen to this story: Two rabbis were approached by a man who said he wanted to be a Jew. The man spoke with each of the rabbis separately. “I’m going to stand on one leg,” said the man. “Teach me the Law before I fall down.”
The first rabbi was a very smart man with a very precise mind. In fact, he’d been trained as an engineer. He happened to be carrying a yardstick with him when the man approached him. That’s what he used to beat the man before he could even get his balance.
The other rabbi was just as smart as the first one. The man made his offer, then hoisted himself up on one leg. He wobbled a bit; the rabbi did nothing but look at him. After a bit, the rabbi said, “Whatever you hate, don’t inflict it on anyone else. That’s the whole of the law. All the rest is commentary. Now—go study.”
Sound familiar? Jesus, good Jew that he was, said much the same thing. Two thousand years later, it’s become a smiley-faced cliché. Reread what Hillel said, though. “All the rest is commentary. Now—go study.” “Go study.” That’s what Akiba did. That’s why, in the story about Pardes, he lived and Ben Azzai died. Mind. Clarity. “Insistent inquiry.” Along with empathic knowledge. Akiba was a tree with branches and roots; he reached down into tradition and up, into the sky. Of course, in the end, even Akiba didn’t know enough: He backed a final, fatal revolt against the Romans. He even believed the leader of the revolt—a man named Bar Kokhba—was the true Messiah. The Romans liquidated all the rebels. Akiba, they tortured to death—with “iron combs.”
“A degenerate with the permission of the Torah” is what the sages call a man who is careful to obey every one of the laws. The choice, though, is not between scrupulous obedience and ecstatic abandon. The choice runs right down the middle. If you really want to know how to fly, you need to know how to walk.
As for me: The lessons I learned from Blind Joe Death made me a kinder person. But only for a little while. My father died; my mother died; my wife died: After each death, I became a more decent person. But it never lasted. After a while, I’d forget how close death really is, how vulnerable we all are, how short a time we have to breathe the air and stand in the light. How foolish it is, under the circumstances, to treat people cruelly or callously, or inattentively.
I keep trying to remind myself.
Henderson,
North Carolina
Destroy, O Lord, and divide their tongues…
PSALM 55:9
THERE was a man waiting for us in the parking lot of the only store off exit 229, I-85, just north of Henderson, North Carolina. How he knew we were coming we can’t guess; he must have had some kind of trip-wire strung to the hand-painted sign out on the highway that read, “MiRAcle this Exit,” because he was standing there as we rolled into the lot, and when we opened the car doors he said, “You here to see it?”
“We are,” we said, and he pointed. His hand was a curled claw of melted fingers and scabby stumps. We followed his direction and saw a little white shack with words scrawled all over it in the same unsteady hand that had lured us off the highway: “Its here its here Its here.” He told us that once on this spot a hitchhiker had looked up into the sky and seen four clouds in the shape of letters: E-S-U-S.
“Well shit that ain’t nuthin,” he said. “ESUS isn’t even a word.” Then sure enough the wind picked up and a fifth cloud blew across the sky, making it a proper miracle, spelling the name.
He moved his mangled fist through the air like that J floating into place, a hook to hang the story on now that the clouds were gone. The advertised “miracle” was actually just photographs of that divine skywriting, on sale in the white shack for three hundred dollars each. We couldn’t see them just then. The shack was padlocked, and Mr. Miracle didn’t have the key. When he insisted we buy something else to make the stop worthwhile, we asked for the local paper. The letters of the headline were deep black and even: “GUNMAN TERRORIZES CHURCH: She-Male Intruder Reportedly Calls Americans ‘Killers.’ ” There was no picture.
Reverend W. F. Buddy Faucette had been a preacher for forty years when the devil came into his church, said a prayer, drew a .38, and pulled the trigger.
Buddy heard later from the police that the devil wasn’t a man at all, and not really a woman either. “He got all the parts, y’see,” Buddy told us one afternoon in the print shop he owned on the main street of town. The devil had even tried to show Buddy his bosom. Reached in and tried to draw up a breast full and soft as a woman’s.
No one in the church had ever seen anything like it, but Buddy wasn’t surprised. “This kind of thing been prophesied,” he said. “Look it up, it’s in the Book.”
That’s how we’d found him. With a list of names gathered from the Henderson Daily Dispatch we’d bought from the miracle man, we’d rifled through the Vance County directory looking for the number of anyone involved in an incident local reporters were calling the country’s “latest act of terrorism.”
“This is spiritual war,” Buddy told us. He’d been fighting it since he got the call to preach in 1959. Back then he told the Lord he couldn’t do it; he didn’t have that kind of voice.
“You hear me quiet, now,” he said to us, deep and low. “That’s how I was then.”
The Lord told him to read the Book of Joshua; He would do the rest. Buddy did so and slipped into the back of a church to see what would happen. But the devil came in after him. Whispered in his ear, “Buddy, you can’t do it. You don’t got the voice.”
“Well,” Buddy replied, slowly, “get thee behind me, anyhow.”
“Okay,” the devil said. “I will—if you can tell me just two words you’re a-gonna preach.”
“Well,” Buddy said, and that used up the only one he had.
So he marched up to the pulpit, put the devil in front of him, and opened his mouth. Out came the story of Joshua: he who won the Promised Land by killing everyone in it.
“Battle’s heatin’ up,” Buddy told us, the print shop behind him quiet and still, his voice gentle as it always was except when the spirit spoke through him, as it seemed to be doing more often. His silver hair swooped up like a torch, his ruddy cheeks drooped to his chin, he didn’t feel old. The visitor with too many parts had been a sure sign that the devil could still hear Buddy preaching.
The next evening we visited the church—a steepleless white pine box, striped by narrow windows glowing blue. One of Buddy’s deacons, Billy Joe, pointed to two colorful pictures on either side of the altar, an empty stage. “You just look right up there,” he said.
Billy Joe had come with Buddy and a few other men to meet us in case we’d been sent by the devil ourselves. Buddy looked to be a powerful man, but of the bunch Billy Joe seemed readiest to handle any fighting that had to be done, spiritual or otherwise. A plumber by trade, he kept his shoulders pulled to his neck and his short-fingered hands flexing between fists and stretched-open palms. He wore tight blue jeans spotted with paint, white leather cross trainers, and a T-shirt depicting the crucifixion in lifelike detail, Jesus’ chest on the front, Jesus’ back on the back, “Dying to Meet You” dripping across the top in red bloody letters.
“Take a good look,” Billy Joe said. “I want you to go ahead and study on what you see.”
Behind the pulpit, the two identical images stared down like the eyes of the church itself, filled with fire and rapture and souls pulled into the sky. On a road that stretches to the horizon, cars drive into ditches, into telephone poles, into each other. In the foreground a tractor-trailer jackknifes and bursts into flames; in the upper left a jetliner crashes into a high-rise. The bodies of the worldly burn everywhere. But the souls of the saved unman taxis and graves and float through office windows, flying up toward Jesus, who shines above it all like the sun at high noon.
Killing the Buddha Page 7