Parashat Shemini - 'Eighth'

Parashat Semini    -    Misrepresenting God                by Rabbi Russ Resnick

Leviticus 9:1-11:47, 2 Samuel 6:1-7:17, Acts 5:1-11

As we approach Yom Ha-Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day (Sunday, 7 April at Pinelands Jewish Cemetry, no. 2, at 11h00), let us consider two historic encounters that may inform our response to this unspeakable event.

The first is in this week’s parasha (Lev. 10:1-3): 

Now Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, each took his censer, put fire in it,and laid incense on it; and they offered unholy fire before the Lord,such as he had not commanded them. And fire came out from the presenceof the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord. Then Mosessaid to Aaron, “This is what the Lord meant when he said, ‘Through thosewho are near me I will show myself holy, and before all the people Iwill be glorified.’” And Aaron was silent. (NRSV)

The sin of Nadav and Avihu must be great indeed for them to merit punishment so swift and harsh. Yet, Scripture says only that they offered strange fire, which God had not commanded them. They are priests, mediators between God and his people. Whatever the exact nature of their sin, it is clear that they somehow misrepresented God, because the Lord desires to show his purity, goodness, and splendour through those who represent him ¬ “those who are near me.”

Moses learns the same lesson at the waters of Meribah (Numbers 20:9-13). There, the Israelites complain because there is no water. The Lord tells Moses to speak to the rock, and it will bring forth water. Instead, Moses castigates the people for their complaining and strikes the rock. Water comes forth, but the Lord tells Moses, “Because you did not trustin me, to show my holiness before the eyes of the Israelites, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.” (NRSV)

As Moses had explained to Aaron after the death of his sons, the Lord will show himself as holy through those who are close to him, and be glorified before all the people. Like his nephews earlier, Moses misrepresents God before the people ¬ and is harshly judged. He is not permitted to enter the Promised Land!

The second incident is an encounter between Elie Wiesel, then a young Holocaust survivor who had just written his first book, Night, and the venerable French author François Mauriac. Wiesel tells Mauriac how his childhood faith perished in the living hell of Auschwitz, and Mauriac writes (in his foreword to Night),

“What did I say to him? Did I speak of that other Israeli, his brother, who may have resembled him—the Crucified, whose Cross has conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine, and that the conformity between the Cross and the suffering of men was in my eyes the key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the faith of his childhood had perished? Zion, however, has risen up again from the crematories and charnel houses. The Jewish nation has been resurrected from among its thousands of dead. It is through them that it lives again. We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs to Him. This is what I should have told this Jewish child. But I could only embrace him, weeping.”

Mauriac is right not to speak. Those who represented the Messiah about whom he wanted to tell Wiesel had so misrepresented him that there was nothing left to say. Hitler, of course, was no Christian. But the seedbed for the Sho’ah had been prepared by centuries of Christian anti-Semitism throughout Europe, and the church had done little to protest the destruction of the Jews. We must remember the ten Booms, the French village of Le Chambon, and many other Christians who helped. But we must also remember that the vast majority, and especially the visible institutions, did not.

In September 1943, the Nazis occupied Rome and rounded up its Jews “under the windows of the Vatican,” which raised no protest. In Lithuania, a bishop met occasionally with the chief rabbi in his area. As the Nazi vice was tightening, the rabbi asked if the bishop could arrange for Jewish children to be hidden in monasteries. The bishop declined, saying that the monasteries were autonomous and the abbots were not generous men. In the Protestant Netherlands, the Nazis offered a deal to the churches that were opposing the deportation of the Jews. If they would stop their protest, the Nazis would refrain from deporting Jewish Christians. The major Dutch Protestant denomination accepted the deal.

Hitler and the Nazis are the great culprits of the Sho’ah, but the church was guilty of its own sin—misrepresenting God by refusing to help the Jews. Those with a claim to be near to God did not display his holiness in this tragic time.

Today, decades later, we often meet with resistance or even rejection as we seek to follow Messiah in the midst of the larger Jewish community. Some resistance to the word of Messiah seems inherent to human nature, but this week we are reminded of the reason for a particular Jewish resistance ¬ the misrepresentation of God in the Name of Yeshua.

If we respond to this resistance by distancing ourselves from our community, by making the non-Messianic Jewish world the “other”, we risk misrepresenting God ourselves. We may be tempted to withdraw from our people over the issue of Yeshua, but this is the exact opposite of God’s purpose for us.

Instead, we have the opportunity to emulate Yeshua, who above all others is near to God…and who resolutely remains near to Israel, as well. “For I tell you that Messiah has become a servant of the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs” (Rom. 15:8).  

Nadav and Avihu were mediators, intercessors between God and Israel, who somehow went astray. Messiah is the intercessor who continues in his nearness to God to offer God’s mercy, healing, and restoration to the whole house of Israel, to “confirm the promises given to the patriarchs.”

The fullest meaning of “Messianic” is that we follow and emulate Messiah. As he is the intercessor, so are we to be an intercessory community, continually drawing near to God and drawing near to the larger Jewish community. Our hope is that among us, God might in some way “show himself as holy and be glorified before all the people.”

Many of us in the UMJC are currently in the midst of seven weeks of prayer leading up to the festival of Shavuot (see details at www.umjc.org <http://www.umjc.org/> ). May these times of corporate prayer help to establish an intercessory prayer movement within the Messianic Jewish community. More than that, may they help us to see Messianic Judaism itself as an intercessory movement, standing in the midst of Israel as we draw near to God.

In this way, we may avoid misrepresenting God, and instead represent him in his mercy and compassion, even as Messiah does himself.