This week’s parsha, Shemini, tells the story of Aaron’s sons offering a stranger fire to the Divine and the Divine consuming them in the fire.
What?
Aaron’s sons are ordained as priests and then God consumes them in fire right in front of Aaron and Moses? How horrific.
As I read this passage, images of children, journalists, patients, and others burning alive in their tents in Gaza flash through my mind.
The thing about genocide is that it doesn’t start with burning people alive in tents. It starts with years of dehumanization and othering. It starts with ethnic cleansing. It starts with denying building permits and demolishing homes. It starts with military occupation, administrative detention, and targeted assassinations. It starts with military blockade, starvation, denial of medical equipment, demolition of schools, homes, hospitals, and more. It starts with silencing and murdering journalists. It starts with torturing and murdering medical providers and civil defense workers.
Did we really think that once an empire gets away with all of these indignities, injustices, human rights violations, and crimes against humanity that empire would simply hang up its hat and go home? That is not how empires work. As long as they are not held accountable, they will continue to push the bounds of their actions.
And like in Israel, so too in the United States.
Once we accept and allow a carceral state to be presumed to be normal and acceptable, with refugees and immigrants locked in “detention centers” in deplorable, inhumane, and abusive conditions in our own country, it should not surprise us that someday a leader would think to deport people to prisons in other countries.
When students are assaulted and arrested for exercising their right to free speech, it shouldn’t surprise us when the government weaponizes that free speech and turns vulnerable groups against one another in the name of national security.
🔥 There is a strange fire burning today.
Too many in the Jewish and non-Jewish world are standing in silence or worse, adding fuel to the fire in the false belief that they won’t ultimately be swept up in the flames. But that too is not how fascism works.
❤️🔥 A burning fire from within
Moses saw a burning bush that was not consumed by the flames. It was a fire that burned within him that did not consume him. Rather it spoke to him and told him he had a mission, a calling, to face the Pharaoh of his time. These times require us to dig deep and find the courage to face the burning fire, so it does not consume us or others.
Reflective Questions
🔹 What are my unique skills and talents that I can offer and bring to the struggle?
🔹 How can we strengthen our movement and lean into one another in the face of efforts to separate and divide us?
🔹 What support do I need to have the courage to stand in the face of the fire?
💪 Courage
When I see others being courageous, it becomes the remedy I need to strengthen my own resolve. There are many, many people who need us now—to tap into our inner resources, to stand up, to reject the efforts of those in power who seek to divide us, and to help grow our movement for love, justice, and liberation.
🙏🏼 May you find time this Shabbat to connect with the Divine source within and around you. May your heart and soul be nourished, and may you find the inner strength to show up—as your most full and courageous self today and every day.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Cat Zavis
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