And Aaron Was Silent

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Friday, April 22, 2005

There are many different kinds of silence. There’s the peaceful silence of an early morning, the tense silence when someone has said something upsetting and no one knows how to respond, the embarrassed silence when two people who don’t know each other well and trying to think of something appropriate to say, and the comfortable silence of two good friends, happy to be together but within nothing that needs saying at that moment.

Jews are not known for silence: rather ours is a talkative culture, a culture of words, lots of them. Studying words, discussing words, even arguing and speaking loud and aggressive words, these are much more frequently Jewish practices, than sitting in contemplative silence.

Our Torah portion is what triggered my reflection on silence. After Aaron’s sons Nadav and Abihu are consumed by fire on the altar, Aaron’s response is described- Vayidom Aharon, and Aaron was silent.

In that silence there is a mystery at last as deep as the mystery of the deaths of these two boys.

Was his silence, an angry silence- so angry at his loss and at Moses’s response to his tragedy, the loss of his two beautiful, wonderful sons, that he didn’t trust himself to say a single word?

Was his silence a way of avoiding fully absorbing the reality of what had happened, for at the moment he spoke of it, the moment he shared this devastating news with his wife and others in the family, it would be real to him?

Was it a mortified silence, here was the day that was to be the highlight of his life, the 8th day of the dedication of the Tabernacle, the climax of his career, and his sons, through their drunken licentious behavior, their desecration of the altar, have embarrassed him and his family forever?

Or was his silence, the silence that followed weeping. Nachmanides tells us that vayidom, means, and then he became silent, implying that before that he was weeping. His emotions were too strong to go on serving as if nothing had happened. Rabbi Samuel Ben Meir, known as the Rashbam, believe that it was because Aaron does not stifle his emotions and try to continue on stoic in a professional capacity that he is called a man of Shalom, a man of wholeness.