Parshat Shmini 5786

Grieve out loud with me, rename the moon

This d'var Torah was given on Shabbat Parshat Shmini, April 2026 at Hinenu Baltimore and auto transcribed (please forgive any confusion in the text.)

If you don't want a sermon about grief right now, take like a 10 minute laugh. Yeah. There's the door. No, but truly, truly free to walk out and every. The feed is strong.

Read the room. Sorry

for everyone on Zoom. You are the precious angels who I can't see your chat feedback. So I wanted, I wanna talk this week about grief and, um, it's not such a reach and it's happening in congregations across the world, um, because this week's parsha, um, is parini the parsha in which, um, we see the ordination of a haron as the high priest.

Um, and a, a huge beautiful day of encounter with God that the people [00:01:00] have for the first time since Revelation and since the golden calf and the, the presence of God comes out and they fall on their faces, they do that a lot. They fall, fall on their faces in, in. Then the next moment that we receive in this parsha is aha.

Own sons who are now priests, NA and Avihu. And they each, according to Torah, take their fire pan, put fire in it, lay incense on it, and they offer before God and Zarah a strange fire which had not been requested of them. And fire comes forth from Hashem and consumes them, and they die according to God's will.

And then the next moment that happens in the parsha is that Moses turns to Aharon, the uncle of these boys who were just killed and says [00:02:00] to his brother, the father of these men who were just killed. This is what God meant when God said through those near to me, I will show myself holy and find kavod before all the people.

And Aaron was silent. The instructions go on to a haron and to his family to not grieve, lest all the people be punished by God. Take the bodies of Navi who out of the camp and do not cry, or we will all be punished.

The challenge sometimes is to say our grief out loud, because there is so much that silences it in the last few weeks, talking to strangers as I want to do. Whenever I meet someone who tells me they're Iranian, I say, how is your [00:03:00] nos? It's what you say in the spring, and the answer is bad. It's a challenge to say grief out loud and.

Watching the spokesman for the Rafi Nia Synagogue in Tehran talk about how it was bombed by Israeli missile talking of the Sifri Torah. The Torah scrolls buried in the wreckage. It's impossible to not hear this grief allowed

my father, who for some reason cannot take off his, my heart is in Gaza dog tag for the disabled Israelis who have died without accessible bomb shelters. This grief that demands to be said out loud, but feels impossible to fully do so. And the grief [00:04:00] that aches that it almost feels crass to name in a litany like this because it is so personal and the loudest.

But the grief of job, loss of breakups, of loneliness, the loneliness, the grief of sick or dying, loved ones of loss of comfort, a grief for the world that isn't yours. If

you're able to yourself, allow yourself to name the grief that demands to be spoken aloud just for a moment.

Grief out loud [00:05:00] connects the heavens and earth. It connects the realms I want to invoke and invite in. One of my names sakes El Sheva, who is not named in this parsha, but the Midras calls in because the rabbis are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that Aaron isn't allowed to say anything. And so they need to fill in the blanks to say what's unsaid, to make Torah lighter to carry.

And so the Midras say, well, even if Aaron didn't mourn, don't worry, Elva did. The Rabba says Elva bot did not enjoy happiness in the world. True. She witnessed five crowns attained by her relatives in one day, the day that I was just talking about. [00:06:00] Her brother-in-law, Moses was a king. Her brother Naone was a prince.

Her husband, our own, was high priest. Her two sons were both deputy high priests. Ra. Her grandson was a high priest, anointed for war, a priest, not a high priest, anointed for war. But when her sons entered to offer incense and were burnt, her joy was changed to mourning. Thus, it is after the death of the two sons of Aran.

Rabbi Marsha Zimmerman says that El Sheva Bat Amina teaches us the power of expressing your sadness when the world and even God seemed to be telling you to deny your grief in this sequence that is. Randomly divided between weeks from the par of last week to the par of this week. We can rant about that at another time.

Um, we see the, the moment in which Moses offers a sacrifice and uses that [00:07:00] blood to ordain his brother as the high priest, and over that word, the ram of ordination. Slaughter has a shell, shallot, which is the cancellation, the musical notation that appears only four times in the Torah. This special trope, and the rabbis of course, have a field day with this.

And one thought is that whenever the she shallot appears, it is when there is jealousy or doubt or fear of what is to come. But she shallot means chain and I understand the she shallot and even feelings of jealousy or of fear. As a chain that can connect heaven and earth, that worrying, that anxiety, that intuition, that wondering or knowing what is to come and the discomfort that it can give us in this [00:08:00] world, that it is a link between heaven and earth.

Perhaps Mosha knew what was to come to his brother and his sons, the grief that was to bear, but this sha chalet showed the beginnings of a grief that Moshe out loud himself. I hope that amidst all of the heartbreaking news, you've also been consuming. Um, Apollo two, Artemis two content. Um. Artemis two is this 10 day lunar mission that launched on the first, and they have four astronauts.

It's crude by nasa, thank God. And it's the first flight beyond low earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. Wow. Right. [00:09:00] Talk to my mother. She's very excited about it. And, um, one of the astronauts is from Baltimore, hometown hero, Heidi Schloss shouting out other hometown hero. And, um, and the moment that had me weeping over the news was the moment in which the, the astronauts are broadcasting and they talk about, um, discovering this crater on the other side of the moon.

They announced that they're going to name the crater after Carol Taylor Weissman, the deceased wife of one of the astronauts, Reed Weissman. Carol was married to Reed until her death from cancer in 2020, and it was named just moments after the [00:10:00] crew set the record for the farthest distance from Earth ever traveled by humans.

And if you haven't seen the clip, you see one of these astronauts, crew mates talking about the wife of his crew mate, and they weep. They just all weep.

This is Jen Chu's. He named the bright spot on the moon. After her, he was 248,655 miles from Earth. The furthest distance ever traveled by human. And she had passed away six years ago and still she was on the tip of his tongue and still of course, and for no reason. You can't imagine. He gave her name to space to a bright spot on the moon, pinning his heart right into the sky.

C-A-R-R-O-L-L seven Characters of love and moon dust, and every magical thing between, I can't tell you the wild [00:11:00] hope this gives me. In the way we search for the deceased and the faces of flowers and aams, the great distance we go to honor the departed, the seeking Stella script of the heart. What I mean is, even when doing the hard, the demanding, the nearly impossible, we're really spelling out the letters in the names of the people we love.

It is all apostrophe. This moment of naming a bright spot in the sky, this crater. After a beloved, after this astronaut's beloved is so moving because it says out loud with the grief and invites us all in to witness it and hold it with those who mourn. We are mourning so much each of us alone in private, even if we rise for kadash and feel held by our loved [00:12:00] ones during Shiva.

And our friends know the anniversary of losses big and small. We are holding so much alone.

And the Mosha tells Aha Va and he tells him he must be silent and he was silent. Va do we have El Shiva, but Amina full of every emotion a person could be full of and a refusal above all to stay silent in her grief.

An invitation to all of us to not fear the grief that is present in us. Its hugeness, the caverns and craters. It carves out in our hearts, but to allow ourselves to speak it out loud, to resist the silence that echoes through Torah when Aha is victim to it. For us to allow [00:13:00] ourselves to witness it and one another to bear it.

An invitation to ask one another, what is your grief? And to speak as you are able with words or just your own heartfelt presence. And to keep asking,