The Man Behind the Curtain
This week, the Torah offers another double Torah portion, Achrei Mot & Kedushim, which are both about creating holy community, in different ways. At the beginning of Achrei Mot, and in response to the deaths of Aaron's sons Nadav and Avihu (which we read about earlier in the Torah), G-d offers a strict set of laws regarding who is, and is not, allowed to approach the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle, and pull back the curtain which covers its entrance, when, and for what purpose.
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I had my first COVID shot this week. It was at Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots and the Revolution both play football. The stadium, like many sports arenas, has an elite level. At Gillette it’s called the Putnam Club, and features a distinct section of seats—red plastic leather rather than the normal blue plastic—and an indoor area for fans to watch the games in comfort no matter what the New England weather looks like outside.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has commandeered Gillette Stadium to distribute vaccines, and when I arrived I found the entire Putnam Club floor cleared of its furniture, replaced with over 100 nursing stations, operating seamlessly, an assembly line of life-saving vaccinations. It felt like a scene from a movie.
The whole thing took about five minutes, plus the 15 minute waiting period, and before I knew it a stranger was plunging a hypodermic needle into my arm, and depositing a strange substance created in a laboratory somewhere. And in case you’re wondering, no, I do not have super power…yet.
The experience of receiving my first vaccine dose got me thinking, about the layers of illusion that have to exist for a complex society to function—whether that’s the modern society we live in today, or the one we read about in the Torah this week within the Israelites camp.
This week, the Torah offers another double portion—Achrei Mot & Kedushim, which are tied together by discussions of holiness. Achrei Mot deals mainly with the fallout from Nadav and Avihu’s deaths earlier, before offering a list of sexual prohibitions along with the laws of Yom Kippur. Kedoshim, in contrast, includes many ethical obligations intended to help the Israelites create an ideal society within their camp, and plant the seeds of a new civilization in Canaan when they arrived.
Before all of that, though, as part of the reaction to Nadav and Avihu’s deaths, G-d offers a strict set of rules governing who is allowed to enter the Holy of Holies within the Tabernacle, and when, and what happens to those who pull back the curtain, and come too close to the presences of G-d within.
Leviticus 16:1
The LORD spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron who died when they drew too close to the presence of the LORD.
The LORD said to Moses: Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come at will into the Shrine behind the curtain, in front of the cover that is upon the ark, lest he die; for I appear in the cloud over the cover.
Thus only shall Aaron enter the Shrine: with a bull of the herd for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering.
He shall be dressed in a sacral linen tunic, with linen breeches next to his flesh, and be girt with a linen sash, and he shall wear a linen turban. They are sacral vestments; he shall bathe his body in water and then put them on.
There’s so much drama in this passage, and it seems so far away from the way we worship today as Jews. The rituals presented in this week’s Torah portion sound more like magic than anything else—displays performed before the entire community in order to reinforce the bonds that hold them together in the first place—their shared religion and ancestry.
To this day Yom Kippur remains among the most attended Jewish services of the year, second only to Passover Seders. The drama of that day is still very real, and still very connected to this week’s Torah portion, as we find ourselves at the end of the day in most synagogues, standing before an open Ark, our new Holy of Holies, with only a curtain to shield us from the sign of G-d’s presence among us, the Torah scrolls.
Sometimes, there’s danger in pulling back the curtain on these rituals, as the Torah seems to underline by connecting this week’s opening passage to last week’s deaths of Nadav and Avihu. The curtain creates the mystery, the magic, and while it’s human instinct to unravel the mystery and pull back the curtain, the truth can be more complicated and even harmful than the original display.
The curtain plays a key role in the 1939 classic movie, The Wizard of Oz. When Dorothy’s dog ToTo pulls back the curtain and exposes the Wizard as just an ordinary guy, it shatters a key illusion in the Emerald City, one Dorothy and her companions have heard about, and which drew them to the City in the first place—that there’s a great and powerful Wizard in the Land of Oz, who can do magical things like give courage, heart, and brains to those who have none, or return a lost little girl to her home in Kansas.
It’s the Wizards projection of his head, and those booming sound effects, make him seem powerful. It creates a sense of awe and wonder in his subjects, not unlike what Aaron must have evoked—dressed in his priestly linens, placing lots, dashing blood, and burning incense in clear view of the Israelite community, who have already witnessed the deaths of Aaron’s own sons, a testament to the power of the deity they had come to worship. The theatrics of the ritual only heighten the sense of awe and wonder it provokes.
But more than anything it’s the curtain, the one that hides the Wizards true form from his subjects, that gives him power. It creates a sense of mystery, just as the curtain covering the entrance to the Holy of Holies created a sense of mystery about the presence of G-d in their midst, a sense of mystery that empowered Aaron to perform rituals on behalf of the Israelite community aimed at maintaining that holy presence.
It’s always possible to pull the curtain back, and what’s beneath, as ToTo did in The Wizard of Oz. It can lead to profound moments of growth, like how the Wizard places Scarecrow in charge of Emerald City and chooses to return home to Kansas.
Still, there are times when you have to ignore the man behind the curtain, so to speak, and embrace the mystery. The mystery, after all, is only there as a tool. Just as Dorothy found when she clicker her heels together, it’s own our actions that make the most difference. It was the willingness of the Israelite community to participate in the rituals the Torah offers this week as much as Aaron’s theatrical garb or the mysterious Holy of Holies that cemented these very rituals, and their modern adaptations, at the heart of the Jewish experience, a series of choices made by successive generations of Jews.
It’s rare that our world faces a collectively individual choice like being vaccinated for COVID-19. The social institutions which run our lives are all geared up to convince people of the imperative—morally, socially, religiously—to be vaccinated. Rabbis, priests, philosophers, comedians, musicians, everyone is leveraging their platform to make it happen.
But to me, there was no more vivid clue of the social imperative to get vaccinated, than doing it in the socially and economically elite club area of Gillette Stadium, a place that’s normally roped off and inaccessible to all of us plebes, with its own parking, its own entrance to and from the stadium, and it’s own experience of the game. This time, we’re all in it together, and instead of ruby red slippers to take us back gone we have paper cards declaring our vaccine status.
All of this is to make this point. There’s a lot of science behind the vaccines that are rolling out around the world. Some of that science is almost magical, and the mass vaccination process itself is an almost theatrical experience. But it isn’t mandatory, it requires our willing participation, and to do that you have to be willing to have faith, in the science of vaccines no matter how mysterious they seem, in the technology of creating and testing them safely no matter how magical that seems, and in the stranger who will stick the whole thing into your arm. It’s a leap, but it’s a leap that’s worth taking.
So go get your shot, and good luck, and thanks for doing your part to embrace the mystery.
Shabbat Shalom.
