SHEMINI 5772

This I believe: The universe is not calibrated to human notions of fairness.

For if the universe operated according to human standards of fairness, no good and gentle human beings would succumb to cancer before their time.

And if the universe operated according to human standards of fairness, no tsunami, no earthquake, no hurricane would sweep away thousands. No famine, no drought, no virus would decimate millions.

And if the universe operated according to human standards of fairness, even its smallest inconsistencies and injustices would realign to make sense, like the college admissions process or the inexplicable popularity of Seven Woks or why some really great shows get cancelled after one season while Jersey Shore has been renewed for a sixth.

All of this may come off as a ringing indictment of God--for if we are to speak of the rules of the universe we might as well take up our grievances with the chief Rule Maker and Enforcer, best known for really good, reliable rules like the speed of light, the constancy of the number pi, the law of gravity.

Two weeks ago Kelly and I visited the The Scales of the Universe, a 400-foot-long walkway that hugs the glass curtain wall along the second level of the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History. This exhibit illustrates the vast range of size in the universe — from the enormous expanse of our observable universe to the smallest subatomic particles — by using the 87-foot Hayden Planetarium Sphere as a basis for comparison.

I guess the feeling with which I left the exhibit could best be summed up as an overwhelming sense of, “It’s really not all about me, is it?” Or, even more, “It’s really not at all about me.”

God is what God is. In my way of thinking, God and the Universe are Echad, One and the same, and the interconnectedness of all matter and energy is how I understand God. As the Chasidim say: It’s all God. The good, the bad, the everything of everything. Isaiah has written: “I form light and create darkness. I make shalom and create calamity, I am Adonai, who does all these things,” who does everything, who is everything.

I would suggest here that the problem isn’t so much a flaw in God’s universe as it is a flaw in our perception, in our stubborn insistence that we matter most, that what we, frail, little human beings perceive as “fair” ought to be at the center of the considerations for a universe in which subatomic particles and galactic clusters provide the best window into the mind, as it were, of God, into the essence of God’s Nature.

What I am saying is, God’s universe apparently has room enough for mountains and avalanches, honey and beestings, children laughing and cancer cells, and that the forces of creation and destruction play by the rules of their Nature, the Nature of things, heedless of how we feel about them.

We, frail little human beings, are, to be sure, remarkable creatures--capable of art and science, of love and wisdom, creatures of such towering achievement and deep yearning that I believe that even if the Universe were to harbor untold reservoirs of intelligent life we would nevertheless exist unique among God’s staggering variety of Expressions.

But, when it comes to understanding “fairness,” we have it all wrong.

In this week’s portion, Shemini, this story is told:

Two of Aaron’s sons die in the blink of an eye, cut down with fire in the prime of life, as they ascended the altar in their first act of priesthood. They offer what the Torah calls esh zarah, strange fire in God’s presence.

A massive blaze erupts from before God and consumes the young men. Aaron, Israel’s great speaker, Moses’s own mouthpiece, falls uncharacteristically silent. His grief knows no bounds, its expression, no words.

Really, what words can give voice to such terrible fortune? Aaron’s silence is total, a black hole of unanswerable grief eddying around the center of a father’s galaxy.

The Rabbis struggled mightily with this passage. Many tried to account for the deaths of Nadav and Abihu by saying, more or less, it was their fault. They came to the altar perhaps impure, perhaps intoxicated, perhaps with ill intentions.

But my favorite midrashim, my favorite Rabbinic lessons about this passage, are the ones that conclude that, ultimately, there is no higher meaning in their demise. “The same fate is in store for the righteous and the wicked,” says the Bible’s gentle cynic, Kohelet, a line that the Rabbis cite in their discussion of the tragedy of Aaron’s sons.

Even more provocatively, the 3rd Century Rabbi Jochanan said, “This story proves only that it is painful for God, when the children of the righteous die while their parents are still alive.”

We say this still, sometimes, when we must bury a child before the parent. We say, “It shouldn’t be this way, the universe isn’t supposed to work this way, it’s supposed to happen the other way around.”

Here, then, is one answer. If our notions of fairness do not accurately represent the way the Universe works, the way God operates, then we must come to a different understanding of why we, frail little human beings, have such a deeply ingrained--it seems almost genetically encoded--sense of fairness, of what adds up and what violates our sensibilities. We must come to terms about why we have such an intuitive sense of the difference between the way things are and the way things ought to be.

I think that inner cognitive dissonance is actually one place we locate God, and that our human notions of fairness are actually not a description of the Universe but a response to it, a response to the basic Nature of the Universe, to our perception of its overwhelming scale that makes us infinitesimally small.

In fact our evolved sense of fairness may be a way of compensating for the way in which the Universe does not respond to our human needs. We have evolved as a species and as a civilization to impose order on what we perceive to be chaos.

Our Biblical images of God comport with this internal sensibility: In the first chapter of the Torah God takes chaos and darkness and imposes order and light. In the Exodus God tames the raging sea and turns it into a highway. At Sinai God tames the wild wilderness mob and turns them into a nation of laws and discipline.

Some of our ancestors wrote those laws, of course, the same way they composed those images, claiming inspiration from a Source they called God--or, more accurately, from their internal sense that the universe was not a fair place and that if God wasn’t going to come down and make things run right then we, frail (yet spunky!) little human beings, better get on with doing it ourselves.

And so it goes, that almost everything else special about the Jewish way of looking at the world blossoms forth from this generative cell.

Our unique heritage of Law and Order goes back to the origins of our religious civilization and provides the basic orientation of our greatest contributions to world literature: the Torah, the Mishna, the Talmud, the Shulchan Aruch… all works that say, basically, “Yes, life is terribly unfair but here’s how you live so as to make sense of it all. Even more, here’s how you pursue justice in an unjust world.”

And then the Kabbalists, the mystics of the Jewish tradition, took an even wider lens and said, “Really our job is Tikkun Olam, repairing the universe, because it is broken, it is cracked and darkness obscures the light of God.”

The Kabbalists really got it, man, because they understood that the only possible response to the unfairness of life--the cosmic injustice of good people suffering, of people who ought to prosper in fact flailing and falling between the cracks, while miscreants and reprobates feast and flourish--the only possible way to deal with the really hard stuff in the world is to make tikkun -- to go out there and make it better.

Over 19 billion years, the Universe--that is to say, God--permitted frail, little human beings to evolve to such a degree of sophistication and power that we can, working together, make the universe a little better. In assisting in the ongoing creation of the world we actually assist in the ongoing creation of God.

And when life hits us, or someone we love, or someone in need, really hard, we can put our arms around one another, set about improving what we can on this shabby little planet so in need of our help, and say to God, “Now I know why you sent me.”

Shabbat Shalom.