Shadows Part 2

צּלּ       TSEL

What Colour is a Jewish Shadow?

From the Holy of Holies issued two flames of fire, as thin as threads, then parted into four, and two each pierced the nostrils of Nadab and Abihu, whose souls were burnt, although no visible injury was visible.[1]

If we are ever to understand this strange description of what happened to the two pious and righteous, and yet egotistical and impetuous young men, the sons of Aaron the priest, we have to go beyond the usual midrashic interpretations that discuss the text in moralistic and ritualistic terms.  We need to grapple with the oblique and allusionistic imagery of the passage.     The sacred writer here puts into words an ecstatic moment in which power that issues from the Holy of Holies, like light diffracted through a prismatic lens, divided into its constituent streams of energy.  Like four threads of pulsating electricity, this energy penetrates the sons of Aaron who, in their eagerness to shine not only in the light of God’s eyes as impressive servants of the Temple cult but also to prove to their father and their uncle, Moses, the intensity of their faith and their worthiness to replace those brothers of the older generation of Exodus and the reception of the Law at Sinai.  But instead of inspiration of the divine through their nostrils, God sends to them a fiery punishment, in the form of invisible flames that sear into their souls deep within their bodies, leaving no outward trace of the action. 

This is metaphor within metaphor within metaphor, imagery inside a conceit inside a mystical code.  What the young men experience, unseen by others, especially their father and uncle as well as the rest of Israel, is at once punishment and reward, suffering due to transgression of the Law that allows no spontaneous or idiosyncratic display of service (avodah) at the altar or in the Temple or at any of the earlier forms of Ark and Tent; and at the same time, this is a reward, as much for Aaron who is saved the humiliation of seeing his children disgraced by God before all the people and in the light of history, and for Nadab and Abihu whose zeal is recognized as meant to sanctify the Name of the Lord.  What is invisible, so thin it cannot be seen, yet is able to be divided and travel through space and time at an incredible speed, but does this mean (in modern scientific parlance) the speed of light?  Here the terms of reference, the shape of the conceptualization, and the sacred rhetoric show that this is a Light that is at the same time the Shadow of God’s luminous and powerful presence in the world of flesh, life and history. 

The Metaphorics of Space

Putting aside anachronistic scientific discussion of the relationship between light and colour in terms of the length of diffracted rays and the various mixtures of beams (e.g., prisms and lens) and liquids (e.g., stains, dyes and paints), we need to begin our midrashic elaboration of this passage in Leviticus by showing how colour and light were understood in ancient Israel as well as in various other pre-scientific societies.  Then, when we understand the mataphorics of such a conceit—an elaborate and intricate figure of speech and thought—It will be possible to talk about the nature of shadows in literal, allegorical and anagogic senses.

There will be a discussion on the way the aesthetics of light and atmosphere in the mid-nineteenth- century led to new ways to see and discuss the nature of shadows.  There came about at the end of that same century, in art and cultural historians such as Any Warburg, a more subtle vocabulary to prise apart notions of how the “shadow of history” could be conceived, in terms such as Nachleben, Distanzierung and Zwischenraum—thus within the penumbra of a primal explosion of energy that casts its way into the darkness of creation one can trace the trajectory of an afterlife, the shadowy and ephemeral revenants that return in recreated form, where the darkness is separated from the light, and the liminal space opened between makes metaphor possible as an expression of such distancing.  The metaphor, let it be remembered, is a vehicle or device for carrying something from one place to another; and hence, figuratively, is at once the process of carrying, with all the transformative power of one lexical or imagistic meaning relocated in another conceptual space, the metamorphosis of the conjunction, mixing and memory of that reconfiguration, that is, the creation of a new set of words, images, concepts, and memories of that complicated experience; as well as, through even further extension, this time as metonymy and synechdoche, that is, through words, images and ideas, as the shape of the new conceptual space, its real, potential and imagined volume, its outer dimensions seen, felt, remembered from without, before and after, and the relationship to what was, is and may be new existential and mnemonic spaces around it.  Once the metaphor has been set in motion through the opening of a space by separation or distanciation it finds some form in which it may be perceived, remembered and re-experienced, although the perceptions, memories and speculated or imagined form is a shadow—adumbration, revenant, shaded or tinted or tainted beam of light.

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[1] Rachel-Esther bat-Avraham, “Musings of the author Rachel-Esther bat-Avraham”, Midrash—Parsha Shemini/Shabbat Paraha (5771) based on Leviticus 9:1-11:47 online at mhtml:file://F:\Rachel-Esther bat-Avraham <<Blog Archive>> Midrash—Pa (seen 25/07/2011).