What Goes In Might Come Out

By Rabbi Joshua (inaudibly known as The Hoffer Hoffman

In memory of my great-aunt, Mrs. Esther Lewinter, who passed away on Monday in Broooklyn, New York. May her memory be a blessing.

The Torah tells s that when Aharon, after witnessing the death of his sons,Nadav and Avihu, during the inauguration of the mishkan, and told by Moshe that what happened was a fulfillment of what God had said, " I will be sanctified through those who are close to Me,' he was silent.The .midrash, as cited by Rashi, says that he received a reward for this silence, in that God spoke to him alone when He delivered the prohibition for kohanim to enter the Ohel Moed, or Tent of Meeting, after indulging in wine.This prohibition was given following the deaths of Aharon's two sons and the instructions of how to deal with their corpses. The juxtaposition of the deaths and the prohibirtion led to the opinion in the midrash that the reason Nadav and Avihu died is that they entered theOhel Moed while inebriated. I once heard from Rabbi Shubert Spero, former rabbi of the Young Israel of Cleveland, that the connection between Aharon's silence and the prohibition of entering the mishkan after drinking wine is that Aharon, through his silence at such an emotionally laden time, demonstrated that he was able to control the extreme emotions that are generated by the kind of event that he had just witnessed, and therefore he was told of the prohibition of entering the mishkan after drinking wine, which is a precaution to avoid the reign of extreme emotions when serving God on the highest level possible, in the mishkan.

Rav Moshe Shternbach, in his Ta'am VaDa'as, writes that Ahron's silence was not merely the silence of a person who does not know what to say after suffering an overwhelming tragedy. Rather, coming on the wake of Moshe's remark that God's name was sanctified through the deaths that occurred, actually constituted an acknowledgment that what occurred was, indeed, a Kiddush Hash, Interestingly, while the version of Targum Onkeles that we have in our standard Chumashim translated the word 'vayidom' - and he was silent, as veshasik, which also means to be silent, there is an alternate reading of the Targum,brought by the Rambam and the Meiri to Avos, 3:3, which translates the word as ' veshavach,' meaning, and he praised. This would conform with Rabbi Sternbach's explanation.

Rabbi Shimshon Pincus, in his Tiferes Torah, seems to take Rabbi Sternbach's approach a step further. He says that silence itself is a form of communication, and constitutes not simply a passive reaction, but a positive message. He proves this, first, from a teaching of the Gra (Vilna gaon), who says that one should not say the words ' baruch Hu uvaruch Shemo' after the beginning of a blessing. Usually, people understand this as an instruction to remain silent in order to be able to fulfill that saying that blessing through hearing it, and that requires hearing it without interruption. However, the Gra says that the. purpose of the silence is in order to combine the two different names of God that are said in the beracha, for the purpose of convbeying an additional messag.The silence between the names, then, is actually an articulation of another aspect of God. Rabbi Pincus' second proof is brought from 'early works, ' which he doesn't name but which teach that there are four prototypical character traits that a person needs to have, from which all other good traits stem, and one of these four traits is that of silence. Thus, silence itself has a positive value, and carries a message. Rav Tzvi Yehudah Kook would often say that the term' Shemiras HaLashon," entails more than just refraining from speaking leshon hora. Rather, it means that one should guard his tongue in the sense of not speaking. Rav Dovid Cohen, who was the Nazir of Yerushaalayim, and a close student of Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook, was known to go for long periods of time without speaking. I heard, at the first yahrzeit observance for him, held in Jerusalem in 1973, at the Harry FFischel Institute, Rabbi Shmuel Sperber say that Rabbi Cohen's silence carried great meaning,and that he was impressed by the genius of that silence.

By considering silence as being a positive ethical trait, we can also understand why the laws of kosher and non-kosher animals, fowl and fish are recorded in our parsha, following the entire episode of Nadav and Avihu, Aharon's silence, and related matters. The Ramban says that refraining from eating these animals and birds is a means of preventing the development of the cruel character traits that they have as a result of consuming their food through mauling their prey. This juxtaposition thus teaches us that in order to control what does or does not come out of our mouths, we need to control what goes into our mouths, as well.