Think about a once-in-a-lifetime experience you had. What was it like? Did you plan it for a long time beforehand (like a wedding or a big trip)? Or did it happen spontaneously?
What feelings do you remember having while it was happening? Did you know while it was happening that it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience?
Parshat Tzav, this week’s Torah portion, takes us into a once-in-a lifetime experience as Aaron and his sons become ordained as cohanim, as priests. As cohanim, they will officiate everything that goes on in the mishkan (tabernacle). Their ordination ceremony to bring them into this role is quite elaborate. Moses is the master of ceremonies, the guide, and leader of this elaborate ritual. There is ritual washing and step-by-step dressing in all of the priestly garments. There is anointing with oil. And there are three offerings of large animals: a bull for sin offering, a ram for the burnt offering, a ram of ordination.
As the sacrifices begin, they each start similarly. Moses brings the animal out, Aaron and his sons lay their hands on the animal, Moses slaughters the animal, and then he uses the blood in some kind of ritual way.
But for the third offering, the ordination offering, there is something unusual that we notice – not because the word is different, but because the trope is different. Our cantillation tradition ascribes a special trope to the word vayishchat, “and he slaughtered”:
וַיִּשְׁחָ֓ט
The trope is called a shalshelet and it appears only four times in the entire Torah: three times in the book of Genesis and once in Parshat Tzav (Leviticus 8:23). The shalshelet is a relatively long sequence of notes that go up and down and up and down and up and down. It musically draws out a single word, dramatizing and drawing our attention to a moment that might have otherwise passed us by.
The other three times the shalshelet appears, it comes at moments that are full of dramatic tension. The first time is in the story of Lot, after he has been told that Sodom is to be destroyed but he delays leaving. The second is with Eliezer, Abraham’s servant, when he prays an extensive prayer to God to find a wife for Isaac. The third time is in the Joseph narrative, when he is propositioned by the wife of Potiphar and he refuses her.
Noticing similarities between these moments of the shalshelet, some commentators explain that the shalshelet points us to an experience of hesitation, like Lot hesitating leaving his home and belongings, or like Joseph hesitating in his refusal of Potiphar’s sexual advances. Others suggest it signifies a moment of strength, in which an internal struggle turns into a decisive moment of confidence and clarity.
But here in this third and final slaughter of the ordination ceremony? Where is the hesitation, the inner struggle, or the strength?
We look to Moses.
The Babylonian Talmud (Zevachim 102a) brings us into a dispute amongst our sages of whether or not Moses was a High Priest. One group of rabbis say:
לֹא נִתְכַּהֵן מֹשֶׁה, אֶלָּא שִׁבְעַת יְמֵי הַמִּלּוּאִים בִּלְבַד.
Moses became a priest just for the seven days of the ordination.
After Aaron and his sons are ordained, they will be the ones to officiate everything in the mishkan; Moses will have no special role there at all. As we watch Moses move through all of the steps of the elaborate ordination ritual, suddenly with the shalshelet we realize just as something huge is beginning for Aaron and Aaron’s sons, something is ending for Moses.
So the shalshalet conveys a whole complex inner world. It conveys Moses’ reluctance and hesitation in affirming his brother as High Priest. It conveys Moses’ strength as a leader and his confidence in his brother taking on this role. And it also conveys the grief of experiencing something that he will never get to have again.
As the shalshelet draws our attention to Moses’ inner world, it gives us space to notice for ourselves how once-in-a-lifetime moments are often full of many feelings: of both hesitation and of confidence, of both fear and excitement, of both grief and of joy. May we give ourselves the gift of noticing these moments and making space for feeling it all.
Shabbat shalom,
Rav Leah