The Fire That Stays

It’s Thursday morning, and I’m sitting in my office as I write this. And I have just signed a power of attorney authorizing my rabbi to sell my bread.

This is one of the stranger things you do as a Jew in the week before Pesach. You sign a document granting your rabbi the authority to sell all the chametz in your home to a non-Jew for the duration of the holiday. Rabbi Zimmerman at Beth Shalom handles it for me. I filled out the form, signed it, and made a donation. In a few minutes I’ll log on to his parsha class.

Across the room there’s a case of kosher wine that arrived this week — a 2018 reserve cabernet sauvignon from the Judean Hills, non-mevushal, kosher for Pesach. Some of it is for Shabbat. Most of it is for the seders.

I haven’t yet started the deep cleaning. The pantry is still full. But the wheels are turning. This is the infrastructure of Jewish life. Not just the seder itself but the thousand small acts of preparation that make the seder possible.

Parashat Tzav, which we read this Shabbat, is also about infrastructure.

Last week, Vayikra was the invitation. Tzav is the operations manual. The word means “command,” and Rashi notes it implies urgency — ziruz — a diligence binding on future generations.

And the very first task the priest performs each morning, before anything else, is this:

וְלָבַ֨שׁ הַכֹּהֵ֜ן מִדּ֣וֹ בַ֗ד וּמִֽכְנְסֵי־בַד֮ יִלְבַּ֣שׁ עַל־בְּשָׂרוֹ֒ וְהֵרִ֣ים אֶת־הַדֶּ֗שֶׁן אֲשֶׁ֨ר תֹּאכַ֥ל הָאֵ֛שׁ אֶת־הָעֹלָ֖ה עַל־הַמִּזְבֵּ֑חַ וְשָׂמ֕וֹ אֵ֖צֶל הַמִּזְבֵּֽחַ׃ The priest shall dress in linen raiment, with linen breeches next to his body; and he shall take up the ashes to which the fire has reduced the burnt offering on the altar and place them beside the altar.

— Vayikra 6:3

He removes the ashes. That is the job. Before anything dramatic happens — the priest puts on his linen, walks to the altar, and clears away what yesterday’s fire left behind. The Hebrew term is terumat hadeshen, the lifting of the ashes. The least glamorous act in the entire sacrificial system. Without it, the altar chokes and the fire dies.

Then comes the verse that carries the whole parsha:

אֵ֗שׁ תָּמִ֛יד תּוּקַ֥ד עַל־הַמִּזְבֵּ֖חַ לֹ֥א תִכְבֶּֽה׃ A perpetual fire shall be kept burning on the altar, not to go out.

— Vayikra 6:6

Eish tamid. Lo tikhbeh. Read it again. The fire is perpetual, but it is not self-sustaining. One verse earlier, the text specifies: every morning the priest feeds wood to it. The fire did not survive because it was miraculous. It survived because someone tended it.

Missiles struck Dimona and Arad this past Saturday night — nearly two hundred people injured. Cluster munitions hit Bnei Brak. On Monday, a Hezbollah rocket killed Nuriel Dubin, z“l, a twenty-seven-year-old from Margaliot in the Upper Galilee. She was engaged.

Soroka Medical Center moved patients underground and treated the wounded through the night.

Eish tamid. The fire does not go out. But it doesn’t tend itself. The doctors who went back to work. The paramedics. The parents who held their children in sealed rooms and then, the next morning, made breakfast. These are the people clearing the ashes and laying the wood.

This week, JNS reported on the five hundredth anniversary of the Prague Haggadah — the first complete illustrated Haggadah ever printed by Jews, created by Gershom Cohen in 1526. One copy traveled from Europe to Charleston, South Carolina, carried by an immigrant named Edward Lewith. His family recorded births and deaths in its margins for three generations before donating it to Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim. Five hundred years. Same text. New names written in the margins each generation.

That is what eish tamid looks like on paper. Someone prints it. Someone carries it across an ocean. Someone passes it forward.

Pesach begins Wednesday night. We will sit at tables in Atlanta and Jerusalem and Prague and Buenos Aires and read the same story we have read for longer than any Haggadah has been in print. We have done this before — under Roman siege, in Spanish cellars, in displaced persons camps, in bomb shelters in Be’er Sheva.

Sunday night, the Atlanta Israel Coalition is putting on an event called Bridges of Hope — a Persian Jewish vocalist, a Black soul musician, a Moroccan interfaith activist, an Iranian-American comedian, a Haitian hip-hop artist who became Orthodox. None of them had to be there. Every one of them chose it.

Every Jewish practice that survived survived because someone found a way to carry it forward. The fire moved from the altar to the page.

Lo tikhbeh. It shall not go out.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham