Rabbi's Chayva's Chat

In sixth grade at Hausner Day School in Palo Alto, more than a few years ago, a full semester of my history class led me through every reference mentioned in Billy Joel’s hit song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” I was already a preteen devotee of the Beatles and ‘60s music, an eager learner, and an avid reader, so I felt familiar with some of the events mentioned in the verses of the song. But this week, as we read Parshat Tzav, I’m called more to the chorus: “We didn’t start the fire / It was always burning since the world’s been turning,” because in Leviticus 6:6 we encounter the verse, “Fire always shall be kept burning on the altar; it shall not go out.”

The levitical fire is a flame to be kept burning upon the sacrificial altar at all times. Biblical sacrifice gave the Israelites a way to connect to a God they could neither see nor hear. The God of Leviticus gives Moses (and occasionally Aaron) directives, but never interacts with the people, or anyone else for that matter. In this book, God is both present and absent in a way that might feel truer to our modern experience than God’s dramatic, anthropomorphic presentation in Genesis and Exodus. Burning offerings upon an altar is both a physical and esoteric act, bridging our material world with the ethereal divine. 

Keeping the altar fire burning eternally is, of course, both a task and a metaphor. Many important projects of life - to maintain a sense of holiness, to keep a community going, to stay in relationship with another person - require regular labor that is much more mundane than its sacred goal or aim. We often focus on this side of the metaphor because we need reminders to keep going, to remember not to lose the noble forest for the everyday trees. 

I want to remind us, though, that there is another interpretation of the eternally burning flame - the fire that has always been burning since the world’s been turning -  and that is the comfort of the fire’s perpetual presence. “The fire shall not go out” can be more than an instruction; it is also a reminder to recognize and reconnect with the things that ground us. We might have stopped noticing them - the sweetness of a child’s bedtime routine, the sacredness of showing up at synagogue and feeling at home - but they are still there, and they are still holy.