Imagine what Aaron must be feeling. On what should have been his finest day, God killed, suddenly, publicly, without warning, his two children. Children who did nothing wrong save from trying to worship that same God. He is beyond words. His silence is not that of the suffering saint, but the silence of a man who no longer knows what to think or what to feel.
When the world is strange, when evil appears, and when things don’t seem fair or make sense, we desire comfort. Even after we grow up, we still want a mother to pick us up, to hold us, to assure us that things will work out, and that there is hope. We want to crawl into her bosom and cry, and to be afraid no longer. God is the greatest mother of all. God hears the tears of orphans and widows, of the poor and the abused. But, for Aaron, God is not a mother. God is the murderer, the very one who cast the shadows of chaos on his life. What then? What is to be done after the most senseless of deaths?
The response is a set of laws. No longer will our actions be determined by caprice but by rules and structure. We will now be responsible for creating order, for shaping a world that can make sense. It begins from the most sensitive place, from the Holy of Holies, whose dedication was marred by the bloodletting, and it continues out to all realms of our lives. From how we do business to who we sleep with, each act must be intentful, considered, and performed to improve the world. If God can not mother the world, we will, and if God will not perfect the world – we must.