Author: Stephanie Friedman

Religion

Confronting the Physical in Parashat Sh’mini

In our day, we consume a voracious amount, without much thought to how each act of consumption could reveal our relationship to both the physical and the numinous worlds. Does this make us like Nadab and Abihu, offering an unscripted pan of incense in either our ignorance or our arrogance, ignoring the order of things as well as the necessary physicality of the gift that would connect us to the One beyond, thinking that an odor alone will do?