Shemini Nadav and Avihu: Strange fire

Why were Aaron and his sons not permitted to mourn their sons/brothers? Why were their tunics intact? What was the strange fire?

The number eight has a meaning of beyond the completion represented by seven: it is extraordinary. The numeral 8 also represents infinity.

This is a hyperlink to the deaths of Nadav and Avihu. Water, water is a lie, it cannot put out the fire of Ben Azzai's yearning for intimacy with G8d. Like the fire at Sinai, and the fire at the burning bush that did not consume.

These words are a hyperlink to the very mystical experience of Nadav and Avihu at Sinai, where G8d is seen in Exodus:

While others fell on their faces, Nadav and Avihu rushed in. There is evidence they were offering themselves up in misguided mystical union with G*d. The strange fire, eish zarah is that their offering is not to choose life, as we are commanded in Deuteronomy.

Torah’s true message of life is the true fire, the one commanded, and death is the strange fire, never commanded. So choose life that you and your children can live.

From my Drash Shemini 5781 https://margosmidrash.wordpress.com/2021/04/09/shemini-5781-yom-hashoah/

Blu and R Yitz Greenberg's Drash: Choose Life https://www.jewelsofelul.com/2015/08/17/elul-3-blu-and-rabbi-yitz-greenberg-choose-life/

Consider the tikkun if we shift the narrative of Nadav and Avihu’s deaths as misguided young mystics, running toward death, instead of a punishing G*d.

Today in the world we strive for glory instead of choosing life, and war and climate change threaten humanity's existence. Is it our death wish? Aaron and his sons were forbidden to mourn for their brother/son. Suicide, not due to mental illness, but for the sake of glory, mystical or otherwise is forbidden. What of the repeated suffering of the Jewish people throughout history, does it make life absurd, do we dare conclude as many modern philosophers have, that G*d and Torah are irrelevant or dead? Camus The Myth of Sisyphus: Illustrated with the absurdity of life with the tale of Sisyphus whose existence centered around pushing a rock up a hill. “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide” Camus councils embracing the absurdity and rejecting despair. Yes, human behavior can be, and often has been (ironically) inhumane, history and present day events show us this. But there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than were dreamt of in your philosophy ~(both from Shakespeare’s Hamlet) There is a reality beyond human games and machinations, and a Unity that we resonate with. We are stardust, we are light, each moment is eternal, each heartbeat a miracle, and our faith reinforces this with the exhortation to “choose life, vacharta BaChayim, that we and our children shall live. It might be an essence of our faith, as Pesach approaches we make a seder to “tell it to our children”. I imagine the Holy One saying to Nadav and Avihu, or to the survivors of tragedy “don’t worry about anything else, just choose life, that you and your children might live, and when you need a lifeline to shamayim, when you can once again create community, I will be there for you.” for four hundred years of slavery, for 300 years following 70 CE, for three days in the belly of a fish, for the Holocaust, the Inquisition, the Crusades. Only this, choose life that we and our children might live. This past week in Torah we were commanded to remember to forget the name of Haman. Forgetting helps, in the same way we forget the terror and pain of childbirth, and just remember falling in love. And perhaps we forgive G*d and the Universe, I did that once, it’s liberating. As we hurtle fast forward into the arms of climate change, or entertain nuclear holocaust, in an experiment with suicide, I pray with all I've got that humanity only remembers to choose life.