Torah reading: Leviticus chapters 9 through 11.
Haftarah: 2nd Samuel 6:1 to 7:17.
Today I'm going to focus on the Haftarah reading, which describes how the Ark of the Covenant was brought back to Jerusalem (after having wreaked havoc in the Land of the Philistines in 1 Samuel). In particular, I'd like to discuss the death of Uzzah (2 Samuel 6:3-4,6-8):
They set the ark of God on a new cart and brought it from the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. Uzzah and Ahio, sons of Abinadab, were guiding the new cart with the ark of God on it, and Ahio was walking in front of it...When they came to the threshing floor of Nakon, Uzzah reached out and took hold of the ark of God, because the oxen stumbled. The Lord’s anger burned against Uzzah because of his irreverent act; therefore God struck him down, and he died there beside the ark of God.
Then David was angry because the Lord’s wrath had broken out against Uzzah, and to this day that place is called Perez Uzzah.
When I first volunteered for this week's D'var Torah, I mentioned that this is not a comfortable or easy story to discuss. Our modern-day reaction to this incident tends to be one of shock and outrage: God got angry at Uzzah and killed him for
trying to prevent his sacred Ark from falling! How can we love or worship such a cruel, arbitrary God?
There are three common explanations for this incident that tend to come up a lot, singly or in combination; I call these "The Devil's In The Details", "He Deserved It" and "Touching the High-Voltage Line." (I come from a Christian background so I'm far more familiar with the standard Christian interpretations -- but I welcome discussion of Jewish commentary as well, of course!) I'm going to briefly summarize each conventional explanation and why I think each is flawed, and then explain my own theory (which, as far as I know, nobody's put out there yet). This might be kind of lengthy, so bear with me and feel free to skim the first three sections if you're familiar with the standard interpretations already.
"The Devil's in the Details"
This is undoubtedly the most common theory given in conventional Christian commentary. Simply put, it states that Uzzah's motives may have been good, but this was irrelevant because, to God, our motives do not matter. God gives us rules to follow, and he wants them followed to the letter, darn it, and if we don't follow every single detail correctly, we've sinned and deserve punishment. Even if we have the best motives in the world, God doesn't care about our reasons -- only our actions.
(Many commentators also point out that the Ark was not even being properly transported -- it was supposed to be carried on poles through rings on the sides of the Ark (Exodus 25:12-14), and then only by the Kohathites (Numbers 7:9). Apparently, God was angry from the moment David gave orders to put the Ark on an oxcart instead, and Uzzah touching it was just the last straw.)
I think most of us instinctively hate this theory. I know I do. For one thing it seems inconsistent with many of the prophetic writings (for example, Isaiah 1) which stress individual conscience and purity of motive over "obeying the Law":
Stop bringing meaningless offerings!
Your incense is detestable to me.
New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations—
I cannot bear your worthless assemblies.
Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals
I hate with all my being.
They have become a burden to me;
I am weary of bearing them.
And -- even more importantly to my mind -- it reduces God to the level of a petty, carping bureaucrat obsessed with trivial minutiae; the sort of person we don't even respect when we meet them here on earth, let alone worship and love. Are we really willing to accept that the Infinite is only infinitely
inflexible?
"He Deserved It"
This explanation (often seen in combination with Theory 1) asserts that Uzzah's motives were really not so pure after all. Uzzah, you see, suffered from the sin of pride. He believed, for some reason, that he was special; that he was above God's law and that he could freely touch the Ark without dying. He lacked proper respect for the holiness of God and his Ark.
This explanation is at once unconvincing and disproportionate. Unconvincing, because the Ark had been kept at Uzzah's house for twenty years; he hadn't touched it then (unlike the young men of Beth-Shemesh mentioned in Samuel 1:6, who "looked into the Ark" and died). Furthermore, surely Uzzah had heard tales of the Ark's dread power and the havoc it had wreaked among the Philistines; it seems ridiculous that he'd suddenly decide that he could touch it without harm.
And disproportionate, because David strolling alongside him -- who actually gave the orders for the ark to be improperly transported and went on to commit several rather heinous crimes -- got off, if not scot-free, with considerably less drastic consequences than Uzzah. Shouldn't adultery and murder rate higher in the punishment scale than a momentary brush against an ark?
"Touching the High-Voltage Line"
To my mind, this is the best of the three conventional theories. It states that there was something intrinsically powerful and dangerous about the Ark: a force, or energy, like electricity or atomic energy, that would be instantaneously transmitted to anyone who came into contact with it. In other words, touching the ark was like touching a high-voltage power line; no matter how pure your motives are, the electricity doesn't care. You're still dead.
Like I said, I think this theory has some merit to it; it certainly shifts much of the blame off both God (who does not directly "choose" to kill Uzzah) and Uzzah (who is more or less an innocent bystander, just "in the wrong place at the wrong time.") And it's consistent with the Ark's deadly powers as described in other passages of the Bible.
A Fourth Possibility?
However, I'd like to take a closer look still at Uzzah's motives. All three theories presuppose a common assumption: that Uzzah made a mistake in touching the ark (he was sinful, or proud, or just didn't realize its power). In other words, he died because he did the wrong thing.
But what if this isn't true? What if Uzzah died because he did the right thing?
…I'll explain.
Looking at the larger picture for a moment, to me this speaks of a huge problem in much conventional Biblical commentary: the nearly universal assumption that everyone who suffers in the Bible deserves it. God rewards the "good guys", especially his "favorites" (David and Jacob and Samuel and so on) and punishes the "bad guys". In other words, if Uzzah died, it must be because he sinned. And this axiom goes unchallenged by pretty much everyone, at least in my experience.
To my way of thinking, it's an atrocious assumption. It does an enormous disservice to the text to read it through this lens -- especially when the question of why the innocent suffer and the wicked prosper is a major theme throughout Job and the prophetic writings. We don't live in a world where the "good guys" always live and the "bad guys" always die; why should this be any different in the world of the Bible? Indeed, from Martin Luther King to Gandhi, from Uriah to Jonathan to the unnamed Israelites who fell on the battlefield beside him, there are countless example that this is demonstrably not the way the world works -- in Biblical times, or in ours. More often than not throughout history, being a person who does the "right thing" has been more likely to get you killed or at least less "successful" in life than those who do the opposite.
So what does all this have to do with Uzzah?
What would have happened if the Ark actually had fallen?
Perhaps nothing. Or (if it did hold some deadly internal energy) maybe it would have exploded, killing everyone around it. Or broken or lost its miraculous powers to protect Israel or some other disastrous outcome. We can't know…because of Uzzah's quick actions.
What if Uzzah -- seeing the Ark tilting and about to fall -- didn't reach out to catch it from blind reflex, but rather deliberately decided to sacrifice himself to prevent the unthinkable disaster of the Ark hitting the ground?
What if he knew that touching the Ark was "against the rules", knew that it would almost certainly result in his death, and yet chose to do it anyway to prevent something even worse from occurring?
This brings to mind a couple of stories that were in the news lately. A police officer named Murad Khan in Afghanistan who, seeing a suicide bomber about to detonate himself, deliberately embraced the attacker, shielding others from the blast. And a young man and woman, Lyle Eagle Tail and Madison Wallace, who drowned after they leaped into an icy river to rescue Madison's little brother who had fallen in. By any definition, heroes.
Was it "prideful" for these people to leap into a raging river? A "sin" against the laws of nature to embrace a suicide bomber to shelter surrounding onlookers? Perhaps by the standards of pure self-preservation, yes it was. But from a higher vantage point, absolutely not. Rather, it was the best and most heroic action to take.
I believe that, faced with a similar situation in which he had only a split second to react, Uzzah made a similar choice: to disregard his own safety to protect Israel's holiest artifact and the lives of those around him.
A little postscript to this theory. Something that often comes up in discussions of Uzzah's supposed "pride" is the idea that his actions were not necessary. "If the Ark had truly fallen off the cart, God would surely have done something to prevent it from hitting the ground -- suspended the law of gravity or miraculously teleported it back onto the cart. He didn't need Uzzah interfering."
Well, yes -- I think we all agree that God can do anything he/she/it would like. In the event, however, the Ark was prevented from hitting the ground. Something stopped it from falling off the cart.
…Or, to be more precise, someone. Uzzah.
What if Uzzah was God's mechanism for saving the Ark from disaster? What if Uzzah was meant to accompanying the Ark that day and to be beside it as it began to fall -- that, in some sense, the purpose of Uzzah's life was to sacrifice himself for the greater good of saving the Ark?
I warned you; it's not a comfortable or easy conclusion. But I think that, on some level, it's a more satisfying one.
Thoughts?