Parsha Shemini: The Solid Color of Silence
The other day I went to see an art exhibition by Los Angeles artist, Molly Larkey. A painting called “Shift” caught my eye. A large canvas, made from 216 smaller square canvases woven together forming a large rectangle caught my attention in an unexpected way. It was a conveyance of chaos and structure, with the seams of each square visible, forming raised boundaries; containers. Several layers of paint, in some places, sparing and translucent, nearly revealing the threads of the woven canvas. Some others, heavy swaths with ridges and waves of texture. Another layer of swirls and scribbles traversing squares, tightly bound in some places and elongated across others. Almost every individual square was impacted by its neighboring squares. Most strokes on the top most layer refused to be contained by boundaries. But there were a few squares that, from a distance of a few away, seemed perfect. They stood out from the rest, almost defiantly. The base layer of paint looked uniform, a single color, stayed within the boundary of a single square, not bleeding into the next, and not absorbing anything from its surroundings. It seemed comparatively quiet. But upon closer inspection, those squares were particularly textured. Each brush stroke was distinct, courageous and willful, and carried over from a neighboring square. Even though it didn’t look like it, it was in fact, just like every other square, impacted by what was happening around it.
It felt like a metaphor for this week’s parsha. In Shemini, we see laws being given to the people, people being enjoined to differentiate between pure and impure, Aaron’s sons dying after offering strange fire to God, and Moses attempting to offer a “why” about this to Aaron, who remains silent. We live in a world where, despite there being laws and structure, we are unable, for the most part, to escape the consequences of things going on around us. A world where sometimes the only reaction we can muster is silence in the face of chaos. If there is anything to learn from this, it is perhaps that even when we can’t easily see how somebody is affected by what is going on around them. When they look like a silent, stoic priest who otherwise has the world at their feet, its ok to see their humanity, their sameness beneath the solid color of silence.
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