Choosing labels carefully as we draw near G-d

Shortly after the deaths of Nadav and Avihu, the Torah tells us that Moshe “announced to Aaron and ‘his surviving sons,’ telling them to take the remainder of the meal offering and to eat it as matzah.” (10:12)

Aharon has just suffered the most devastating loss that no parent should ever experience, the loss of his two oldest sons in an instant.

In the Torah’s depiction of their deaths, it seems clear that Nadav and Avihu engaged in an act — bringing a strange fire — that somehow warranted their deaths. The rabbis discuss many other possibilities of negative behavior on their end that may have caused their demise. At no time are their younger brothers, Elazar and Itamar, included in the discussion — as if to say, they too should have died for what Nadav and Avihu did, yet they were somehow spared.

So why are they called the “surviving sons” (the Targum Yonatan even calls them “his sons who were saved from the sreifah,” that last word referencing the fire that consumed the souls of their older brothers)? They didn’t survive the fire — They weren’t there! And they didn’t do anything to get such a possible punishment anyway!

My grandfather left Germany in 1937 with his parents. It would be an insult to those who went through the Holocaust to call him a survivor. Escaped, yes. Survivor? No.

Now, it could be that the translation is inaccurate. After all, the Torah’s language refers to them as “notarim” – which translates to “remaining sons” (the translation choice Artscroll uses, for example). It is Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan’s translation which calls them “surviving.” And yet, the appellation given to them from the Targum Yonatan remains a question.

Rashi posits that they were supposed to die, as punishment to their father (in that all his sons would die) on account of his role in the Golden Calf, but were spared because Moshe’s prayer saved half of Aharon’s sons. Of course, if this were true, then pinning the deaths of Nadav and Avihu on “the strange fire” seems to be a cover for the real reason for their demise.