Boston has a hot real estate market. Apartments are on the market for a day or two and they are lapped up at exorbitant prices. With the high demand, the motivation for landlords to spruce up the place is low. So one is left with centenarian apartments in bad need of a makeover. With summer upon us, it was time to fix up the entrance- paint the door and whiten the walls. Sounds simple, right? Paintbrush, paint, and wall. What could go wrong?
Had I not observed how some handy friends had helped paint my basement some time ago, I would have forgotten multiple items as even a simple paint job has a decent list: a special tool to open the can of paint (one could use a screw driver but the special tool really helps), plastic lining, sand paper, rags, paint tray, multiple brushes for different areas, tape to protect edges, and clothing ready to get some paint on them. Each one of those items a while back would have been a new trip to the local Home Depot. I made sure to have them prior and it made the job go smoothly.
Yet even with all the right tools, the execution has its own quirks. How much paint to glob onto the brush to get a thick coat on the wall without spraying extra paint everywhere else? What types of strokes to use and what brush when? Should I tape every edge or rely on a steady hand for some of it (spoiler: always tape!)?
These two aspects of life: understanding the job at hand and executing it were exemplified by Aaron who passes away in this week's Torah portion. It says he is buried on ‘har hor’, which literally reads the mountain on a mountain. One commentary says that it literally looked like a mountain with an extra apple like protrusion that resembled a second mountain. But the mystics give a different answer. They say there are two ‘mountains’ each of us must climb in our life. It is the mountain of understanding how the world works, and the mountain of executing that vision. Aaron exemplified this on both levels.
He was the high priest that executed (pun intended) the sacrifices. It was his job to bring spirituality all the way down into the world and he understood how to then bring the lower world back up to G-d. For that, he needed a deep understanding of how the spiritual worlds work. On the deepest level, these correspond to the two ה’s of G-d name, the upper ה and lower ה. Not surprisingly, the word mountain in Hebrew, הר, really means- the full of expression of ה as the letter ר in Hebrew is the letter that means to bring something out (it trills in the mouth). In other words, Aaron was buried on the ה’s that he brought into the world.
Shabbat Shalom!
