Strange Fires

Nadav and Avihu brought their own fire to the altar — their own vessels, their own inspiration, their own way of drawing close to God. The sages acknowledge the holiness of the idea. But holiness without the right vessel doesn’t survive. And the Midrash tells us what went wrong: they did not talk to one another. Each was inspired alone.

That’s the world right now. Everyone with their own fire, their own inspired response to the moment. The holiness of the idea is everywhere. Ideology reigns supreme. The consultation is nowhere.

Social media has given everyone a vessel — and made actual encounter almost impossible. We are all Nadav. We are all Avihu. Inspired, certain, and alone.

Writing on the Wall started after October 7 not to add another voice to the noise, but to create a space where different voices come together, reflecting the jagged reality of Israel today, not flattened into some happy and false unity, but nonetheless in conversation

We are still planning our next curated issue — Hope / Exhale — poets, novelists, artists. But reality intervened.  No one was exhaling when the ballistic misses were fired, when the sirens were blasting. We found ourselves moving in and out of shelters. We improvised: we made BALAGAN Underground instead.

Ronit Eitan mapped the entire social hierarchy of Israeli life through the three kinds of shelter — the mamad, the building miklat, the public miklat — and wrote the sharpest piece of social observation we’ve published. One of my students from Umm al-Fahm, wrote about having no shelter at all, and the silence of not knowing where to go. A woman in Hashmonaim calculated the logistics of a haircut like a military operation. A Russian-speaking community found their bomb shelter had become more home than the theater it once was.

Jewish, Arab, Russian. Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the Galilee. We don’t do politics. We do perspectives. They don’t cancel each other out. They don’t resolve into something comfortable or cohesive.

The sages said Nadav and Avihu were holy. The idea was real. But without consultation, without the willingness to bring your fire into relationship with someone else’s, it consumes itself.

BALAGAN Underground is our answer to that. Not a solution. A practice.

Hope/Exhale is still coming. Look out for it.