In the process of instructing Moses what Moses, in turn, is to command Aaron, the Lord says, "The fire on the altar shall be kept burning," and moments later repeats, "A perpetual fire shall be kept burning on the altar, not to go out" (Lev 6:5,6,).
The fire on the altar was a matter of fascinated speculation for the sages of the Talmud. As the gemara explains, the fire could come either from the kohanim , according to Leviticus 1:7 ("The sons of Aaron the Kohen shall place fire on the altar") – or from heaven. And when it came from heaven, says the gemara, "it lay down like a lion."
But the Talmud doesn’t rest with that distinction. A a few lines later that image of the heavenly fire "laying down like a lion" is challenged: "Said Rabbi Hanina, the kohanim’s deputy, ‘I saw it – and it was laying down like a dog’" (BT Yoma 21b). A lion or a dog? In its inimitable fashion, the gemara seeks to reconcile the two very disparate images by explaining that both are true. The heavenly fire did indeed crouch "like a lion" in Solomon’s Temple, says the gemara; it was in the Second Temple that it crouched "like a dog."
The two images, of course, conjure up very different associations. To say that the flame was like that of a lion evokes an image of power lying in wait, guarding its lair, ready to spring; to say that it is like that of the dog evokes cowardice and submission. Rabbi Aharon Velkin, in Metzach Aharon, expands the significance of the images. In the period of the First Temple, he says, Israel was its own master, with its own King and its own government. Rather than Israel submitting to a foreign power, foreign powers "trembled and shook" before Israel. Thus he said, in the days of the First Temple the fire on the altar looked to the Israelite people like a lion, showing them that they, like the lion, could act with courage and strength.
But in the Second Temple period, says Velkin, the Jews were "enslaved" by the Romans and the Greeks, and their authority over their own destinies was severely limited. Now the altar’s fire took on the image of the dog, evidence that like a dog, the Jews had to be slavishly devoted to their masters, because rebellion would mean they would be left unprotected.
The parallel Rabbi Velkin is suggesting between the "Second Temple" and the fear-ridden life of the Jews during most of the centuries of the pre-State diaspora is clear : for centuries in the diaspora, Jews cowered in the face of tyrants’ power. From a Zionist perspective, only when we achieved a state of our own did we stop cowering.
But isn’t it also true that anyone who lives in fear of alienating a controlling power would see, in the fire, the image of a submissive dog, just as anyone in control would see the lion?
Indeed, the difference between the fire-as-lion and the fire-as-dog was heartbreakingly exemplified in today’s New York Times – one, however, that forced us to see our own position, as Jews, in a different light. Entitled "Israeli Soldiers Stand Firm, but Duty Wears on the Soul." the article describes a gathering, at the Yakar Center for Social Concern in Jerusalem, at which 27-year-old Mikhael Manekin, director of "Breaking the Silence," spoke about his experience serving for four years with the Golani brigade in the West Bank. "Breaking the Silence" is a group of former combat soldiers and some reservists who seek to bear witness to their troubling experience controlling Palestinians in Palestinian territory.
While unambivalently committed to protecting Israel, Manekin, the article explained, was morally torn by the behavior of the Israeli soldiers toward the Palestinians, behavior designed to humiliate and control.
The article then went on to quote a "tall and dignified" man of about 45 who got up and said that it is "crucial to intimidate people at checkpoints to keep them cowed...Then he said: ‘These people are not like us! They come up to our faces and they lie to us!"
And the article continued:
"That was enough for Uriel Simon, 77 years old, a professor emeritus of biblical studies at Bar-Ilan University and a noted religious dove. ‘As for liars,’ Mr. Simon said, then paused. ‘My father was a liar. My grandfather was a liar. How else did we cross lines to get to this country? We stayed alive by lying. We lied to the Russians, we lied to the Germans, we lied to the British! We lie for survival! Jacob the Liar was my father!" he said.
"As for the Palestinians, he said, ‘Of course they lie! Everyone lies at a checkpoint! We lied at checkpoints, too.’"
Though today, with a nation of our own, the fire on the altar may look, for us, like a lion, as we come close to the festival of our freedom, perhaps now more than ever it is incumbent upon us to remember not only the degradation we suffered throughout history, when the fire on the altar looked to us like a submissive, frightened, dog but also the profoundly complex moral responsibilities of power and freedom. When we are strong enough to see the fire as a lion, we do our moral sensibilities a grave injustice when we fail to remember what it means to feel so powerless that you have to survive by lying at checkpoints because your fire is cowering like a dog.