That week’s Torah portion was chapters 9, 10, and 11 of Leviticus. Boring stuff, mostly. Step-by-step instructions, in painful detail, of the sacrifices that Aaron, the high priest, had to offer in the ancient temple—exactly what kind of animals needed to be sacrificed and in what quantities, when to burn the incense, procedures for the burnt offerings. Leah heard all about it from a voice that billowed up from the men’s section, some famous rabbi visiting from Europe who was invited to speak after the Torah reading.

The rabbi spent much of his time elaborating on the temple rituals, but then he came to the interesting part. After the complicated sacrifices that Aaron performed, two of Aaron’s priestly sons—Nadav and Avihu, crazy names that nobody used anymore—tried it for themselves, their own way. The two of them each took a pan with fire and incense, more or less just as their father had, and offered “a strange fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded them.” The Lord, unimpressed by Nadav’s and Avihu’s creativity, responded to the gift by burning them to death. Aaron and his other children were forbidden from mourning them.

Leah had heard the story before, but had never given much thought to it. Yet this time, surrounded by smelly children, she couldn’t get it out of her mind. As he spoke, the rabbi referred to endless commentaries that all seemed to try to clean the story up, claiming that Nadav and Avihu had done something truly wrong, that they had brought profane materials into the holy of holies, that they were worshiping idols, that they were plotting to take over their father’s role, that they were drunk—anything to explain what was so “strange” about the fire they had brought in. But when the rabbi repeated the exact text of the story, translating it word by word for the ignorant Americans, Leah noticed that nothing in the text itself suggested that anything was wrong with this supposedly strange fire, other than that it was a gift God hadn’t asked for. Leah felt as if she were the one who had been burned. Was thinking for oneself really a capital offense? Or, perhaps, was it possible that the sons of Aaron had committed no crime at all—that instead they themselves had become the real burnt offerings to the Lord?

Suddenly a thought entered Leah’s mind, something that hadn’t occurred to her before. She stopped listening. Instead she stared at the mothers in the seats around her with their whining children, children upon children upon children, and began counting days in her head. The clocks in New York, Leah knew, were all “fixed.” But the clock inside her body wasn’t, or at least shouldn’t have been. Yet at that moment, surrounded by crying children, she understood that Aaron had fixed it.