Bad mistake. Shouldn’t have done it. I imagine that had Nadav and Avihu lived, they would have regretted the actions that led to their deaths. Nadav and Avihu were the two eldest sons of Aaron and were consecrated as kohanim along with their brothers Eleazar and Itamar. Together with their father and seventy elders, Nadav and Avihu accompanied Moshe part of the way up Mount Sinai. However, following the inauguration of the Mishkan, these two brothers offered incense with esh zarah, "foreign" fire. They were immediately crisped by God’s fire, and were buried outside the camp.

If they were simply excited and enthusiastic, would that have made them so culpable? Perhaps. There are commentators concerned about rule obedience who caution against spontaneity in religious practice. But other rabbis suggest that the esh zarah was linked to avodah zarah, foreign or prohibited worship, a type of idolatry. Still others, from the follow-up that instructs the kohanim not to offer sacrifice while intoxicated, imagine that the two men were drunk. We’ll never know.

Recently, Mark Perlman of the New York Jewish Week has been blogging about “Regrettable Moments & Jewish Do-Overs”. He writes: “It has been a ‘season of regret,’ with corporate miscues and apologies rampant: Toyota’s recall, NBC’s Jay Leno/Conan O’Brien scheduling gaffe .... If only there were a do-over.” Every week adds to the books about the Wall Street melt-down which are full of “if onlys”. The Catholic Church also faces a series of regrettable actions. So do some Canadian Members of Parliament.

Perlman asked Rabbi Charles Buckholtz of the Shalom Hartman Institute “What are the biggest mistakes in Jewish history? Describe regrettable moments in Jewish history where a do-over might have been helpful”. Rabbi Buckholtz offers a general framework and then some specifics:

There are two kinds of mistakes — necessary/constructive and unnecessary/destructive. The constructive mistakes are choices that reflect something noble and essential about our humanity and advance human and Jewish destiny even though, at the time, they may appear to contradict not only God’s will but also our own enlightened self-interest. These are... decisions we would not want to take back. Rather, we tend to take a kind of weary pride in them. The template for this kind of mistake is eating from the Tree of Knowledge, aka, the mistake that gave birth to human history. This mistake clearly expresses a deep human value position: the prioritization of free choice, curiosity and learning — evolution — to stasis of any kind, even the stasis of spiritual bliss in Eden. To regret it would be to regret our own existence. Not so Jewish.

In contrast, unnecessary/destructive mistakes metastasize into corrosive regret. They are the choices we make based on failings of courage and consciousness, the triumph of the voice inside us that is small, petty and afraid for all the wrong reasons. They are the moments when we find ourselves shouting at the movie screen of our own lives and the lives of those who came before us. “You really do not want to do that!”

Rabbi Buckholtz identifies, among others, Moses smashing the Tablets.... [He] was well within his rights to smash them. Still, is it not the task of spiritual leadership to remind us of our deepest connections and commitments precisely in those moments when despair and paranoid pettiness have taken hold? Who knows what wisdom those first tablets held? Who knows what further tragic failings they could have helped us to avoid.

The Spies... [who] return from a mission to scout out the Promised Land and apprise the people of their findings: [These] guys were scared.... can barely tell which end is up on a spear. Still ... We needed you to rise to the occasion, to hold a space for your personal anxiety without letting it infect your public speech. You could have saved us ... years of desert bickering and backstabbing, .. whose deep, festering power lives with us to this day.

Here are some modern would-be do-overs that Rabbi Buckholtz suggests:

Shabbetai Tzvi. About 150 years after being expelled from Spain... after about 100 years of humiliation, torture, execution, and imprisonment under the Inquisition...which was a few centuries after being expelled from England, then France... in the direct aftermath of the Cossack massacre of around 100,000 Ukranian Jews... the Chosen People had just about enough... An exit-strategy presented itself in the form of Shabbetai Zvi, a Turkish-born kabbalist whose Messianic claims captivated the suffering masses with promises of a new Kingdom of Israel, headquartered... in Jerusalem. When he converted to Islam under threat of death, he left countless despairing disciples and a deep, lasting tear in the fabric of European Jewish life. Much of traditional Judaism’s wary, insular orientation toward modernity, expressive spirituality and utopian promise can be traced to the disillusionment burned into the communal consciousness by Shabbetai Zvi.... to [learn from this tragedy] is to strive to care for the health and security of people at the community’s margins, refusing to abandon our struggling neighbors to the kinds of material depredations and social degradations that lead some to false messiahs.

Denominational Politics. ... has had an asphyxiating effect [on] modern Jewish culture, snuffing out ...  constructive, enriching conversations that unify and strengthen diverse communities.... The general attitude of suspicion and hostility it has tended to foster, [is] one of the most potent.... sources of distaste and estrangement for the modern Jewish masses.

The Allon Plan. In the elation after the Six Day War, with Israel abuzz about the question of what to do with its newly captured territory in the West Bank, Deputy Prime Yigal Allon stepped forward with an idea novel in its sobriety. Let’s do ... something. Let’s make a decision. The Allon Plan... proposed returning much of the captured West Bank territory to Jordan, while maintaining a strip of sovereignty along the Jordanian border and through the north of Jerusalem. This would have allowed for the possibility of a clear, defensible border, and – who knows? – maybe a version of history with less depressing headlines. But ... someone apparently made a stronger case for Plan B: “Do Nothing and Hope for the Best,” and the ... Allon Plan [remains] a historical footnote about a government unable to make a decision about making a decision.

A postscript: the development of Israeli life post 1967 within and beyond the Green Line is remarkable. But the decision to allow so many small settlements to be built has made the determination of future borders more complex and challenging.

Let me add a few other mistakes and if-only do-overs to the list:

Weak Leadership during the Nazi Holocaust. I’m not trying to blame the victims, most of whom were trapped. Moreover, the Nazi effort to control the news about the death camps slowed the reaction time of Eastern European Jewry. Of Poland's 3.3 million Jews, over 90 per cent were killed. Same in Latvia and Lithuania, but most of Estonia's Jews were evacuated. In Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands and Yugoslavia, over 70 per cent were killed and more than 50 per cent in Belgium, Hungary and Romania. But there were lower proportions of deaths in Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Italy and Norway.  Many of the 750,000 Jews in Germany and Austria emigrated, but they went to the wrong countries: Czechoslovakia, France or the Netherlands, from where they were later deported to their deaths. Only about a quarter of German Jewry survived. Survival was often dependent on the country in which a Jew lived.

Had Jewish leadership gone public with what was known, perhaps a few more souls would have been saved. But we were split about what to do and when to do it. The debate about Yoel Kastner’s train is symbolic of the disaster. Had anti-Zionist rabbis not been so reticent, perhaps a few more Jews would have been saved.  Had North American Jews not been so feeble and frightened, maybe more of our relatives would have found shelter; perhaps the Allies would have bombed the concentration camps. I wish we could have had a do-over. We have learned the importance of Jews acting for other Jews and have brought that to bear on behalf of Soviet, Syrian, North African, and Arabian Jews. We have internalized the significance of political engagement. Our contemporary awareness now leads us to be extra vigilant whenever Jews are endangered. Still, we are a small group in democratic nations with many competing interests.

Arab Jewish Refugees. We erred by not putting the issue of Jewish refugees on the international agenda in the 1950s. The more than a million Jews who emigrated or fled from Arab countries did so without recompense from Arab governments. Israel and Diaspora Jewry did the right thing to welcome and support those without personal resources, but we did not demand compensation. The result is that this issue is effectively off the table in any future negotiations between Israel and the Arabs.

Palestinian Refugees. Benny Morris and Ephraim Karsh are not often in agreement, but they have each chronicled the Arab-Israeli conflict and revealed the mixed history of the refugee problem. Arabs left their villages due to a combination of three factors: instructions from local Palestinian authorities; fear of Israeli military attacks; and ad hoc intentional expulsions. The Arab counties allowed this refugee problem to fester and grow so that Israel constantly faces the call for a “right of return”, without any serious effort by the Arabs to support and care for these displaced people.

Regarding the Arab citizens of Israel, Morris contends that Ben Gurion should have ordered the transfer of even more Arabs out of what would become Israel. I wish the whole situation could be a do-over, but I’m not sure what would have been possible or desirable.  Before these situations become even more regrettable and intractable, Israel must work very hard to ensure the equality of all its citizens, respect for minority rights, and the provision of appropriate governmental support to all residents and regions.

North American Young Adults. In Empowered Judaism, published this month, Rabbi Elie Kaunfer  argues that North American Jewry has dumbed itself down through insipid synagogue life, superficial Birthright trips to Israel, and meet and greet Hillel programs. Kaunfer contends that we have failed to intellectually and spiritually empower young adults to step up to a complex and engaging expression of Jewish life. He argues that transformations in contemporary culture mandate changes in Jewish communal and spiritual structures and that we still have the opportunity for a do-over.

I’m sure that you can come up with more regrettable moments in Jewish history and would-be do-overs. Nadav and Avihu faced a zero tolerance policy and did not have the opportunity to correct their mistake. Other events of the past are also not remediable, but if there are situations where we can still do something, let us act before it is too late.