You know the type. Maybe you come across them through your device, maybe at your Shabbat table, or maybe behind a pulpit. They speak with absolute certainty and often invoke a name of authority: God’s name, the nation’s name, the Torah, or something else, as though it were a weapon. They exhibit very little hedging. The words seem to be driven by a sense that this is what righteousness demands, and anyone who doesn’t see it that way is either weak or corrupt.
It could be that these types of speakers think that this approach signals wisdom. Maybe there are audiences that hear it and assume this type of certainty signals depth. Over the years, when I hear that tone start, I’ve come to believe it usually signals the opposite.
This week’s Torah portion, Parashat Acharei Mot, opens in the shadow of a catastrophe. Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, have just died in the Mishkan, consumed by a fire that came out from before God. The Torah’s explanation for their deaths is brief and somewhat abstract: They brought an eish zarah, a strange fire, something that God had not commanded. The rabbis fill the void with myriad interpretations: They were drunk, too ambitious, too impetuous.
Many of the traditional commentators read their actions through a negative lens. But R. Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbica (also known as The Izhbitzer or the Mei HaShiloach, after his most popular book) says they had too much love, untempered by awe. It is a quintessentially Hasidic interpretation. Hasidic commentators are often a bit subversive, and many say Nadav and Avihu were made of the right stuff, but they just didn’t know how to channel it.
In his book, the Mei HaShiloach reads the opening of our parasha as a direct response to what happened to Nadav and Avihu. In Leviticus 16:1-2, God speaks to Moses after Nadav and Avihu’s death:
God said to Moses: Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come at will into the Shrine behind the curtain, in front of the cover that is upon the ark, lest he die; for I appear in the cloud over the cover.
In this passage, God tells Moses to warn Aaron that he’s ”not to come at will”—meaning, not to enter the holy place whenever he feels like it. The Mei HaShiloach reads this as a caution, that Aaron should not do whatever his impulse pushes him to do. In other words, look at what happened to Nadav and Avihu. They entered the Mishkan with genuine purity, with sincere love of God, but they lacked the requisite amount of humility to recognize that this moment wasn’t simply about their own desire.
According to the Mei HaShiloach, the warning to Aaron isn’t, you’re not as holy as them, be careful. The warning is rather that they were quite holy, but their spiritual power wasn’t enough to save them. Instead, you must stay in a permanent state of what he calls meihush, spiritual apprehension—a constant low hum of “I could be wrong about this,” and know that you always need divine assistance. The most spiritually advanced person is not the most spiritually confident. Rather, they are the most spiritually cautious.
That notion of cautiousness is not limited to the spiritual realms either. Philip Tetlock, psychologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, spent two decades studying how people make predictions: political analysts, intelligence officials, economists, and pundits. What he found, published eventually in his book Superforecasters, clarified that the people who were most confident in their predictions were, systematically, among the least accurate. The cable news personality who pounds the table and says “I guarantee you” tends to get things wrong far more often than the person who says “I think there’s roughly a 60% chance of this, and here’s what would change my mind.”
The best forecasters Tetlock identified, the eponymous “superforecasters,” were united by the fact that they held their views fairly loosely. They updated constantly as new information came in without sweeping moral declarations. They didn’t feel diminished by saying “I was wrong.” In fact, they sought out that feeling, because it meant they were calibrated.
The worst type of forecasters, according to Tetlock, were the most certain ones. The experts who had been around long enough to have a theory of everything, who had accumulated enough experience to stop questioning, were often the most incorrect.
Tetlock calls the best forecasters “foxes,” after an old Greek saying that the fox knows many small things, while the hedgehog knows one big thing. The hedgehog is the aforementioned great media personality, politician, or religious leader, full of bluster and declarative certainty. They wield that certainty like a hammer, to flatten dialogue. I would say that their style of aggressive conviction, imperviousness to doubt, is itself a spiritual symptom. The fox, on the other hand, is the type who is willing to say, “It depends.”
I hear echoes of the Mei HaShiloach in Tetlock. As priests, Nadav and Avihu were among the most spiritually accomplished people of their generation. Their error wasn’t ignorance; it was that their spiritual love became so powerful, so certain of itself, that it mistook its own intensity for divine instruction. “I feel this deeply” turned into “…therefore God wants this.”
The Mei HaShiloach might say: The more certain you are of your own righteousness, the more reason you have to worry.
Real spiritual development doesn’t produce more certainty. It produces more meihush, spiritual apprehension. The prophets embodied this, as did Moses.
Thankfully, there is an antidote embedded in the Torah portion. After the warning, God gives Aaron a ritual: a bull for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering. The elaborate choreography of Yom Kippur that follows is full of precision and order. In other words, it’s constrained.
That, I think, is the point. This Yom Kippur ritual becomes the container that holds the right balance for spirituality. The ritual is based on one’s personal need, and it has to happen on Yom Kippur, not at just any moment that Aaron desires. Spiritual humility gets built into the practice itself.
Tetlock’s superforecasters have their own version of this ritual: They track their predictions, score themselves ruthlessly, and publish the results. They build accountability into their practice so that their certainty isn’t unmoored from reality. The structure pushes them to not simply rely on their confidence.
We could use more structures like that. Rituals that require us to slow down before we act on our certainty, asking ourselves “Can I be trusted when I’m overly certain?” This might avoid the mistake of Nadav and Avihu’s foreign fire, which they were so certain God wanted.
In the Mei HaShiloach’s telling, Aaron is not weak. He is a figure who has genuinely reckoned with what happened to his sons, not by deciding he is stronger than they were, but by accepting that he isn’t. Honestly, none of us are. The fire that consumed them is still burning, and the only honest response is to approach it with trembling hands and a ritual that knows what our confidence forgets.