In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Shemini ('The Eighth', Leviticus 9:1-11:47) tells of the eighth day dedicating the sanctuary, the sudden death of Aaron's sons Nadab and Abihu who offered 'strange fire,' and the laws of clean and unclean animals that form the basis of kashrut, the Jewish dietary code.
The deaths of Nadab and Abihu, consumed by fire after offering 'strange fire which He had not commanded' (Leviticus 10:1-2), is one of the Torah's most debated punitive episodes, with classical commentary offering markedly different explanations, some reading their fault as unauthorised innovation in ritual regardless of good intent, others, following a tradition noting the immediately following prohibition of priests serving while intoxicated (Leviticus 10:9), suggesting they had entered the sanctuary while drunk, and still others reading their death less as punishment than as an unusually intimate closeness to the divine presence that ordinary priestly service could not sustain. Aaron's silence after his sons' deaths, 'and Aaron was silent' (Leviticus 10:3), is read by rabbinic and later Jewish ethical literature as a model of restrained grief accepted without protest.