The Day the Clouds Went Away

Aharon was one hundred and twenty-three years old. He was three years older than his brother Moshe. Long ago he had done the talking for Moshe when Moshe was too shy to speak to Pharaoh. Once, when a plague swept through the camp, Aharon had run into the middle of it with a fire-pan of incense and stopped it with his own body between the dying and the living.

People loved him because he loved peace. When two men were fighting, Aharon would go sit with each one and say, 'Your friend is already sorry.' Then he would go to the other and say the same thing. By evening the two would meet in the street and hug.

On the day he was going to die, Moshe and Aharon's son Elazar walked up Mount Hor with him. The whole camp watched from below. At the top, Moshe carefully took off the eight special clothes of the High Priest — the breastplate with twelve jewels, the blue robe, the gold headband, all of it — and put them on Elazar, one piece at a time. Then Aharon lay down. The Torah just says he died there. Our Sages say he died the way a person falls asleep, and Moshe was jealous of how peaceful it was.

Down on the plain, people looked up and noticed the light was different. For forty years, ever since they left Egypt, seven clouds had traveled with them. One in front to flatten the road. One behind to catch stragglers. Clouds on the sides. A cloud above for shade. A cloud below to hold them up. They had lived under those clouds so long that they had stopped noticing them. Now the clouds thinned out and the desert sun came through hard, and the people knew — before Moshe was even back down — that Aharon was gone.

The Torah says everyone cried for him for thirty days: men and women both. The Sages say the women cried too because so many of their marriages had been quietly saved by Aharon. Within hours a nearby king who had been afraid of the clouds attacked. And this is why, our Sages teach, the month of Av begins with sadness. A great shelter had been taken away. From now on, everything that happens this month will happen out in the open.