It’s the eighth day after their spectacular ordination, and Aaron and his four sons are riding high as the newly minted priests of the nascent Israel nation. But two of the sons do something very, very wrong.

The Torah relates that they brought unauthorized “strange fire” before God and promptly died in a ball of fire.

Why did God smite them? Were they drunk? Over-excited by the events of the previous week? Full of themselves and showing off? Or so full of love for God that they couldn’t help themselves?

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks pointed out that as priests, they were required to work within strictly defined parameters. In essence, they had the gall to have an original thought. But that wasn’t acceptable.

It’s why, I think, geniuses are found working in mom and dad‘s garage, rather than as cogs in a huge corporate machine. It’s just too confining.

Judaism has a kind of love-hate relationship with original thought. Many of our prayers are carefully defined, written two millennia ago by sages who claimed that one must recite the official prayers word for word but as if they were brand new, as if you were making them up at that very moment.

I am now in my sixth decade of life, and more and more find myself chafing at the limitations of prescribed prayer. I am a little jealous of Aaron’s sons, who had the gumption at a young age to strike out, do the prayers in a way that was meaningful to them at that moment. It has taken me a long time to get to that point.

Like them, I find myself wading fearlessly into unknown territory. I don’t think God will mind. I believe, perhaps, naïvely, that God, too, has grown up, and has learned that breaking the rules isn’t always a bad thing.