chukat 5768 dvar

8/7/2019 Chukat 5768 dvar

1/5

Dvar Torah: Parashat Chukat 5768By Rabbi Maurice Harris

God gives the Parah Adumah Red Heifer laws.

Thirty-eight year jump!

Miriam dies and is buried at Kadesh. Moses / Meribah episode the people have no water and rail against

Moses; God tells Moses and Aaron to take the rod and order the rock togive water; Moses strikes the rock. Moses and Aaron will not be permittedto enter the Promised Land.

Edomites refuse request to pass through their land, so the Israelites goaround them.

Aaron dies at Mount Hur. Elazar becomes High Priest.

Israelites defeat Arad in battle at Khormah.

Israelites rail against Moses during journey around Edom. God sendsseraph serpent plague and many die. Moses intercedes. Makes the

bronze seraph figure that promotes healing when looked at. Israelites are refused safe passage through the Amorites land. They

battle Sihon, King of the Amorites, and dispossess them, settling in theirtowns.

Israelites defeat Og, King of Bashan, taking possession of his countrybefore marching to Moab, which is just across the Jordan River fromJericho. This sets up next weeks parashah, in which Balak, King ofMoab, will send Balaam to curse the Israelites.

1. Summary

2. Theme: death and grief

3. The red cow ritual in rabbinic tradition

a. They acknowledge that they dont understand it

b. They treat it as a law that should simply be obeyed out of love andloyalty to God a class of laws that dont have readily apparentrational explanations that the sages called chukim.

i. Tractate Parah in the Mishnah doesnt raise questions

about the reasons for this law, but details the ritual as therabbis recall how it was performed during Temple times.

ii. In one midrash we find: Numbers Rabbah 19:5: R. Joshuaof Siknin in the name of R. Levi said: There are four lawswhich the Evil Inclination criticizes [as irrational], and inconnection with which Scripture uses the expression chok.They are the law of (1) a brother's wife, (2) mingled fabrics,(3) the scapegoat, and (4) the Red Heifer. A brother's wife:

1


2/5

for it is written, Thou shall not uncover the nakedness of thebrother's wife, etc. (Lev. XVIII, 16). Yet when her husbanddies without children, Her husband's brother shall go in intoher(Deut.XXV, 5)! Mingled fabrics: It says, Thou shallnot wear a mingled stuff, wool and linen together(Deut. XXII,

11), yet a linen cloak with woolen fringes is permitted! Thescapegoat: for it is written, And he that lets the goat go toAzazel shall wash his clothes (ib. XVI, 26), yet the goat itselfatones for others! And how do we know that the law of theRed Heifer fits into this category too? From what we havelearned: All those who take any part in the preparation of theRed Heifer from beginning to end have their garmentsdefiled, but the Heifer itself makes garments ritually clean.And the expression statute is applied to the Heifer: THIS ISTHE STATUTE OF THE LAW. [NOTE: EACH OF THESE 4LAWS HAS THE WORD CHOKAPPLIED TO IT.]

c. Clarification: the rabbis werent struggling to explain why therewould be a ritual for purifying a person who had come into contactwith a corpse. That would seem natural to them. The categories oftameyand tahorwere real to them and were deeply connected tothe most powerful and mysterious forces in our world the life forceand our encounters with death. Their questions had to do withother aspects of the law. For example, the midrash above presentsthe dissonance some rabbis felt about the ritual operationsdescribed in the law that seemed to do surprising things with theritual state a person who administered the purification ritual was in.

Some rabbis discouraged trying to understand this kind of law others, through midrash, went ahead and offered possibleexplanations. One of these midrashic explanations links thepurification that the Israelites were able to receive through a ritualinvolving a red cow with the spiritual desecration the Israelites hadbrought upon themselves during the Golden Calf disaster back inExodus.

4. What I feel like we can learn from the red cow ritual: the red cow ritualrepresents how our biblical ancestors faced the mind-boggling,terrifying, confusing, and awesome experience of contact with death.This is the way that a person who came into contact with a corpse anespecially intimate encounter with death was able to put theirspiritual life back into balance and re-enter the community in a state ofspiritual health. RE-EXPLAIN TAHOR AND TAMEY. This ritualassumes that when we human beings come into direct contact withanother human beings dead body, we are thrown into a state of ritualimbalance.

2


3/5

a. Taharah personal experience. My first one I was shakinginside. All my previous encounters with death flooded me. Theache of the loss of my father roared up. All my natural fears werethere. And yet, so was my best self. Like the water we pouredover the deceased persons body, I poured all my compassion and

goodwill on the person. I wished their spirit a gentle and peacefuljourney, and sent out reassuring and loving feelings. Seeing theirbody confronted me with my ultimate powerlessness over death.There was nothing I could do to bring this person back, and there isnothing I can do about my own mortality. Of course I already knewthese things, and of course, like the rest of us, I live every day ofmy life knowing these things. But we arent designed toconcentrate on the fact of our mortality every waking hour. We putthat awareness aside most of the time so that we can live rich, fulllives in the moment. The taharah experience shatters that. Icouldnt just go back to work. In my experience with the TBI chevra

kadisha, instead of ritual purification, we all go to the Glenwood.Why not? The Glenwood is a comforting weigh-station between therealms of the dead and the living. Theres no priest to sprinklesacred water and ash on me, but there are comrades to drink a cupof coffee with, to be quiet with, to be in a spiritual neutral zone withas our bodies and spirits reset.

b. The secondary contact with this experience rendered the priest whoperformed the ritual tamey too.

i. Another way to look at it: the priest enters into the liminal

space between life and death by administering the ritual tothe person, and in that space the categories blur. So thepriest stays out of the zone of purity until evening.

ii. The ritual combines water, blood, bone, flesh, and ashes symbolic of the earth to which we physically return. Thetamey person is made ready for return through a ritualizeddirect encounter with the core elements of life and death.Because performing the purification ritual contaminates thepriest, both participants are joined together in facing theultimate mystery of the human condition. They dont have toface it alone. Ultimately, they both return to the life of thecommunity, the mystery remaining in tact.

c. Midrash describes ancient Jews as being mocked over the red cowritual by their ancient Roman / pagan counterparts. An idolaterasked R. Yohanan ben Zakkai: These rites that you perform looklike a kind of witchcraft. You bring a heifer, burn it, pound it, and

3


4/5

take its ashes. If one of you is defiled by a dead body you sprinkleupon him two or three drops and you say to him: "Thou art clean!"

i. Reconstructionism invites us to do what Mordecai Kaplancalled live in two civilizations. Take the best insights and

values of both civilizations and let them serve as correctivesfor one another. For example, Kaplan took the Torahs lawsdemanding that the free market be regulated so that the poorand needy are properly cared for and held them up as acorrective to the unregulated and uncaring capitalism hewitnessed in the US during the 1920s and 30s. And he tookthe best of American values the movement for womenssuffrage in the 1920s, for example and held it up as acorrective to Jewish traditions that privileged men andprevented women from achieving some of their potential.

ii. Id like to suggest that the red cow ritual offers us a chanceto invite Jewish values to serve as a corrective to Americanvalues. The red cow ritual says that people who come intoclose contact with death must be attended to, and that theirspiritual, psychological and emotional needs must be met.We may not ignore them, way dont just say, Why dont youtake a day off and then come back to the office tomorrow?after someone has a traumatic experience involvingwitnessing death up close. We take some of our most bestspiritual and psychological workers and we get with thatperson, making sure they take the time they need to

integrate their experience, and we provide them with aspiritual path back to balance.

1. Contrast this with the way, for example, our societyfails to support our soldiers who return from Iraq.Youve read the stories in the paper about the highnumbers of psychologically damaged young men andwomen who have returned from the battlefield, andwho havent received adequate counseling andsupport. Many of these people have had directcontact with a corpse, direct contact with death andtrauma. Youve read about how this failure to providethese soldiers with psychological and spiritual supporthas taken a toll in the form of a very high suicide rate,broken marriages, and patterns of addiction. For ourbiblical ancestors, the way back to wholeness afterthe potential trauma of contact with a corpse includeda ritual that is hard for people in our era to easilyimagine. But the lesson is that they cared. They

4


5/5

would not have let the scandal of ignoring the needsof these returning soldiers happen.

2. Close with a question: viewed from a distance, whichis harder to understand: a society that cared for its

citizens who were confronted directly with death witha ritual that is hard to rationalize, or a society thatdoesnt care for the very citizens it asks to confrontdeath when they do so and then come homecompletely out of balance?

5

chukat 5768 dvar

Documents