In addition to our regular weekly parasha, Shemini, today we also read parashat Parah, one of the four special readings done in the weeks before Pesach. Because the Passover sacrifice had to be performed in a state of ritual purity, the rabbis chose this section of the Torah because it deals with the issue of purification, as does the haftarah for this day.
The subject of this reading is one of the most perplexing and intriguing in the Torah. In fact, the rabbis of the Talmud named a special category of law for it: Hukkim, that is, those laws that cannot be explained rationally, but simply must be accepted without understanding. The law goes like this: someone who comes into contact with a dead person must be purified by taking the ashes of a perfectly red cow with no blemishes who has never worked, a parah adumah, along with a mixture of other purifying ingredients: cedar wood, hyssop, and crimson stuff. The mixture is added to water which is sprinkled on the person who has been contaminated by a corpse twice over seven days, and then the person is purified. Interestingly, the people who touch the ashes in the performance of the purification become impure in the process.
This is a very strange law. A midrash tells that even the wise King Solomon couldn’t make sense of it. The rabbis declared it a law we’re actually prohibited from questioning its reason. And the mishnah records that this ritual was only performed nine times ever. First of all, finding a parah adumah, a perfectly red cow, without speckles, spots, or a few black hairs is very rare, although people in Israel did get very excited back in 1997 when one was actually born. Secondly, since the destruction of the Temple 2000 years ago, we haven’t been able to perform the ritual, and so technically everyone is impure, either from coming into contact with the dead directly or through someone else who touched the dead.
What does this law mean? Even though the rabbis declared it a hok, a law that can’t and shouldn’t be explained rationally, that never stopped us from trying to interpret its meaning. And I’d like us to think about another question today: What is the point of having laws that cannot be understood, that don’t make rational sense? What is the parah adumah about?
By putting the parah adumah in the category of hok, a law that doesn’t make sense, the rabbis are suggesting something very deep. They are saying that there are some things in life that we cannot ever understand. Some things just don’t make any sense to us - like death. Like the inexplicable deaths of Nadav and Avihu in our parasha, where in the middle of serving God, they are suddenly gone in a split second, and we don’t know why. We can only respond the way their father Aaron does, with silence.
And as parashat Parah says, that contact with death defiles us, contaminates us, maybe not in the sense of ritual purity that applied thousands of years ago, but in an existential sense. Touching death might destroy us spiritually or might leave us with a sense of helplessness or hopelessness, terror or trauma. If God is Elohim Chayim, the God of Life, then coming close to death, we face the absence of God, the absurdity and tragedy of life.
We can’t make sense of it, so we can only turn to hukkim, admitting that there are some things we cannot understand, some things that we can only accept, some things that our mind cannot grasp, but only faith and trust can carry for us. And this applies not only to actual death, but to other experiences that defile us. When the Torah says Hanogeah b’meyt, “the one who touches the dead,” the Ishbitzer rebbe interprets these words to mean: anything that happens to a person that creates resentment toward God.
The Torah is teaching us that there are things that don’t make sense, and those things can contaminate us and separate us from God. And we can be cleansed and purified, but not through logic and rational thought, only through the strengthening of faith, only through a hok, a law performed purely as an act of trust in God. It’s the same kind of irrational thought behind the mourner’s Kaddish: after a death, the mourners stand a recite a prayer that praises God’s greatness.
Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, the Piazetzner rebbe, taught this in his work, the Eish Kodesh: “There are sufferings in the category of hukkim, whose purpose we do not understand. . . To meet every hok, a strengthening of faith is required. The hok is without reason, but faith too is above reason. So when we bind ourselves to God, who is above reason, then even the hukkim-type calamities are transformed into sweetness.” (The Holy Fire, p. 81)
In his drash on this very parasha, he says: “It is plausible that the purification [effected by the Red Cow] and the prohibition of questioning the reason for the commandment are not two independent matters; rather, the prohibition of questioning is itself part of the purification. . . One must believe that since God made things happen this way, that’s how it should be. . . and that it is good. (The Holy Fire, p. 87-88)
What Rabbi Shapira is teaching is so challenging: strengthening faith as a response to suffering. You might hear this and respond the way I would: someone who could teach that must never have experienced real suffering, must never have felt that resentment towards God. But Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira was the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto, and he gave this drash on parashat Parah in 1942. His teachings only survived the war because he buried them in a container just before the ghetto was destroyed, and years later a construction worker found them and sent them to Israel. This is one of many teachings on faith that he delivered at a time of horrific death, a time when faith was deeply shaken, including his own.
Parashat Parah teaches that there are things we cannot understand, and the resentment that comes from this can defile us. But the Torah also teaches that we can be cleansed and purified not by trying to understand but by surrendering in faith.
|
