Salvation through Death - Breaking the Cycle

The Red Heifer purifies the defiled and defiles the pure and is universally taken as a commandment that defies reason and logic. According to science, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction so where's the illogic? Even according to Rabbinic scholars such as Saadia Gaon and modern scholars such as Jacob Milgrom there is nothing unreasonable about this enigma. So why is the ḥoq of the Red Heifer so troubling. Why does it keep God up at night?

Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/330146

Transcript:

Geoffrey Stern 

So welcome, one and all, to Madlik, another week of disruptive Torah. And this week the parsha is parshat Chukat, which we're going to find out what it means but Chukat is "the law". And the law that is under discussion is the law of the red heifer. And those of you who know your Old Testament know that the laws of purity are a big feature of biblical Judaism, temple Judaism, and those laws of purity relate mostly to impurity that is gotten from death or anything to do with death. And the red heifer is, as we are told in Numbers, 19 is the antidote. And what what happens is the priest takes this pure red heifer that has never carried a yoke and slaughters it, and sprinkles the blood and then mixes the ashes, with some water and hissop and cedar wood, in Crimson stuff. And then it is set aside and used to sprinkle miraculously, on those people who have come into contact with death. And that should be a pretty straightforward thing. It might sound very strange to us moderns but many things in the temple in terms of a sacrificial cult sounds strange. But for some reason, and that's what the subject matter of today is, this one is singled out as being stranger than strange. And therefore, the focus is on the word that God says, numbers 19:2 this is the ritual law that the Lord has commanded zote chukat hatorah, and all of the commentators and we are going to struggle with the fact that the the sense, this is a strange Chok. This is the showcase, the poster child of a law that has no rationale, in fact, is a irrational. And you have to obey, because God commanded it. And I should add the key point that the Cohen who goes ahead and prepares the sacrifice of the red heifer, and his helpmate, who cleans his garments, anybody involved in the preparation of this elixir, who is going to take away the impurity of death, himself becomes impure. And so I'm going to open it up to discussion. Rabbi, what about this struck all of the commentators as so strange that it had to be singled out as an example of a law that has no logic?

 

Adam Mintz 

So that that is such an interesting question, the idea of a chok, of a law that has no logic, the idea that the same thing that makes people pure, make people impure, I think really bothered the rabbi's. They could not get their arms around that. Because basically, purity and impurity are opposites. So how was it possible that the very same thing that can make you pure can also make you impure? I think that really bothered the rabbis. And I think that that's what led them to call this thing of Chok. By the way, the word Chioke in the Torah doesn't always mean something that you can't understand. Sometimes it just means a law. So Para Aduma the red heifer is really a unique situation, a unique case. And it's this idea, this kind of confusion between purity and impurity. And I think that's a key term, the idea of confusion.

 

Geoffrey Stern 

So first of all, I mean, I love the fact that you talk about a confusion, but what came to my mind and I wasn't actually even going to talk about this is isn't there a fine line between the profane and the pure. In other words, whether we've talked about it before the pride of following God's laws and the pride in oneself, you know, a harlto a temple harlot is called the Kadesha which comes from the same word as Kadosh. I mean, you could you could say, well, doesn't this happen all the time that something that is close to pure doesn't quite make it actually becomes profane. But if we look at the commentators like Rashi is the first one, he doesn't seem to imply that it was troubling  so much to the rabbi's, as it was to our detractors. He says, Because Satan and the nations of the world taunt Israel saying, What is this commandment? And what reason is there for it? On this account, we say it's a Chok that God using the word Choke, all the commentary say it's also something that you kind of niche into stone you Chok Chaakti? I have kind of carved this this rule. It's not for you to question. But do you think there's an aspect of this that isn't so much that it was troubling to the rabbis, as it was troubling, or it was a it was a point of polemical discussion where people would come to the Jews? And say, this thing is so strange, your religion makes no sense.

 

Adam Mintz 

 I'm thinking about that for a minute. You think that maybe we're worried about what other people will say about us? Do you think that generally, Torah is worried about what other people will say about us? You know,

 

Geoffrey Stern 

You wouldn't think so.

 

Adam Mintz 

I'm surprised that you suggested that because I wouldn't have thought so.

 

Geoffrey Stern 

So, I mean, if you look at bamidbar rabbah, which is another source in the source sheet, it says a Gentile asked Rabbi Yohanan Ben zakkai. These rituals you do they seem like witchcraft, you bring a heifer burn it, take it's ashes. And if you read that whole thing, his thing is not so much that something that is impure becomes pure and defiles the the person who's doing it, he seems to be bothered by sprinkling some water and puff, you're instantaneously pure. So there were two instances in the commentaries. Both of them have this polemical aspect to it. And that's why I don't think I came up with it on my own. I was struck by that myself, when I was looking at the sources, and before I let you respond, do the rabbi's care what the nation say? I think, yes, there's a verse in Deuteronomy that says "Ki hi Chochmatchem ubinatchem b'enai hagoyim", that the Torah is the wisdom of the Jews in the eyes of the nations. The amount of times that Moses argues with God, when God's ready to blot out the Jews. And he goes, God, what's everybody gonna say? You took us out of Egypt, and you killed these people. So I do think there is a strong element what will the goyim say, certainly in the discussion about this law, but in general,

 

Adam Mintz 

You see, I guess my question is like this, Are we worried about what the goyim will say? Or is that just a midrashic trick to kind of emphasize a problem that we have with these laws? And we kind of then put it in the mouths of the goyim. I don't know how much difference that makes, but I'm just raising that as a possibility.

 

Geoffrey Stern 

When we say what will the goyim think we're really speaking like, Jews who have lived in exile for 2000 years? I don't think that would be fair for this young movement of Jews in the desert. But they did feel that they had a movement I believe, and the rabbi's too, we're in a world where maybe Judaism already because it was parleying itself as the believer in this one invisible God, maybe it was even taken to a higher standard. But in any case, there seems to be a question of the benchmark, the level of Judaism and does this somehow conflict with it. And I think you touched upon that by saying, we like to have an ideology we like to have a religion that is squeaky clean, everything fits into it's place. And this is not so not so understandable. I think the other aspect of it that came up in my research is what big of a problem it is. And this, of course, is the famous Pesikta, which says that Moses goes up into the heights of heaven. You know, there are a few Midrashim that say, what did Moses do 40 days and 40 nights when he was up in heaven. And so here is one of the renderings, he goes up and he sees the Holy One, blessed be he is engaged in the study of the Torah. And he's studying the passage of the red heifer, citing a law in the name of the sage who stated it. And Moses said before ahim:  Master of the Universe, worlds above and worlds below are in your domain, yet you sit and cite a law ascribed to flesh and blood. And Michael, I know you love the drama and you love the theater of the Torah. This is a play, I think, of going up to heaven and seeing God number one studying man's Torah. Well, is it man's Torah? It was Torah that God wrote and gave to man. But here he is engaged in the study of the red heifer.  It, so to speak, keeps God up at night. What do we make of that? And either a theological level or in terms of the discussion that we're having?

 

Adam Mintz 

I want to just add to that question, Geoffrey.  Why does the heifer have to be red? I mean, does that seem significant? Is it just because a red heifer is so rare? So therefore, it wants to show you that you have to go out of your way to find the red heifer? Is that what it's about? Or is there something deeper in there?

 

Geoffrey Stern 

I mean, last week, I said that Techelet, it was the Pantone color of Judaism. And now this week we're discussing red. In my mind anyway, this has to do with life and death, there's no question about it. And one is using the red have to take away whatever it is that death tarnishes us with; the impurity that we get from death. And so in my mind, whether it's the blood or whether it's the color of the heifer itself, that's my natural association was with the blood. But again, the fact that it impurifies the pure, it's the fact that you take these drops of water, and magically make somebody pure. And then there's the other element, which is that it's outside of the temple. All of those three things, you almost get the sense that this is a solution, in search of a problem. It's almost as though there's something strange about this law, what is it? It keeps God up at night? the nations of the world taunt us with it? The problem of the problem is almost harder than the problem itself. To me, that's what kind of struck me.

 

Adam Mintz 

Well, I mean, to rephrase what you just said, Geoffrey, it seems like the Torah makes the red heifer a lot more complicated than it has to be. We could accomplish the same thing, by having a ritual that was much more direct, and much more simple. Why are rituals generally complicated? You know, you think about the Pascal Lamb, you have to put the blood on the door post, you have to eat the whole thing. There are a lot of details in these sacrificial rituals. You think that's important, or you think that's just the way it was?

 

Geoffrey Stern 

Michael, what are your thoughts?

 

Michael Posnik 

My thought right know is this. I find that this question of the red heifer with all the energy we have to try to quote "figure it out", is an opportunity for a little humility. Certain things we say we understand, they seem to fit in with the entire system, we're content about that, but here is the exception, which in a certain way, proves the rule. And so I would say that it's not to be solved in that sense, because it is outside the possibility of solution, it is a way of acknowledging the fact that there is a space is a place for us to not know. And to either just accept or to surrender to it, or to let it go. So that's my thought right now, it's not to solve the problem. It's simply to say, Alright, we'll make an effort. But it's a place where I have to surrender what I think I know what my mind thinks it knows. So that's, that's my thoughts are right now. I like the fact that it's a puzzle not to be solved. No matter how hard you bang your head against the wall, it's not going to be solved.  You have to surrender to it, if you want to.

 

Adam Mintz 

Definitely a nice explanation, that the complexity is a reflection of the need to surrender. If we understood it, there wouldn't be as much surrender because what you understand you don't surrender to you understand it, but if you don't understand it, then you have to surrender I like that a lot.

 

Michael Posnik 

You want to understand everything? N

 

Adam Mintz 

No, I like that.

 

Geoffrey Stern 

So I would like to play the devil's advocate a little bit and continue along the trend that I was looking at is that the problem of the Red Heifer is not so apparent and that we might be misguided in in what we understand the problem to be. For instance, if we look at the Law of Conservation of Matter for every reaction, there is an equal and opposite counteraction. Saadia Gaon says I don't get what is so complex about this whole rule. He says that you know, heat can make certain foodstuffs soft, but you boil an egg, it gets hard.  Food can be beneficial to someone who's hungry and detrimental to someone who's already eaten a meal. Certainly medicine can benefit the sick and hurt the healthy. The world is full of things that can affect different people in different ways. He doesn't use this example but you know, it's a known  saying in the Torah that for those who are zocher (privledged), the Torah is a sam hachaim It's a medicine of life. And for those who are not zocher, it's a som haMavet. It's, it's a poison, we can study the same text, we can be exposed to the same revelation, and we can take away from it. Two different opposing things. And I think that's an amazing, beautiful lesson. Maybe it's sophisticated enough to become a little bit of a mystery. And something that is not obvious at first glance. We were talking a little bit before we started today, I'm reminded of the wonderful expression that's attributed to pretty much everyone out there of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, you know, is that the role of a leader of a Rabbi of a journalist so I think that at a certain level, it's it's not necessarily something that is so far beyond our ability to fathom, it's certainly not something that would keep us awake at night in terms of something being bothersome. It's a sophisticated point of the world that it means different things to different people, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And so I just wonder, what is it that Michael or you Rabbi feel, is so complex about this message that something can make one person impure and the other pure?

 

Michael Posnik 

Just I was thinking before about wine, for example, something really simple even though we don't understand what it is exactly. You can use wine for purity and you can use wine for impurity. And then I was thinking about language, Geoffrey, we can use this gift of language to bring death to people we can embarrass and shame people which I think the Talmud equates with killing someone really and we can use language as we are here to uplift and nourish and raise. In that sense, the ambiguity or the complexity is in a certain way, practically how it's used. I don't know if this relates exactly to the question of the heifer. But it strikes me that we have a certain responsibility to use what we have, in an appropriate way, if we know that there's an appropriate way. So that's, what comes up for me. I'm not, I'm not seduced by what you call complexity. I think, as I said before, I think recalling complexity is just something that the mind says, Oh, this is complex, because I don't understand it. I'm perfectly happy to not understand. And then I have a choice where as I say, whether to do it or not do it. So that that's where I'm coming from today.

 

Geoffrey Stern 

I love the fact that you brought it back to death, and you talked about, you know, sometimes the stakes are high. And if you embarrass somebody, the Talmud says it is like killing him. And so I think that, to me, the secret of the the challenge of the Parah Adumah cannot be far away from the challenge of death itself. And I don't want to raise the stakes too high. But to me, one of  the clues is in a piece of Talmud, that ends the story of the Parah Aduma. And the next story that follows the story of the parah Aduma, is the death of Miriam. And Rabbi Ami says, Why was the Torah portion that describes the death of Miriam juxtaposed to the portion dealing with the red heifer to tell you just as the red heifer atones for sin, so too the death of the righteous atones for sin, and it seems to me that what is keeping kivi'yachol, as if to say, God up at night, and what is making the challenge here is that in the world that the Torah is operating in, there seems to be this inextricable connection between salvation and death. So that it comes out of a world where there was child sacrifice, and obviously, it has a whole life of sacrifice itself in the temple. And somehow, if you've sinned to redeem yourself, something has to be killed. And getting back to your point, Rabbi Adam, about the question of the red here, it seems that in order this whole notion that the death of the righteous atones, I think we're really at a crossroads here, that both Judaism and Christianity at the same moment that that Roman was saying, this sounds crazy. This sounds strange was struggling with how do you get salvation? Do you need someone to die in order for someone else to live? And you know, there are books that have been written lately. Jon Levinson wrote a whole book about the idea of the death of the son in Old Testament as opposed to only in Christianity. He says, this didn't come up [out of no where] the idea that a God or righteioous person has to die, in order for salvation to be reached. And he traces it through the Akeda, the sacrifice of Isaac. But the idea again, that someone has to become tuma, in order for someone else to become tahur. It's not so much just a kind of cognitive or an intellectual question or mystery. It's something that really hurts home. There's so much in religion in general, but certainly Old Testament Judeo-Christian religion, about this need for something bad to happen in order for something good to happen, whether it's "ha zorim bedima brina yikzaru" (You plant in tears and reep in joy) or whether it's that a generation has to die in order for a new generation to go into the promised land. That's what I kind of saw as the real challenge here. It wasn't the intellectual inability to understand how some things can become pure and some things impure. But it was like this Gordian knot between the necessity for your purity to come at the expense of somebody else's impurity. That's kind of what struck me. And that I will agree with you, Michael, that is a mystery that does not have a solution. I'd like to break the knot. But it seems to somehow be written deeply into our DNA.

 

Michael Posnik 

That's really beautiful, about the dynamic of what we call life and death. And their relationship, and whether they're interdependent on one another, or they simply happen, we witness it, and try to see the connections between these things. You say God was up studying this passage, he might have been enjoying himself. Just really having finding pleasure in something that becomes a poem, rather than a piece of text, or a piece of text. He might have just enjoying the wonderful conundrum of that. The unknowability of it, still stay with that.

 

Adam Mintz 

Complexity is what makes it so exciting.

 

Michael Posnik 

You like it!

 

Adam Mintz 

The complexity is what gives it meaning. If it's not complex, it doesn't really have meaning. If it's too simple, it doesn't have real meaning. An interesting idea, Geoffrey. I mean, from my perspective, if you look at the word Chok, and you know, you can look at any lexicon and it will tell you every word how it's used throughout. I think the most common usage for it is that it is something that is written in stone. It's a law of nature. In Jeremiah, it talks about Chukat Yoreach ve'kochavim" the law of the moon in the stars. If you look at other places, Kings "B'chukat haGoyim", these were established rules. And my sense is here that the tension here the thing that intrigues us so much, and intrigued the rabbis and intrigued those who were polemisizing with them, is how can you break this? How can you change this, and in a sense to me, it wasn't simply that God was studying the Torah. And I don't see any reason why he wasn't enjoying himself. It doesn't say he was upset. But he was in studying the Torah. And he was studying it because there was going to be some sage, because he was studying the Torah of man. So he wasn't studying what was written in His Torah, but the Oral Tradition that came out of it, and, and to me, it's almost as though the mystery the puzzle of this Red Heifer this Chok that seems to be written in stone. I'm not sure what great sage he was referring to. I would like to think that it was Rabbi Akiva. And Rabbi Akiva at a certain point says something that is sung from the top of one's lungs at L'og B'Omer It's considered a very kabalistic thing, but it's a beautiful thing that he said. And Rabbi Akiva said, How fortunate Aae you Israel before whom you are purified? And who purifies you? It is your Father in heaven, and I will sprinkle purifying waters upon you and you shall be purified. And he says, "Ma Mikveh Metahir et ha Temaim, Af Hakadosh Baruch metahir et Yisrael", just as the ritual bath purifies the impure. So too the Holy One, bless it be he purifies Israel. And from the context that we're studying, it's almost in contradistinction to the red heifer, where the mikveh, for the pure waters of the mikvah do not become impure when one is sprinkled with them. And of course, if God ultimately is the one who purifies us, God does not become impure by purifying us. And I don't know, I don't know if this was all part of the tension at this moment in history, where the temple was destroyed. were, theyre were new possibilities and there were needs to break out of the old mold. Because I don't think that either Christianity or Judaism successfully broke out of it. Martyrdom was very big in in Judaism and part of the martyrdom was to bring the salvation. And that's the sad part of it. It's one thing to die because one has to for one's faith, but to do it in order to bring salvation to believe that there has to be a connection between death and giving up one's life in order to bring salvation is what so troubles me. And this Rabbi Akiva beautiful, saying, seems to me to point at a possible way out.? A possible way out of what? Of the complexity.

 

Geoffrey Stern 

His model, if you look at it, from the perspective of our discussion, does not have anything that is impurified by purification. I think if you look at this saying that it says how fortunate are you Israel, to know who purifies you, and the idea is that you can be purified, you can have salvation, without the need for whether it's the Egel Arufah, the red heifer, but also this cycle, this Gordian knot,  of sacrifice and of death in order to to create the potential for life. It kind of came to me as I was reading over this and saw this the saying of Miriam's death and the death of a tzadikim could bring life. And knowing even that Rabi Akiva himself was a martyr. It gives you another route out. But it also makes you understand, I think, what the mystery, the challenge and what the turmoil of the whole question of the red heifer.

 

Adam Mintz 

I like that a lot. I like turning the complexity of the Red Heifer into martyrdom. I think those are related topics. I think that's really, really interesting. Thank you so much, Geoffrey. This was an amazingly interesting topic today.

 

Geoffrey Stern 

Thank you, Rabbi. Thank you, Michael.

 

Adam Mintz 

Shabbat Shalom, everybody I'm looking forward to next week.

 

Geoffrey Stern 

You got it Shabbat shalom. See, well then.