July 9/05 — Shabbat Chukat

Commentary by Rabbi Alan Green

“Speak to the children of Israel, that they bring you a red cow, perfect, without blemish, and upon which there has never been a yoke. You will give the cow to Elazar the priest, and it shall be taken outside the camp, and slaughtered in front of him… A man that is clean will gather up the ashes of the cow, and place them outside the camp, in a clean place. And they shall be put aside for the children of Israel, for use as a water of sprinkling, as a purification from sin.” (Numbers 19: 1-9)

This week’s Parsha begins with what is perhaps the most puzzling and mysterious passage in the whole Torah. These instructions for the manufacture of a purifying mixture of water and the ashes of a perfectly red cow are just the beginning of the mystery.

This mixture was designed to purify anyone who had even the most casual contact with a corpse. Even to be under the same roof as a corpse was enough to require a rite of purification involving the ashes of a perfectly red cow.

In ancient times, contact with a corpse prevented one from entering the sacred precincts of the Temple. Even today, we can understand how a rite of purification might have been desirable under such circumstances.

We human beings don’t do very well with death. Even the death of strangers often has a profound impact upon us. How much the more so is this true with the death of our loved ones! So, we can understand many of the practices that surround death today—the rites of funerals, burials, and mourning—as the modern equivalent of the sprinkling of the ashes of the red cow.

Now, back to the ancient ritual. Read the complete description of this rite (p. 652-655 in the Hertz Commentary), and you will discover that while its aim was to purify the impure, it defiled anyone connected with preparing either the ashes or the water. This was a contradiction whose logic is said to have eluded even the giant intellect of King Solomon—the wisest man of the ancient Jewish world.

A story in the Talmud relates that a Roman nobleman once expressed amazement at the rites of the red cow. Yochanan ben Zakkai explained, “Just as a person possessed by melancholy is freed from his disease by taking certain herbs, or by the burning of certain roots, so with the ashes of the red cow: prepared in the prescribed way, and dissolved in water, they drive away the ‘unclean spirit’ of defilement, caused by contact with the dead.”

The Roman was satisfied with this answer. However, Rabbi Yochanan’s students, who knew better, then questioned him: “You warded off that man’s challenge with a broken reed, but what will you answer us?” To which Rabbi Yochanan could only reply, “By your life, the corpse doesn’t make anyone impure, nor do the ashes make anyone pure; but the law of the red cow ritual is a statute of the KADOSH BARUCH HU, whose reasons are beyond human understanding!”

The red cow ritual is a perfect example of a whole class of commandments in the Torah, called in Hebrew, CHUKIM—most often translated as “statutes,” but meaning any law or ordinance which cannot be explained rationally. Indeed, the Parsha begins with the words, ZOT CHUKAT HA-TORAH—signaling from the start that the red cow rite is a CHOK, and we aren’t going to be able to understand it with our limited human intellects.

Perhaps the lesson of the red cow ritual, or any of the CHUKIM of the Torah, is that there are categories of experience and understanding that transcend the rational. Indeed, if we are ever going to be able to grasp the subtle realities of God and spirit, we would do well to soften our fearful, iron grip on the logical, the rational, and the tangible, in favour of what can only be sensed by the body, or intuited by our feelings.