Chukat

A friend of mine looks at youthful pictures of old stars, calling it Mussar. We hope and pray daily for health, for life. Death lives like a heartbeat between our thoughts, in our lives. The paradox of the Parah Adumah – Red Hefer, which defiles the pure and purifies the defiled, represents the mystery of death. The inherent contradictions of life and death are the enigma that even King Solomon was unable to comprehend.

Rabbi Soloveitchik notes the long gap in narrative between the incident of the spies and the death of Miriam. (The story of Korach and the tale of the wood gatherer are written in between, but when these actually occurred is questionable.) Shortly after the exodus the spies brought their report. And it was thirty nine years later that Miriam died. We are told nothing about what happened in this time. Why? Because nothing happened. At least, one could understand people of that time feeling it that way. After the spies' report was in, the community was told they’d travel forty years, then die. Jewish national life would begin after this population wandered aimlessly, then disappeared. Death was the only destination they had in their lives.

The Midrash presents this image: Annually, on the night of the ninth of Av, everyone between ages twenty and forty would lie down in an open grave. In the morning, only some would get up and walk away. So they progressed toward the end of an era, a time marked incrementally by the death of a generation. This had to have been a sad time to live.

Rav Soloveitchik says the Parah Adumah served as a symbol for dealing with death. Had the Parah Aduma puzzle been about impurity alone it would have been put in Vayikra with the rest of tum'ah and taharah. This teaching was purposely put in Bamidbar, in the heart of an intense confrontation with mortality.

One of the metaphors of this rite is that someone other than the person being treated for impurity sprinkles the heifer's ashes. Generally, impure people immerse themselves in a mikvah, bringing some sense of control. Here, the treatment comes from outside oneself, out of one's own control. The impurity of death mirrors death. We can't cope with death on our own. G-d assists us in dealing with the lethal nature of life. G-d assures us that the soul will survive the demise of its physical form. We will live to see death of death.

The Torah is a guidebook for life. The start of this parshah states that "this is the Chok of the Torah." Death is part of life. That’s a chok, a reality that we can not grasp. Even Solomon was a man, and thus he couldn't completely understand life and death. It's a G-d thing.

The Rambam serves for many as the paradigm of the rationalist. He wrote that when he saw the handwriting of his deceased brother he felt unbearable emotional pain. And Rabbi Soloveitchik, today the mentor of many religious intellectuals, wrote that when struggling with his wife's fatal illness, as he walked the hospital's whitewashed walls he could not find G-d.

Death is a difficult reality for us all. This portion serves a simple reminder of this truth. I will close with a poem imagined in the voice of a friend.


before i tell you what
i'm going to tell you
i want you
to know
i'm cool with it:
i was laid off
i think i'm gonna teach
i said that when it happened
then i applied to revel
(i found devorah's-
that's our oldest daughter-
pictures all over
the brochure)
they gave me full scholarship
i told them
it's the only way
i could possibly do it
i'm taking three classes
the dean told me
i've been out of school
for a long time
that i've forgotten
how hard school is
and hey - you know what -
he was right
the girls don't say hello
excuse me but that's not right
but i think the biggest change
since i was there
is that y.u. has gotten affluent
everyone's got a cell phone
some people type everything
the teacher says in their lap top
while i'm sitting there going "doy"
and i was reading every word
of thousands of pages
i realized there's a way to do this
now i pick out the important parts
anyway
why don't i ever
see neil
at y.u.
he lives there
i wonder why i i never see
him in the library
or on the street
getting a cookie
oh by the way
does everyone here know
that i'm dead
take it slow
aaron