"To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner.  I am not a teacher, only a fellow student."  (Soren Kierkegaard)

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A FEW PRE-SHABBAT AND POST SHAVUOT WORDS FROM RABBI AARON

How Now Red Cow?
Parashat chukkat opens with a perplexing (some would say opaque) chapter which describes the purification rituals surround spiritual impurity caused by contact with corpse. The best way for me to covey the challenges of this ritual is to let the text speak for itself:

Adonai said to Moses and Aaron:  “This is a requirement of the law that Adonai has commanded: Tell the Israelites to bring you a red heifer without defect or blemish and that has never been under a yoke. Give it to Eleazar the kohen; it is to be taken outside the camp and slaughtered in his presence. Then Eleazar the kohen is to take some of its blood on his finger and sprinkle it seven times toward the front of the tent of meeting. While he watches, the heifer is to be burned—its hide, flesh, blood and intestines. The kohen is to take some cedar wood, hyssop and scarlet wool and throw them onto the burning heifer. After that, the kohen must wash his clothes and bathe himself with water. He may then come into the camp, but he will be ceremonially unclean till evening.  The man who burns it must also wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he too will be unclean till evening. “A man who is clean shall gather up the ashes of the heifer and put them in a ceremonially clean place outside the camp. They are to be kept by the Israelite community for use in the water of cleansing; it is for purification from sin. The man who gathers up the ashes of the heifer must also wash his clothes, and he too will be unclean till evening. This will be a lasting ordinance both for the Israelites and for the foreigners residing among them.  “Whoever touches a human corpse will be unclean for seven days. They must purify themselves with the water on the third day and on the seventh day; then they will be clean. But if they do not purify themselves on the third and seventh days, they will not be clean. If they fail to purify themselves after touching a human corpse, they defile Adonai’s tabernacle. They must be cut off from Israel. Because the water of cleansing has not been sprinkled on them, they are unclean; their uncleanness remains on them. “This is the law that applies when a person dies in a tent: Anyone who enters the tent and anyone who is in it will be unclean for seven days, and every open container without a lid fastened on it will be unclean. “Anyone out in the open who touches someone who has been killed with a sword or someone who has died a natural death, or anyone who touches a human bone or a grave, will be unclean for seven days. “For the unclean person, put some ashes from the burned purification offering into a jar and pour fresh water over them. Then a man who is ceremonially clean is to take some hyssop, dip it in the water and sprinkle the tent and all the furnishings and the people who were there. He must also sprinkle anyone who has touched a human bone or a grave or anyone who has been killed or anyone who has died a natural death. The man who is clean is to sprinkle those who are unclean on the third and seventh days, and on the seventh day he is to purify them. Those who are being cleansed must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and that evening they will be clean. But if those who are unclean do not purify themselves, they must be cut off from the community, because they have defiled the sanctuary of Adonai. The water of cleansing has not been sprinkled on them, and they are unclean. This is a lasting ordinance for them. “The man who sprinkles the water of cleansing must also wash his clothes, and anyone who touches the water of cleansing will be unclean till evening. Anything that an unclean person touches becomes unclean, and anyone who touches it becomes unclean till evening.”

“Although my heart moved me to provide clues to the mitzvot which precede the text of the red heifer, I offer my apologies - as much as my aim is to instruct my son and his peers (may God watch over them), regarding this mitzvah, my powers fail me and I'm reluctant to say anything; whether it is by way of commentary or even the plain sense of the words because our sages (may their memory be blessed) wrote at length about the the deeply esoteric nature of this mitzvah.“
King Solomon, in his great wisdom, successfully grasped the rationale for every mitzvah in the Torah except this one, about which he remarked, [Ecclesiastes 7:23] "I said I am wise, but this exceeds my grasp." Furthermore [quoting from midrash Tanchuma] Rabbi Yose son of Rabbi Chanina says, "The Holy One told Moshe, 'I will reveal to you the reasoning behind the red heifer rituals, but I am not revealing this to anyone else.'" 

Simple translation: "totally beats me!"
The author of Sefer Hachinuch goes into serious detail regarding the spiritual purification regimen in the era of the Holy Temple regarding the red heifer. Trust me when I tell you that if Numbers chapter 19 didn't cause your eyes to glaze over, these pages would certainly do the trick.

Toward the end of his description the author quotes this bit of talmud: "A total of nine red heifers were slaughtered for the purposes of this ritual. "Moses slaughtered the first one, Ezra the Scribe slaughtered the second one; the ashes of the following seven heifers were used until the Second Temple was destroyed. And the tenth heifer will be slaughtered by the King Messiah, may he be revealed to us in our day." 

Unraveling this bit of talmud
This suggests that red heifers were exceedingly rare and that the ashes were used rather sparingly over many centuries. This notion of scarcity is coupled with the idea that concerns of spiritual purity were of high importance within Biblical and Temple era Judaism. 
A quick related aside: check out the pdf for chukkat below. There's a recent photo of a very real handsome red heifer. I juxtaposed this photo [taken from a cattle-breeding website (!!)] with Numbers chapter 19 in order to highlight the cultural distance between the modern reader and the ancient text. 

Another rabbinic go-round; this dialogue is from Pesikta deRav Kahana [midrash, Palestine, between the 5th and 7th Century]

A heathen questioned Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai saying:
"The things you Jews do appear to be a kind of sorcery. A cow is brought, it is burned, is pounded into ash, and it ash is gathered up. Then when one of you gets defiled by contact with a corpse, two or three drops of the ash mixed with water are sprinkled upon him, and he is told, 'You are cleansed!'"
Rabbi Yochana asked the heathen: 
"Has the spirit of madness ever possessed you?"
"No."
"Have you ever seen a man whom the spirit of madness has possessed?"
"Yes."
"And what do you do for such a man?"
"Roots are brought. The smoke of their burning is made to rise about him, and water is sprinkled upon him until the spirit of madness flees."
"Don't your ears hear what your mouth is saying?! It is the same with a man who is defiled by contact with a corpse - he, too, is possessed by a spirit, the spirit of uncleanness, and Scripture [Zechariah 13:2] says, 'I will make false prophets as well as the unclean spirit vanish from the land.'

Now when the the heathen left, Rabban Yochanan's disciples said: Our master, you put off that that heathen with a flimsy answer, but what answer will you give us?" He answered: "By your lives, I swear: The corpse does not have the power by itself to defile, nor does the mixture of ash and water have the power by itself to cleanse. The truth is that the purifying power of the red heifer is a decree of the Holy One. God said: I have set it down s a statute, I have issued it as a decree. You are not permitted to transgress My decree. 'This is the ritual law.'   

Rubinstein's 2 cents
Rabban Yochanan's offers a sophisticated take on the non-rational nature of ritual. He compares the biblical ritual to an ancient form of exorcism (which it may well have been), but he rejects the ritual as being an exorcism. According to Rabban Yochanan we oberve the ritual as a gesture of obedience [or submission] but he offers no means of deciphering the ritual itself.  
Looking closer - another edit
Here is the teaching: When a man dies within an enclosed space... 
A plain-sense reading of this words = here are the rituals concerning ritual impurity conveyed by contact with the dead...
A Hasidic re-reading of this verse (thank you to Rabbi Mordechai Finley for this insight...)
This is this ultimate paradoxical teaching: human beings die. We all do. There are times when we can come to grips with the loss of someone close, and there are times when death stares at us as an insurmountable wound, an ache, an emptiness which returns from time to time, unbidden, haunting.

On Sunday June 16 a group of 16-year olds from Camp Ramah were white-water rafting on the Ocoee, and one young man, Andrew Silvershein, drowned. Everyone had followed all the safety protocols, and yet - the impossible to explain reality is that people die. Sometimes we call the event a freak accident because there is no way for words to help us come to grips with our loss. 
The seemingly opaque passage of the red heifers bids us to face spiritual impurity with these mysteriously cleansing waters. For me, for all of who grieve for Andrew, or for anyone who has been torn from our embrace - it's not about spiritual impurity. It's more about the crushing isolation of sadness and melancholy. Perhaps the healing waters are our tears and the tears and the love of our friends, and the cleansing rituals are about the ways a community mourns and extends itself to those whose back are bent in grief. Rabban Yochanan was right: the ash-infused waters don't make anything extraordinary happen. But when we build a ritual home and live inside the rituals - something powerful happens for us, to us. 

Shabbat Shalom

Rabbi Aaron

Click any of the images below to view the complete pdf file (some pdf files are more than one page)