Did you know there is an institution in Israel dedicated to raising animals that will be kosher to sacrifice if the temple in Jerusalem is rebuilt? One of the tasks is they are trying to raise a red heifer (a young cow that has not had her first calf), but in order for it to be kosher it has to be completely red- no white hairs anywhere. They have a few red heifers they’ve been raising, but each of them have developed a few white hairs, at least as of their last update in May. (While I find these efforts interesting, I will say on a personal level I feel very okay about not doing sacrifices, and practicing Judaism without the temple, but that is a subject for another day.) However, the red heifer, or in Hebrew parah adumah, has an important role in temple worship as its ashes are used to ritually purify people who have been in contact with the dead. This whole mysterious ritual is described in the beginning of this week’s Torah portion. It involves priests burning the red heifer and mixing the ashes with water and other elements.
Many sources and commentators are puzzled by this law and cannot understand what reason might be behind it. It is seen as a mystery. For example in Sefer Hachinuch he explains:
“I saw that our rabbis, their memory be a blessing, spoke at length in the depths of [the Torah’s] secrets and the vastness of its points, to the point that they said that King Solomon understood, with all his vast wisdom, all the reasons for the mitzvot, except for this one, as he said about it, (Ecclesiastes 7:23) "I said, I will understand, and it was distant from me."..
He is saying that even King Solomon who is known for his incredible wisdom did not understand the reasoning about this mitzvah. He understood all the others, but this one eluded him. According to this text, the red heifer is the most mysterious and confusing of all the mitzvot.
Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, a sage during the time of the mishnah, is also asked about this ritual by his students (in Bemidbar Rabbah 19:8). He tells them there are some declarations and rules that we will never know why, but we have to follow them:
Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai said to [his students], "By your lives, a dead person doesn't make things impure, and the water doesn't make things pure. Rather, God said, 'I have engraved a rule, I have decreed a decree, and you have no permission to transgress what I decreed, as it says "This is a chok (rule) of the Torah."
Generally as people, and as meaning-makers we want to understand why we are doing something and what it means. It can be hard when we don’t have a specific “why.” Just like here we have the rabbis grappling with the fact that they don’t understand the reasoning behind the red heifer, we also struggle when we don’t fully understand something. There is a lot of unknown out there, even as we discover more and more through science and study it keeps revealing more questions. The red heifer here invites us into that sense of mystery. It tells us it’s okay to wonder and to question and not come up with a satisfactory answer. We have felt that a lot this year, wondering and questioning- trying to plan and then plan again as things change. How can we lean more into that feeling of the unknown and the mystery, to be a little more comfortable with questions that don’t necessarily have an answer.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Walker
rabbiwalker@bethdavid.com