The Korach episode most likely took place like everything else in Bamidbar during the second year in the wilderness. The story in this week’s Parasha, beginning with the death of Miriam, takes place 38 years later. Where does that leave the Para Aduma (the red heifer), which is the first subject of the Parasha? I believe it is placed in the middle for a very important reason, both as an antidote to Korach and as the essential introduction for a new generation.
The red heifer is the Torah’s prototypical Chok, or a law that defies final explanation. The cow is used to purify someone who has become ritually impure because of contact with the dead. In the midst of explaining the procedure, the Torah sums up by saying “this is the law of a man who dies in a tent” (19:14)). But the Torah does not say “this is the Torah OF” (Zot Torat HaAdam…”). Instead it simply says, “this is the Torah -- a man who dies in a tent.” The Gemora notices this and learns from here that the verse is announcing something about the Torah itself, and not just about a specific scenario. It is saying that the Torah itself is defined as someone who “dies in a tent,” i.e. the Torah exists through someone who is willing to kill himself over learning. There are people who learn a lot, of course, but we are now hearing about another level. These are people whose learning is so relentless that they allow themselves almost no interruptions. Their “killing of themselves” involves ignoring their physical needs except for the barest minimum.
This is certainly an important thing to learn, but the question is, why did the Torah choose this context in which to teach it? Why does this concept of self-sacrifice have to appear in the section of Para Aduma?
There are surely many approaches to this question but I heard one approach in the name of an early 20th century teacher, R’ Isser Zalman Meltzer, ztz’l. He said that this concept belongs here, amidst the most famous Chok of the Torah, because it itself is a Chok. It would make sense that the Torah always needs scholars willing to push themselves to learn more and more. But does it depend on people willing to regularly go without sleep? The Torah’s existence depends on that? This is a concept that defies explanation.
Our son Yehuda, with whom we visited this week in St. Louis, suggested one application of this idea. He suggested that one of the things that one sees from this is that learning is not just another intellectual endeavor. Because it looks like other areas of study, we often assume that it can only be mastered by people who have specific intellectual gifts. But that’s not true. It is common to find among great scholars people who did not possess such gifts from birth. The key to their growth in learning was their willingness to treat the Torah as nothing less than their life. This result cannot be explained but it’s certainly evident.
But there’s another way to approach the insight that learning Torah with this intensity is itself a Chok. This approach explains why this entire section comes at this point in the Torah. R’ Shlomo Fisher in Yerushalayim points out that in the long blessing we say after a Bris, we call it a Chok. As a rule, the commentators do not call Bris Mila a Chok, so this is an interesting usage of the term. Here it does not mean that it is a Chok because it defies ultimate understanding. The word Chok can mean that a certain law embodies what I would call the posture of a Chok, which is a certain deference or acquiescence. One shows a respect for the law by listening and following it without a quibble or question. Performing the Bris at such a young age impresses upon everyone involved how non-negotiable the Mitzva is. It makes it a given that this is how a Jewish child begins life.
The Chok of Torah learning is this kind of posture. When one is willing to forego all but the minimum of physical necessities for the Torah, one manifests this type of deference to Hashem’s Torah. That is the Chok in the learning of Torah conducted in this manner.
This is clearly the opposite of Korach. But one can also see why it directly precedes the moment at which the Torah picks up the narrative 38 years later in the wilderness. One of the prerequisites for the new generation was to correct the errors of the previous generation. One major gap was that they lacked the posture of a Chok, the ability to respect Moshe Rabenu’s words to the point of unquestioned deference. This new generation is taking over now, and the precondition is the ability to listen with no preconceptions, to hearken to what is actually being said without filtering it through what one might think. There’s always time to analyze and question, but only after one has learned the essential competency of the Chok, which is to listen with innocence.
