This is the 28th time we’ve passed Parashat Para together. When I first came to Palo Alto to try out for the job, this was the Parasha in a year exactly like this one. A leap year in which Purim had been Thursday (Friday in Yerushalayim). I haven’t spoken about it every year, and two years ago this was the Shabbat we closed down for the virus. But the bulk of those Shabbatot, when I did speak, I addressed some aspect of the reading about the red heifer. That I’ve done it so many times speaks to the complexity of the Parasha, but there are aspects of it that I think we can grasp.
The red heifer holds the promise of transition from Tum’a, or ritual impurity, to Tahara, or purity. But even though we translate the latter as “purity,” it really means clarity or transparency. It is a Hebrew word but it is also used in Aramaic, as a translation of the word Tzohary’im (Yirmiya 20:16). When Noach puts a Tzohar in the Ark, it is a window, a transparent opening that lets in light. At noon, at Tzohary’im, things are so clear that there isn't even a shadow. Something clear and revealed is Tahor.
Tum’a, on the other hand, is the opposite. It is obscure, buried, inaccessible. Whenever you have a word in Ivrit that has a Tet and a Mem together, it means that something is sealed off, unseeable. Tamun means buried; a Timtum is someone whose biological gender is unclear. A M’tumtam is someone who does not think clearly.
The ultimate inaccessible state is death. It is Impenetrable, and that is why it is associated with Tum’a. Contact with the dead leaves one in the deepest state of Tum’a.
How one transitions from one state to the other is the realm of Chok. It belongs to the ungraspable part of the Torah. The red heifer is the paradigm of Chok in the Torah. A Chok is also best understood in the contrast with Mitzvot which have “reasons.”
When the Mitzvot of the Torah have reasons, they are never called Sibot. A Mitzva is never “caused” by its reason. The Torah’s reasons, when they are offered by the commentaries, are always called “Ta’amim,” or “tastes.” All flavoring or taste is the mechanism by which something mixes with us. Something that stands outside of us needs a way to mix with us and become part of us. That’s what a reason does -- it gives a taste.
But what we call something a Chok, even if it has a reason, that reason does not characterize the way it interfaces with us. Chok comes from the word to engrave, to carve into something so that it becomes a part of the thing. When we write letters on paper, the letters are not part of the paper. An eraser can erase them, a straight edge can lift the letters off of the paper.
Not so with what is engraved. Nothing erases it, nothing can remove it. It becomes part of the stone. A Chok cannot “mix” with us because it is not necessarily apart from us. It is part of us.
Reading Parashat Para is a stage we reach after Purim. What we learn on Purim is that the world exists on a level beyond understanding. That does not mean that people are supposed to give up on the value of rationality. That would be silly. But it is a good idea to give up on the idea that everything can be rationally explained. [On the way to Kiddush, Shabsi Walfish pointed out that Godel’s incompleteness theorems express the same idea in the realm of mathematics.] Reading about the red heifer after Purim underscores that point.
In Parashat Chukat, after the reading of the red heifer, the Torah mentions the death of Miriam. Rashi comments there that both the death of a Tzadik and the process of the red heifer give atonement. R’ Chaim Kanievsky, ztz’l, passed away on Shushan Purim and presented rabbis all over the world with a dilemma of how to address it without going into the realm of eulogy, which cannot be given on Shabbat. I hope to speak about R’ Chaim on Tuesday night in Beit Midrash. But I wanted to mention him here in connection with the red heifer. The verse says that the Chok of the Torah comes up when “a person dies in a tent.” The Talmud says that that means the Torah is acquired by those who kill themselves “in the tent,” or the Beit Midrash. No one demonstrated that better than R’ Chaim, who devoted himself to a schedule which enabled him to finish the Mishna, both Talmuds, the Mishne Torah of the Rambam, the Shulchan Aruch, the Mishna Berura, and all of the Midrash EVERY YEAR. That cannot be done unless one is ready to sacrifice almost everything else. In turn, he became the rare Talmid Chacham on whom the Torah was engraved, becoming part of him.
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