Chukat: The Healing Power of Strange Rituals

How can a strange ritual help us deal with life’s hardships?

Parashat Chukat opens with one of the strangest rituals described in the Torah (bamidbar 19.2):

The priest is to take a perfectly cow “without blemish,” burn it entirely, and add hyssop, cedar wood, and crimson. Then the one who gathers the ashes will add them to the purification water.

The ritual of the parah adumah is indeed a purification ritual.

On one hand, the Torah tells us it is a ‘chok’: a decree, a type of commandment that doesn’t have a meaning in and of itsel: as opposed to testimonies (Edim) or laws of justice (Mishpatim), their rationale stemx solely from the fact they were decreed by Divine Authority.

But on the other hand, the Torah explicitly conveys meaning to this very shamanistic ritual:

it is to cleanse us from contact with the dead.

Indeed, for Non-dual as it is on the level of mysticism, Torah teaches us that there are two things cannot be brought together: life and death.

Within the cycle of life, these two opposite poles of human existence become the source of one of the most important structuring dichotomies in Jewish ritual life:

The opposition between Tumah (impurity) and Tahara (purity).

Tumah is connected to death. Tahara is connected to life.

This is why one who comes into contact with a dead body, as our parasha later expounds, becomes tameh (impure) and has to go through a quarantine period before immersing in the living waters (mikveh) of purification.

This will bring them back to tahara: the side of Life.

Commenting on the verse "one who comes into contact with the dead"(Bamidbar 19:11), the Mei HaShiloach offers us a profound interpretation of what death means on a philosophical level.

He starts, as usual, by taking us on a detour:

We could be “angry” at God, contending with Divine will—in other words, from a Hasidic perspective, contesting what is happening in reality for many reasons: illness, war, hardship.

These contestations take the form of prayer.

Praying for compassion, claiming a “sweetening of the decrees” as Hasidic language says, is acceptable to the Ishbitzer Rebbe.

But he adds:

“It is forbidden for the human being to find in one’s heart any grudge at God for something that already happened.”

אסור לאדם שימצא בליבו שום תרעומת על הש"י בדבר שכבר עבר

In other words, as we saw about the world of prayer in Parashat Shelach:

As long as there is hope, we can still address our complaints, as it will, to God.

This is because we are still hoping for compassion. We are still hoping for something to change.

But with דבר שכבר עבר, “a thing that already happened,” what are we going to do?

When no prayer will help what already happened, then what is left to us is to surrender to the fact that it happened—to surrender to the decree of God.

That would be a phenomenological definition of a chok: a decree.

The ineluctable. What has been done cannot be undone. The consequences can be amended; we can change from it. But the factuality of what happened, the factuality that it happened, this cannot be erased.

It is called therefore a decree because it is imposed upon us; there is nothing we can do about it.

This is how the Mei HaShiloach understands and offers what, in my view, stands as a deep, stoic philosophical definition of death in our parasha. Because, regarding the verse he is commenting on, he teaches: “The dead,” means something that has happened in the past, and concerning this it is forbidden to become angry at the attribute of severe judgment מת היינו דבר שכבר עבר, ע"ז אסור לאדם להתרעם על מדת הדין

“Death,” on a philosophical level, points to more than the cessation of life in a physical body.

Phenomenologically, it points to the ineluctability of facts: the unerasable factuality of what happened.

Many times, when confronted with hardship, we can stay stuck at the level of suffering because we don’t accept that it happened. It may sound absurd, and yet, this is what we humans spend too much time doing: we stay fixated at the point of not agreeing to accept that what happened, happened.

Yet not agreeing doesn’t change facts. Reality doesn’t ask for our permission. Only once we accept that it happened can it be for us the beginning of resilience.

This is why, upon hearing the news of death, we say “Baruch Dayan HaEmet,” blessed is the Judge of Truth. (Talmud, Mishnah Berakhot 9:2) By saying so, we remind ourselves and each other that we don’t get to judge facts, reality, Truth, divine decrees. All we can do is surrender and heal.

How do we do so?

The answer is with the parah adumah, the red heifer, the Mei HaShiloach reminds us:

“One who became angry, raising complaints, the waters of the chatat (guilt offering) purify him”

מי שעבר עליו תרעומות, מי חטאת מטהרו

Water, in a Jewish mystical perspective, is the symbol of life.

This is why we purify ourselves (we bring ourselves closer to life) upon awakening in the morning, as sleep represents, in a Talmudic perspective, a sixtieth of death. This is why women purify themselves in the mikveh after having let go of their monthly blood and lost an opportunity for new life. This is why the one who came into contact with the dead has to purify themselves in the living waters of the mikveh before coming back into society.

I feel we, Israelis and Diaspora Jews, need a huge mikveh right now.

There has been too much death. The ones we have suffered on October 7th and since; the ones we have been, and are still, tricked into causing by an invisible enemy who won’t fight directly but whose war strategy is to cause as many civilian deaths as possible on both sides; the ones that the extremists among us are causing, thinking it will protect the Jewish people.

There has been so much death over these past nine months that many of us are raising our voices in complaints to the divine. And that is useless.

What we need, regarding this unbearable amount of sadness because of death, is the healing water of the mikveh. And this starts with the purifying mikveh of our tears, since, as the Piaseczno Rebbe reminds us, “tears are the mikveh of the soul.”

But there is one complaint I want to keep sending high up in the sky.

There is a prayer I want to keep saying.

There is a Divine Mercy I want to keep asking for.

This is for the release of those who are retained captive.

For them, God doesn’t want our tears. For them, God wants our prayer.

For them, it is not time for the purifying waters of the parah adumah.

Their fate hasn’t been decreed yet.

For them, there is still hope for return. Let us keep praying.