Chukat: Renunciating Reason
Chukat: Renunciating Reason

From www.naaleh.com 

Parshas Chukat begins with the commandment for the ultimate chok, a law for which we can discern no humanly logical reason. These are the instructions concerning a red heifer whose ashes, when mixed with water and sprinkled upon someone who has become defiled by contact with death, have the ability to return him to a purified state.

Nevertheless, our Sages try to explain the purpose of this law as an expiation for the sin of the golden calf, that the mother, the heifer, must clean up the mess caused by her son, the calf. With the sin of the golden calf, death was reintroduced to the world as it had been originally introduced into the world through Adam’s sin. The red heifer would in some way nullify the impurity of death these sins caused.

While this explanation carries the element of truth, we must look more deeply into the connection between the two ideas to understand the root that unites them.

In what way is Adam’s sin similar to the sin of Bnei Yisroel forging the golden calf?

What was the status of Man and of Bnei Yisroel prior to each of their sins?

How do the ashes of the red heifer bring us back to the mindset we were meant to have at creation and that we achieved again at Mount Sinai?

Rav Pincus, the Tiferes Shimshon, shows us that the sin of the Jews in creating the golden calf was not a sin of idol worship. After all, they went to Hashem’s second in command, Aaron, with their request, and his response was, “Tomorrow is a holiday for Hashem,” not a holiday for calf worship.

So what was their sin? It was a sin of faulty reasoning, of using human logic to replace what Hashem had either explicitly commanded or explicitly omitted from his commands. The Jews did not want to replace the true G-d with an idol; they merely wanted a tangible symbol to represent G-d as Moses had done before he seemed to be “missing”. A

nd thus, this great people who had rectified Adam’s sin when they stood at Sinai and proclaimed, “We will do and we will listen,” who had reinstated the purity of man and nullified the death decree against mankind, now fell victim to the same hubris that had claimed Adam.

The Tallelei Chaim, Rav Chaim Hakohen, shows us that the phrase Hashem uses to introduce this ritual, “This is the unexplained law of the Torah,” points to the underlying basis of all sin. He explains that just as the laws pertaining to the red heifer are beyond our comprehension but we perform them because they are the will of G-d, so must we approach the performance of all mitzvoth in the Torah, simply doing them because they are G-d’s will, whether we believe we understand  the reasoning behind them or not.

The snake undermined this fundamental premise by telling Adam and Chava that if they ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge they would rival G-d. They used their own reasoning not to rival G-d but to hope to serve Him better by using the enhanced intellects they would acquire if they ate of the Tree Of Knowledge. By choosing to act on their own logic rather than on G-d’s command, irrespective of the reason for their act, they transgressed G=d’s explicit command not to eat of the fruit of that tree. By not submitting their mind and their will to the will of their Creator, they set the stage for all their descendents to put the reasoning of their own minds as a higher priority than His will.

The Tallelei Chaim sees an allusion to the sin of Adam in the very letters spelling out the red heifer in Hebrew, the PaRaH ADuMaH. That first sin was a sin of the fruit of Adam, PRIADaM. The letters of the two are almost identical in Hebrew, except that the “Yud” (I) with a numerical value of ten got divided into two “Heh”s, each with a numerical value of five.

According to Rav Chaim Hakohen, one of these Heh’s represents the upper, spiritual realm of the neshama, the soul, while the other represents the lower, physical realm of the body. Originally these two elements were meant to be in total harmony, with the spiritual aspect ruling over the physical desires.

In that state, the Tosher Rebbe points out in Avodas Avodah, man would have been immortal, rising up to heaven as one entity as Elijah had done. But all that spiritual potential within man dies when he dies. This loss of potential is the greatest impurity. When mankind and later the Jews sinned, they split the two realms, and that potential became obscured. At death then the spirit would return to its Source, and the body would return to the earth from which it was created, to the ADaMaH.

The snake introduced impurity to a pristine world. He closed off the physical body, the vessel for the spiritual soul, from the source of spiritual blessing. By sublimating our physical bodies and desires and opening ourselves up to the will of a Higher Authority, we open our beings to all the blessings our souls want to bestow upon us. Conversely, when we impose our own will over our beings, we close ourselves off from the flow of the spiritual blessings. As the Tallelei Chaim explains, we do not feel the beauty and rejuvenating effects of Shabbos, the gift of our souls, because we have been sealed off from receiving its blessing unless we can counteract the effects of sin on ourselves.

True, when we die, we atone for these sins and return to the source from whence we came, the earth. When we do teshuvah, repent, we are also trying to return to our original source. Part of the parah adumah ritual included immersing in the mikvah, ritual pool,  before being sprinkled with the ashes of the red heifer. Immersion in the mikvah waters is a symbolic reentering into the womb to emerge reborn in a new, purified state.

(Indeed, Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, in Waters of Eden, speaks of a woman’s monthly immersion in the mikvah as purification from the death of the potential of a new life as if it were the actual death of a human being.)

Being sprinkled with the ashes/water mixture of the red heifer was the final phase in the process of symbolic rebirth.

Rav Goldwasser in Yalkut Lekach Tov illustrates for us the conundrum presented by the parah adumah and the sin of the golden calf. Not only do the ashes of the red heifer purify those upon whom they are sprinkled while defiling those involved in its preparation, but both the red heifer and the golden calf were transformed through fire.

In the case of the golden calf, an inanimate object was transformed into the image of a living creature, a calf, and in the case of the red heifer, the opposite occurred; a living creature was transformed into the inanimate ashes. In essence, explains the Yalkut Lekach Tov, we can never know the purpose or end result of anything in this world. That is the domain of the G-d alone.

Today, in the absence of the red heifer, how can we nevertheless strive for purification? We begin by focusing on the spiritual aspect of our lives, by realizing that our essence is the holiness within us. As the Tosher Rebbe tells us, when we recite the daily morning blessing thanking Hashem “that He has not made me a slave,” we should reflect on the idea that we have the ability to free ourselves from the acquisitive demands of the material and physical aspects of our lives.

We have the choice to fill our time by satisfying every physical desire, or by opening ourselves up to spiritual fulfillment.

In Getting to Know Yourself (Da Es Atzmecha) elucidates this idea more fully. One can achieve happiness, he explains, only when he stops running after his physical desires. (Running, ratz, and desire, ratzon, share the same root.) The new car, the better job, more money, instead of satisfying us merely generates a desire for more acquisitions. That, he explains, is because material items are external to our true essence which is spiritual.

As long as we focus on these physical things, we will never achieve true inner peace which is a manifestation of understanding our spiritual essence and appreciating it. With our focusing inward rather than outward, we stop running, discover our true self, and open ourselves up again to enjoy the blessings of the soul, of the reflection of Hashem within us. We will begin to again approach the ideal condition of Man as a being whose spiritual essence bursts forth to elevate and animate the physical vessel which contains him. We will again commit ourselves to the vision at Sinai and achieve the purification the red heifer symbolized.

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