Who among us understands the mystery of life and death, or tuma and tahara (impurity and purity), the main subjects of this week's sedra? Not many, I dare say.



What I think we can say is that at least one nuance of tuma is that it represents a progression away from life; while tahara is a movement towards life. Thus, when a woman begins her menstrual state and the possibility of conception is absent, she enters a state of tuma, and when a body is prepared for burial, it undergoes a tahara that prepares it for new life in the World to Come.



Blood is the primary symbol of the tuma/tahara dichotomy. Blood, of course, can symbolize death; yet, "the life is in the blood," says the Torah, and blood carries life-giving oxygen throughout the body.



We are told that "B'damayich chayee" (in your bloods you shall live). Prior to Pesach, the Jewish People had to spill two bloods: that of the Brit Mila and that of the Korban Pesach (paschal sacrifice). In both instances, there was a high element of danger - in the surgery of the Brit and in the public flaunting of the Egyptian god, the lamb. Yet these two acts - precisely because they were so dangerous and thus represented faith in G-d - were our principal merits in leaving Egypt.



I have learned a lot in these last six months, since our beloved son Ari, z.l., was killed [while serving in the IDF - ed.]. His death, like that of any Jew killed suddenly and violently, was an act of the grossest tuma. Such crimes pollute the Earth and blot out the Shechina, G-d's presence.



And yet, Ari?s courage and self-sacrifice has released a torrent of purity across the world. On a recent trip to America, I had the privilege of addressing 1,000 young people in New York and Florida who have been learning daily in memory of terror victims, each one keeping a picture of the martyr in front of him or her while studying. In Miami Beach, our family was the recipient of a holy Sefer Torah in Ari?s memory, organized by holy Jews who only knew of our son, but had not actually met him.



Here in Israel, we have watched in amazement as so many people have done so many unbelievable things in response to this tragedy, from chesed, to study, to support for Ohel Ari, the center we are starting in his name. No small part of this, I am sure, is the understanding that it is only because young IDF zaddikim like Ari give their lives that Israel and all its people survive day by day, year by year.



May Hashem soon replace the blood of our k'doshim with the bloods of the Brit and the renewed Korban Pesach.

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Rabbi Weiss is the director of the Jewish Outreach Center in Ra?anana.

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