Chukkat, part two, the d'var

Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai said, of the ritual of the red cow, two different things. To non-Jews, he said it was an exorcism. To Jews, he said “It makes no sense, it has no point, but God commands it, so we do it.” (from Midrash Tanhuma).

I read in my Chumash, also, that King Solomon himself labored to understand this ritual, and could not.

I don’t get that. The Torah is full of bizarre rituals, rituals that seem like magic. At the same time the Torah itself, and the Rabbis who followed, are careful to note that the rituals are NOT magic. Their effectiveness stems from God, not from any other forces called into service by the specific actions. It is commanded by God that this is what you do, and so you must do it exactly as God commands. But the fact that you do it precisely is not what makes it work. You do it precisely only because God commands you to do so. That is why the rituals are not magic. But why should the ritual of the brown cow be more mysterious than the others?



And why does God command such rituals? Why would God want us to do things that look an awful lot like magic, but are not meant to be understood that way, and at the same time prohibit the practice of actual magic? (Not that that ever stopped anyone. I am wearing, right now, a hamsa my father’s mother gave me, many years ago, that she bought in Israel. A hamsa is an ancient middle eastern token of protection from the evil eye, and it’s sold wherever Jewish jewelry is sold. )

Anyway, back to the red cow ritual. You sacrifice the red cow, you burn it up (teeth, tails, hooves, dung, and all) and you collect the ashes and mix them up with some water. Well, you don’t; Eleazar the Kohen does. That makes the “water of lustration”, which should definitely be the name of a band.

The water of lustration purifies concrete nouns (“A noun is a person, place, or thing.”) after they have been defiled by death. You can get a priest to dash the water of lustration upon the contaminated objects (but only after a certain amount of time has passed), and then they become clean again. There’s an entire chapter, verse after verse, of exactly which people, places and things become defiled through death, and exactly how to purify them. If you don’t purify them, they will always be unclean.

Yes, let us modern people now take a moment to point and laugh at our very, very superstitious, gullible, gods-ridden ancestors, with their seven drops of the water of lustration, and their red heifers, and their priests shaking hyssop at a tent where a dead man lay. Oh, those ancients and their obsession with pointless spiritual purity. It’s like old home video, these stories, of kids doing the darnedest things with the utmost seriousness.

Or instead let’s project the germ theory of disease three thousand years before it was discovered, and decide that enforcing separation for people and places where someone has died was for the purposes of medical quarantine. That’s because our people have always been special and preternaturally clever. ( And the injunction against pork is all about trichinosis, and circumcision was to prevent cervical cancer in ancient Hebrew women...)

The great advantage of both of those stories is that both of them allow us to pretend that contact with death does not, in fact, cause any kind of spiritual contamination. We were either superstitious or health-conscious, but not actually dealing with a genuine spiritual phenomenon that genuinely needed a purely spiritual solution, because if that were so then we would have to admit that today, too, there are spiritual consequences to death.

If death does not contaminate, then why, pray tell, do we hide ourselves from it? Why do we segregate our old and dying? Why do we leave professionals to care for our dying, why do we leave professionals to prepare our dead for burial, why do we run from death like it’s breathing down our own necks, icy cold?

Me, I threw away the clothes I wore at my uncle’s side when he died. After he died, my cell phone turned sinister. The things I touched, the objects in that room, my body, that hospital, that part of town, the park at which I’d received the call that his kidneys had failed, the taxi company I’d used to carry his things home from the hospital, all of them -- UNCLEAN! Everything that his death touched, including me, was foul with it. No one came to me and pointed and pronounced me “unclean”. No one came to me and said “You, you are impure. Separate yourself until you have been purified.” It was Death itself that dropped a barrier, and if I had had some water of lustration, I would have been grateful.

But we have no more priests and no more temple and no more water of lustration. All we have are the words, but perhaps they are enough. At the very least, they are a reminder that we once understood the spiritual significance of death. In the days after you have witnessed death, when you are seeing the world through a veil, when you walk like one half-dead yourself, and wonder where to turn and what to do and how you can feel this way about what is a perfectly natural process, (isn’t it?) it is no good laughing at the ritual of the red heifer, and it is no good nodding at its wise hygenic quarantines. You know better than that.

* Here is a wonderful article on My Jewish Learning which suggests that today, in the absence of the Temple, it is tears and tzedekah that substitute for the water of lustration.