Before I begin, I would like to thank my mother for graciously allowing me to write a guest blog on her blog this week and for her Torah which constantly inspires me. I would also like to to thank all my teachers at Yeshivat Maale Gilboa where I studied this year. Particularly, I am grateful to Rav Elisha Anscelovits whose ideas about legal realism in halkha deeply influenced this drasha.
Parshat Chukat begins with the laws of tumat meit, the laws governing contact with death, a powerful and negative experience. In the Torah, such contact would likely occur through the passing of a loved one, on the battlefield, or through the discovery of an abandoned cadaver. The laws of tumat meit provide a framework for navigating this experience.
After a difficult experience, we often suppress our negative emotions. However, sometimes we simply need to allow ourselves to feel hurt, angry, or sad to begin the process of healing. The Torah classifies the person who touches the corpse as “unclean,” tamei, helping the person name their pain and accept it rather than suppressing it. Emotional cleansing begins with allowing oneself to acknowledge feeling unclean.
The Torah also understands that this reckoning requires time. A person who has become unclean through contact with a corpse undergoes a healing process of seven days in which her status as unclean prevents her from reengaging with normal life. This separation allows the person to confront and process the experience uninhibited by distractions. It is only in a space of uncleanness, that a person can be truly cleansed.
To be cleansed, the unclean individual must be sprinkled with water that has been mixed with the ashes of a red heifer. This ritual further helps the unclean individual accept and release their uncleanness. Given that the water is filled with ashes, the sprinkling is most likely not a cleansing experience. Rather, being doused in sooty water is dirtying. The cleansing comes only from the physical experience of wiping away the ashes, as is evidenced by the fact that an individual is only pronounced “clean” after she has bathed. Once again, the Torah recognizes that to feel clean, we must first allow ourselves to be and feel dirty, both physically and emotionally.
In the Torah, the “water of cleansing” (mei niddah) is itself unclean. This paradox is mirrored by the language that the Torah uses to describe the process of cleansing. Hu yitchatah bo, “he shall be cleansed in it [the sooty water],” (Numbers 19:12). The word yitchata comes from the root chata which can mean both “sin” or “cleanse.” The Torah understands that allowing ourselves to recognize and engage with a negative experience such as sin rather than suppressing it, is what allows for cleansing.
This understanding of the process of cleansing via the red heifer sheds light on the classic rabbinic paradox regarding these laws. The water of the red heifer cleanses the unclean individual, but everyone involved in the process of producing the water becomes unclean. This is not a paradox when one understands that the ashy water is not a vehicle for cleaning but a vehicle for feeling unclean in order to become clean. Those involved in making this water are participants in a process of confronting — not erasing — the pain of encountering death and are therefore touched by it, becoming unclean as well.
The laws of the red heifer are often characterized in rabbinic and contemporary writing as examples of unexplainable divine fiats that one must simply follow because God decreed them. This insistence that one must obey these rules even without an understanding of their purpose points to the nature of this process as truly transformative, yet counter to human instinct. We naturally try to free ourselves from painful experiences by trying to escape or hide from them, but in the end, we must drench ourselves in them to wipe them away, to become “clean” again, and to move forward.
