This week we read an additional passage in the Torah explaining the paradoxical ritual of the Parah Adumah, the Red Heifer. The ritual consists of anointing someone who has become spiritually impure with specially prepared ashes of a burned red heifer and water.
What is spiritual impurity? The Chiddushei HaRim — the founder of the Ger Hasidic dynasty — explained that spiritual impurity means that one’s internal spiritual vitality has left. Impurity in spiritual terms means something is lacking.
We all know that feeling of when we have confronted something so difficult and challenging – either to us, or to others – that we are left spiritually bone dry. All our faith is zapped. Maybe it was someone we met, a historical tragedy, a personal challenge. Maybe it is the accumulation of years of suffering, whether self-imposed or external.
How can we regain our spiritual vitality — a deep and needed connection with God — when we get to that place? By placing God’s will ahead of ours.
Instead of keeping the burden of what we should be doing with our lives now that we have come to this dark place, we place that burden on God. We turn to God for direction and to borrow a phrase, “W.W.G.D.?” What would God do?
The lack of spiritual purity is the absence of God’s life force and vitality. By placing God’s will ahead of ours we reveal God’s life force, remove spiritual impurity, and regain spiritual purity and vitality.
We all posses the ability to regain spiritually purity, no matter what we have done with our lives, where we have gone, what we have seen. But it requires action and to do God’s will.
“And what does the Lord demand of you?” Said the Prophet Michah (6:8). “To do justice, to love loving-kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”
Shabbat Shalom
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