One verse, five voices. Edited by Nina Litvak and Salvador Litvak, the Accidental Talmudist
This is the statute of the Torah which the Lord commanded, saying, Speak to the children of Israel and have them take for you a perfectly red unblemished cow, upon which no yoke was laid.
– Numbers 19:2
Sara Yoheved Rigler
Author, “Holy Man” and “8 Seconds to Connect with Hashem”
The law of the Red Heifer made mystics of us all. While most of the mitzvahs of the Torah are amenable to reason, this ritual — that makes the spiritually impure pure while making the person who administers the ritual impure — defies logic. Rabbi Chaim Shmuelevitz, the legendary Rosh Yeshivah, questioned why this verse starts, “This is the chok [decree] of the Torah,” instead of, “This is the chok of the Red Heifer.” He answers that a chok is a mitzvah that makes no sense to us. We do it simply because God has commanded us, and this characterizes all the mitzvahs of the Torah.
The mitzvahs operate on a level beyond rationality (like quantum mechanics, anyone?). The culture clash of Hanukkah pitted Greek logic against Jewish wisdom, replete with paradox, based on spiritual laws that cannot be seen, measured or analyzed. While Jewish rationalists explained almost all of the mitzvahs in a way that appeals to our rational minds, the law of the Red Heifer is the boundary beyond which rationality cannot tread.
According to Kaballah, the 613 mitzvahs of the Torah are 613 ways to bond with God. I don’t refrain from eating pork because I’m afraid of trichinosis. I refrain from eating pork because God asked me to. Certainly, eating unkosher food causes spiritual blockages, but I don’t have to fathom the spiritual physics. I buy my husband the birthday gift he requested because I love him. I do the mitzvahs because I love God.
Rabbi Menny Chazanow
Rosh Beis Medrash, Beis Medrash of Hancock Park
“Zos chukas haTorah” — This is the statute of the Torah. Not a statute. The statute.
The parah adumah is Torah’s great paradox: the same ritual that purifies the impure simultaneously renders the pure impure. No explanation has ever fully satisfied. And yet the Torah doesn’t call this “the statute of the Red Heifer.” It calls it the statute of the Torah itself. The Or HaChaim asks: why? He answers with something radical. We are meant to approach all of Torah the way we approach the Red Heifer — as a supra-rational decree whose ultimate cause exceeds our grasp. Every mitzvah, at its root, is a chok.
But does that mean we should perform mitzvot in silence, without trying to understand them? Nachmanides, commenting on the mitzvah of shiluach haken, offers a correction. We may never fathom the divine cause of a mitzvah, the ultimate “why” behind G-d’s will. But we can discern its aim — what it cultivates in us, what it teaches about moving through the world. Cause and aim are not the same thing.
The Hassidic masters go even deeper. Every mitzvah contains both dimensions simultaneously: the supra-rational and the rational. Each is an encounter with a transcendent G-d whose will exceeds comprehension, and at the same time an integrated human experience that calibrates our moral and spiritual selves. Not two types of mitzvot. Two layers within each one. The tension between them isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s the point itself.
Rabbi Pinchas Winston
The quintessential chok — statute. There are commandments that we easily understand, like “don’t murder.” You don’t have to be religious to appreciate the value of laws like that. The Red Heifer? It’s mitzvot like this that make doubters question Torah Judaism more and test the faith of followers. It’s not that the logic isn’t there. It is VERY there. It’s just that “there” is not “here,” making the commandment hard to grasp. Kabbalah explains that there are five layers of spiritual consciousness, ours being the lowest and most physical. They become more spiritually sophisticated as a person ascends, something only possible if a person spiritually refines themselves. A high IQ can help, but it by no means guarantees that a person will ever get past the first and lowest level of spiritual consciousness. Some of the greatest minds never did. There are 613 commandments, but they are not all “rooted” on the same level. We may perform them on earth, but their ability to rectify levels of reality depends on the spirituality of the mitzvah, the spiritual plane it is based in. If a mitzvah doesn’t make sense to us, that is the clear sign that it doesn’t operate on our level of reality. It causes rectification on a higher level which then flows down to our level. The mitzvah of the Red Heifer may defy our logic, but it also tells us that ours is not complete and inspires us to seek an even profounder understanding of life.
Rabbanit Alissa Thomas-Newborn
Gratz College, New York-Presbyterian, and Netivot Shalom
The statute of the Red Heifer is one of the most mysterious in our tradition. The ashes from the Red Heifer make a person pure, while the process of facilitating the creation of the ashes causes the one doing it to become impure himself. How can something that purifies also cause impurity? Sforno and other commentators reflect on the meta-impact of this ritual. Sometimes to rectify something, we have to use an extreme. For example, in order to heal or treat an illness, doctors will use an otherwise seemingly harmful medication. Or to bend a bent iron back into its original form, more pressure than was originally exerted is required. But our rabbis recognize that these explanations are still likely to leave us with a lingering lack of clarity, reflecting the nature of this mitzvah as a “chok” (a law without a rational answer). Rather, learning to live with “not knowing” is the task we are called to address. This is easy to say and much harder to live. The Red Heifer exemplifies the existential effort to have faith, even when we do not understand or do not have an answer to the “why” questions in life. In the space where this mitzvah impurifies as a way to create the source of purification, we face the contradictions and blurriness of being human. Resisting the urge to resolve, we are challenged to ask ourselves how we can better live with the unknown and find spiritual value in doing so.
Abe Mezrich
Author, “Words for a Dazzling Firmament”
Here is an animal who could grow to be a mother. Who could be so strong she holds a yoke. She is red – the color of blood, the color of living. We kill her and burn her to ash. We bring her ash to a place or to a person who has encountered death. This makes things pure again.
Isn’t it absurd? To see how life is cut short by death. How death is overturned by the life that is possible. Somewhere a man or a woman has died. Somewhere a little cow refuses to give death the last word.
