Before the grave there is a cradle.
Death of wisdom comes from fatal
conceit, which leads to false solutions
of problems, like absurd ablutions
which fail to cleanse the troubled mind,
confusion by them underlined.
The Priestly laws of the red heifer
anticipated Hayek, effer-
vescence of this law quite in-
explicable. We can’t begin
to understand what Solomon,
the wisest monarch, gave up on,
but I say that this ritual burst
this bubble. We must quench the thirst
for explanations, since solution
of any problem brings pollution.
Believing that we can explain
everything is quite insane.
Some things aren’t rational, defying
reason. If you choose to view
them rationally it means that you
will cause your mind to be defeated,
being fatally conceited.
Before Hayek, very clever,
taught us that intelligence
solves, often, nothing, the red heifer
taught us that laws need not make sense,
and that trying to control them a conceit
that’s often fatal, and is why
attempts to do so can defeat
those who on human sense rely.
Num 19;2 states:
זֹ֚את חֻקַּ֣ת הַתּוֹרָ֔ה אֲשֶׁר־צִוָּ֥ה יְהֹוָ֖ה לֵאמֹ֑ר דַּבֵּ֣ר ׀ אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֗ל וְיִקְח֣וּ אֵלֶ֩יךָ֩ פָרָ֨ה אֲדֻמָּ֜ה תְּמִימָ֗ה אֲשֶׁ֤ר אֵֽין־בָּהּ֙ מ֔וּם אֲשֶׁ֛ר לֹא־עָלָ֥ה עָלֶ֖יהָ עֹֽל׃
This is the ritual law that YHWH has commanded: Instruct the Israelite people to bring you a red cow without blemish, in which there is no defect and on which no yoke has been laid.
The ritual of the red heifer (Numbers 19) describes purification of corpse-contamination by sprinkling the ashes of a red heifer on the affected individual. The ritual causes pollution of the layman who decontaminates the corpse-contaminated person, a paradox that the Rabbis state was beyond Solomon’s ability to explain.
In “Javier Milei’s Gift for Pope Leo: ‘Man is not born wise, rational and good, but has to be taught to become so.’—Hayek,” WSJ, 6/15/25, Andy Kessler writes:
On June 7, Pope Leo XIV met with Argentine President Javier Milei at the Vatican. Mr. Milei reportedly gave the new pope a historical document from 1642, a handwoven vicuña poncho, and Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s 1988 book, “The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism.” Even though the book costs only $18.83 on Amazon, it was the most valuable gift.
Hayek’s fatal conceit is that “man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes.” It’s a hearty defense of free markets—of classical liberalism. My colleague Matthew Hennessey got taken to task by the vice president for defending free markets on these pages. In 2025!
Hayek pounds home the point that markets are about price discovery. Wealth creation “is determined not by objective physical facts known to any one mind but by the separate, differing, information of millions, which is precipitated in prices that serve to guide further decisions.”……
My poem suggests that the statement in Num. 19:2, “This is the ritual law that YHWH has commanded,” implies that the comprehensibility of the ritual laws of the Torah follow the paradigm established by the law of the red heifer, the Torah’s ritual laws being determined by factors that, like wealth creation, are not determined by physical facts. whose mistaken misidentification as a causes of puzzling realities can be as fatal a conceit as the one that Hayek attributed to the identification of socialism as a cause of wealth creation.
This poem’s application of Friedrich Hayek’s concept “fatal conceit” to the comprehensibility of ritual laws of the Torah such as the ritual law of the red heifer explains the following rabbinic ally related story about Dama the son of Netina:
According to a rabbinic story (Jerusalem Talmud Peah 1:1, 15c, Qidd. 1:7, Babylonian Talmud Qiddushin 61b), Dama, son of Netina was a a gentile council president who lived in Ashkalon in the first century C.E.
It happened once that one of the precious stones fell out of the High Priest’s breastplate, and was lost. Seeking a replacement, the sages were referred to a certain Dama ben Netina who purportedly had the exact jewel they required in his possession. They offered him one hundred dinar, and Dama accepted their offer. When he went to fetch the jewel he discovered that he could not access it without waking his father. So he returned and informed his clients that he could not provide them with the item they sought. Assuming that he was trying to renegotiate the price, they increased their offer until they reached a sum of 1000 dinar. When his father finally woke up he brought them the jewel, and they were still willing to pay him their final offer of 1000 dinar. Dama, however, was only willing to accept their initial offer of one hundred, saying: “What? Do you think that I would sell the honor of my fathers for mere coins? I refuse to derive any tangible benefit from the honor of my fathers!”
The Jerusalem Talmud asks what heavenly reward Dama received for such meritorious behavior. The answer given was that on that very night a pure red heifer was born to Dama’s cow, enabling Jews to purchase this extremely rare item from him for a small fortune. The rabbis’ explanation of a puzzling event was a conceit which coincidentally involved identifying Dama ben Netina’s red heifer, the active agent of a ritual that has no logical explanation, as the cause of an event with which it has no logical connection.
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
