Getting Ready

This week Parshat Parah is read in synagogues throughout the world. The Mitzvah of the Red Heifer is contained in these 22 verses. This enigmatic section teaches the rules for how a Jew who has come into contact with a corpse can shed the TUMA’A (impurity) and become TAHOR (ritually pure) again. This procedure was necessary for anyone who wanted to visit the Beit HaMikdash. So, we read it annually almost a month before Pesach in order to remind people to become pure in time to bring the KORBAN PESACH on the 14th of Nissan.

This particular passage does not appear anywhere near the laws of Pesach. We find these instructions, instead, in chapter 19 of Bamidbar. This issue is raised at the beginning of the last year of the 40 years in the Wilderness, and, specifically, immediately before the death of Miriam. It is possible that so many people became ritually impure at her funeral that it seemed the most logical place to discuss the Parah Aduma. 

The Ohr Hachaim is perplexed why the Torah doesn’t bring this material way back in chapter 12 of Shmot, which presents the Mitzva of the Korban Pesach (Paschal Lamb). If the most urgent reason to become TAHOR is for the purpose of bringing that offering, why didn’t we mention it back there? He suggests that the Jews of Egypt didn’t need to become TAHOR, because they only became Jewish that morning on the eve of the departure from Egypt. Converts are totally TAHOR at the moment of their conversion.

So, in the Torah, we put off discussing this ritual until it was needed just prior to the entry into the Holy Land. But for the rest of Jewish history we want that annual reminder to come within weeks of the pilgramage to Yerushalayim for the Pesach festival.

Cool! But what does this mean to me? We have no Beit Hamikdash. We have no Parah Aduma. We have no Korban Pesach. Why must we read this portion every Adar? There is actually a controversial opinion that the obligation to hear Parshat Para is D’Oraita (Biblical, Tosfot, Brachot 13a). So, what is the great significance of these few verses?

Rav Elchanan Samet, whose literary sensitivity is profound, offers:

Perhaps we can suggest another significance for the metaphor of purification as they return to their Land. The purification is indeed ‘from all your impurities and from all your idolatry’, but attention should be paid to the verses from this week’s Haftorah: And I shall give you a new heart, and a new spirit shall I place within you, and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and I will give you a heart of flesh. And I shall place My spirit within you and shall ensure that you will walk in My statutes….(Yechezkel 36:26-27). The purification of Israel from the impurity of their sins involves something like the resuscitation of a body that had no living, beating heart within it. 

What a marvelous idea! Our reading of these arcane laws is tantamount to being resurrected from the dead. And it’s always read around the time of the Vernal Equinox, when Nature itself displays its own ‘resurrection of the dead’ in the trees, flowers and shrubberies all around us. So beautiful, but so full of pollen!

Rav Soloveitchik, who also knew something about literary power, offered the following explanation:

The ashes of the Para Aduma are necessary in only one instance of ritual impurity: contact with the remains of a human being.  Other forms of TUMAH are resolved through immersion in the Mikve or natural spring.  Contact with human mortality is a particularly traumatic experience, because man directly encounters his own death and impermanence.  One can overcome this trauma only by turning to God Himself for reassurance.  One therefore receives purification from the Cohen, the representative of the Almighty Himself.  The sprinkling of the Para Aduma symbolizes God’s purification of the individual that has experienced the most morbid of all forms of impurity.  Only one’s absolute dependence on God can help him properly deal with the effects of such an encounter with death.

Rav Shimshon Refael Hirsch was also motivated by the phenomenon of facing our mortality to observe:

HaShem wants us to live our lives as His people as an act of freely willed affirmation, not out of passivity or resignation. However, when a person comes into contact with death, he may be impressed with the apparent overwhelming power of nature. Indeed, he may be so struck by the inevitability and inescapability of death that, in effect, he despairs and loses his free will. Loss of his free will, in turn, means losing his capacity for affirming the autonomy in his relationship with HaShem. A person in that state cannot connect with KEDUSHAH by entering the Beis Ha’mikdash and bringing a KORBAN. 

However, I think that it’s the S’fat Emet who puts this reading into its proper place:

These 4 PARSHIYOT (SHEKALIM, ZACHOR, PARA, and CHODESH) appear to follow a pattern, the first 2 and last 2 are similar. It follows the verse: Create in me a pure heart, O God; And renew a right spirit within me (Tehillim 51:11). SHEKALIM represents a generous heart, through which one merits RUACH CHAYIM (to survive Amalek)…Later one must adjust their giving spirit to make sure that it is pure, without impure parts (PARA). And then God renews the spirit within us (CHODESH)…Actually we can only achieve purity after we have disposed of Amalek. The power of Amalek is the lack of inner life. It is following extraneous urges, divorced from our inner spiritual reality. We must eliminate that before becoming pure. 

The Parsha of the Para confronts us with many questions and concerns, but our reading of it now, just weeks before the Pesach Festival of our Birth as a Nation, is really about getting us ready for that wonderful CHAG. This reading historically was the great warning that Pesach was coming, sort of like those mountains of Matzo which appear in our supermarkets right after Purim.

So, let’s use the power of the PARA to help us prepare for our annual commemoration of the Redemption From Egypt, and, Please, God!!, bring us one step closer to the Final Redemption, B’MEHEIRA B’YAMMEINU, AMEN!!