Grandpa called it bullsh*t; I call it life

My Grandpa Larry had a complicated relationship with faith. He never left the house without his Star of David necklace, but his favorite food was fried catfish. He visited the Lubavitcher Rebbe more than once and praised him highly, but grumbled about religious fakes and faithful idiots. The quintessential Brooklynite, brash and sardonic, he was always complaining about something. We grew up visiting him and my grandmother in their Bensonhurst home in the summer, but we really got to experience his colorful commentary when he lived with us for a year toward the end of his life.

One Friday night, I came to the table with my parasha folder brimming, ready to give the d’var Torah my fourth-grade Bais Yaakov (Orthodox) teacher had composed for us. I don’t remember the content of that speech or even which parasha it was, but I do recall my grandfather’s reaction.

To his credit, he waited until I finished delivering the whole d’var Torah: “You really believe in this bullsh*t?”

(I, of course, burst into tears.)

Another memory of Grandpa Larry remains with me. 

One day, he called me and my siblings into his room and had us line up. Then, he handed $20 bills to my brother and one of my sisters. “What about us?” My remaining sister and I asked. “That’s not fair!”

“Life’s not fair,” he said grimly. “That’s the lesson. You can all go now.”

Grandpa Larry’s approach to grandparenting was certainly not in line with the gentle parenting approach that’s popular now. And I wouldn’t teach my own daughter according to his methods. 

But they certainly had an impact.

* * *

Parashat Chukat is about the incomprehensible; both in law and in life. 

The first of these is presented in the commandment to sacrifice a parah adumah, or red heifer. This was a more cumbersome task than the text implies; the exactness of its specifications made it quite difficult to perform. Sefer HaChinuch elaborates: “The commandment of the heifer is that it be three or four years old… two black or white hairs disqualify it… if it had hairs whose roots were red and the tips were another color, it all goes according to the roots…”

This commandment is referred to as a chok — a law given without clear explanation. Most laws, Ohr HaChaim explains, “are either based on reason or on traditions which have to be symbolised.” But this mitzvah is different: “God decided to legislate a commandment which did not fit either of the two categories we mentioned before… to withhold the reasons which prompted Him to formulate this legislation.” By doing so, God invented a new category of commandment — one that is harder to perform than the rest.

When we encounter things we don’t understand, we find new ways of understanding them. We rationalize our choices, and it’s easier to perform a commandment that aligns with our pre-existing beliefs. But when God doesn’t provide a rationale — and we struggle to justify it ourselves — we are forced to rethink our relationship with faith. To have faith is not just to live with faith that there’s a reason for something, but to follow God even when there isn’t one.

* * *

The second incomprehensibility is lived every day. We live through events we don’t control or understand. “The ways of my life are tangled and entangled,” wrote Yehuda Amichai, “I am a knot that cannot be undone.” 

Sometimes we think we see a brief glimmer of some larger plan — that we’ve made sense of the incomprehensible. But often, the unknowableness of existence overpowers us. Time and time again, we experience the world’s perplexing twists and turns through great loss.

After the law of the red heifer is given, a sobering event happens. Miriam, the great prophetess and leader, dies — and when she passes, the water that nourished the nation stops flowing too. 

The Jewish people don’t take their thirst gracefully. They immediately become belligerent, asking bereaved siblings Moshe and Aaron: Why? Why would you do this to us?

This is an instinct many of us have in reaction to the perplexing. Why? Why me? Why now? Why here?

The parasha continues with more incomprehensibilities: Aaron’s death, hunger, the kidnapping of some Israelites, war.

For the Jewish people in the desert, what happened didn’t always make sense. 

But then — and now — that’s life.

* * *

If Grandpa Larry were alive today, I think he’d make a great chavruta (study partner). And if it were up to me, we would start here.

He would have a lot to say about Parashat Chukat: Laws without rationales. Events that don’t seem to have a rhyme or reason. The “bullsh*t.”

It might comfort him to know the Israelites complained a lot, too.