Mysteries of the Red Heifer

(This is a revised version of the Devar Torah (Bible homily) that one offered on the weekly Torah portion, Parashat Ḥuqqat, at Chabad of Fresno, California, on Shabbat, 13 July 2024. I hope it will be of interest to readers of the Times of Israel.)

Next week’s Parsha (Torah portion), Balaq, deals with Bil‘am (Balaam), the pagan prophet hired by Moab and Midian to curse Israel. God forces him instead to bless us: he prophesies that we are destined to be alone among the nations, and pronounces repeated blessing in poetic verses so powerful that one has become part of our daily prayer: Mah ṭovu ohalekha Ya‘aqov, mishkenotekha Yiśrael, “How goodly are your tents, O Jacob; your dwellings, O Israel!”

I’d like to get into the discussion of this week’s Parsha by way of the writing of a kind of latter-day Balaam— a novelist of genius who seems to have intended to curse Zionism and the modern state of Israel in a fashionably snarky book but has ended up blessing it, in a masterpiece. Michael Chabon, an American Jew now living in Berkeley, California, published his novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in 2007. It’s an intricately, brilliantly imagined and constructed alternative-history detective story, noir in style, told from the standpoint of the pudgy, middle-aged hero, an unhappy Jewish cop estranged from his wife and married to the bottle, who lives and works in a sort of Jewish state that is located, not in the Land of Israel, but in Sitka, Alaska.

In historical reality, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, worked out a plan during World War II to allot part of Alaska to Jewish escapees and Holocaust survivors as a temporary refuge from persecution. In the real world, Congress rejected the proposal: it is a historical footnote. But in the imaginary timeline of the novel, the Ickes plan is approved, and Sitka, Alaska and its environs become the Yiddish-speaking domain of the European Jewish survivors, who are ironically, dismissively referred to by the largely indifferent Jewish community of the lower 48 states as the “Frozen Chosen”. Sitka boasts nightclubs with klezmer-rock fusion bands on the stage and bowls of pickled tomatoes on the guests’ tables. There’s a Filipino outfit, the Mabuhay, which turns out Chinese donuts. Big Macher is a chain of superstores. Disconsolate Russian immigrants, Lubavitchers, and deadbeats rub shoulders in a linoleum-floored chess club.

The lease on this Yiddishe medina, this Jewish state, per the conditions of the Ickes plan, is temporary, and in the present time of the action, 2007, time’s run out and Sitka will soon revert to Alaska. The prospects are bleak: the local Tlingit Indians are unfriendly, and nearly all the Jews, who have built a life, a home, and a unique culture in the far North, will have to go. Businesses are closing here and there as random individuals obtain visas to places like Australia and Canada, pull up stakes, and depart. But no country really wants the Sitka Jews.

There was a State of Israel in the alternative reality of Chabon’s narrative, but it was short lived: invading Arab armies overwhelmed it in the 1948 war and a few sullen survivors get together to speak Modern Hebrew in draughty rented rooms. Arab Palestine in the novel is a war zone, devastated by competing regional powers and Islamist factions. (I do not know how here in the real world this endless war will end, but I hope there will be peace, friendship, and equality for everybody, Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike— in our Holy Land and everywhere. I don’t believe for a moment that this will happen in my lifetime, but one has to hope.)

In the last months before Reversion, fundamentalist Christians who run the CIA and other branches of the Federal government, aided by a few hard-bitten Zionist desperadoes, have a secret plan to force the hand of the Divine by dynamiting the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount and sending an advance party of Hasidim from Alaska to resettle the Holy City and build a third Temple. Mendel, the estranged son of the Rebbe of the close-knit, fictional Hasidic community in Sitka, which Chabon portrays as a crime syndicate and fanatical cult, has shown all the signs of being the Tsaddik ha-dor, the Righteous Man of his generation, a Moshiach (Messiah)-in-the-making. Except he’s gay and a junkie, and unwilling to play along with the plan, so the gunmen of the conspiracy bump him off in the Zamenhof Hotel, the fleabag where he’s been using tefillin to tie off when shooting up. (Eliezer Zamenhof, by the way, was the Jew from Bialystok who invented Esperanto. The novel brims with such sardonic references to idealistic lost causes.)

Our hero is on the murder case. But Detective Meyer Landsman— the Yiddish policeman!— comes up against the Feds when in the course of his investigations he visits a distant farm and commando training camp presenting itself as a drug treatment retreat. There the Yiddish cop comes upon a para aduma, the red cow of our Parsha. She’s being raised so that the High Priest can purify himself from past contact with corpse matter by bathing in her ashes: then and only then will he be able to officiate at the rebuilt Temple. At which point, the humorless, sanguinary G-men from Washington believe, there will not be Jewish national rebirth but Armageddon and Apocalypse— Jesus Christ will have no choice but to return and the world as we know it will end. I won’t spoil the ending, but the mooing red cow is sidling close to it. Even though there’s no Messiah, we’ve got the Red Heifer, an attack on the Temple Mount is in the offing, and the show must go on.

Chabon’s novel bristles with self-consciously anti-Semitic tropes. He clearly detests the early Zionist pioneers, but seemingly in spite of himself he writes these lyrical lines about the essence of Zionism— Hebrew and the Land of Israel— when Detective Landsman overhears his captors at the red cow farm talking: “They are talking, those Jews on the other side of the door, about roses and frankincense. They are standing in a desert wind under the date palms, and Landsman is there, in flowing robes that keep out the biblical sun, speaking Hebrew, and they are all friends and brothers together, and the mountains skip like rams, and the hills like little lambs.” This is Balaam trying to curse and instead uttering a blessing, and a blessing, at that, replete with verses of Psalms 114 and 133— the first a part of the celebratory Hallel liturgy; the second, the source of the happy Israeli folk song Hine ma tov.

Date palms, roses, the desert wind: when I first read the passage in the newly-published book I was walking across Harvard Yard, a place that a Polish colleague once confessed to me reminded him of nothing so much as Auschwitz (brick barracks, soggy field, sick trees). I was seized by a love and longing for the reborn Land of Israel and our revived holy tongue, and began to cry. At just that moment several of my pupils were coming from the other direction and anxiously inquired whether I was okay. I tried to reassure them that my tears were of joy. Joy that we haven’t been cashiered off to Alaska on a lease subject to termination by unfriendly strangers. Joy that Hebrew is alive and well. Good on you, Michael Balaam Chabon! You’ve pronounced the blessing in spite of yourself. Now to the source of that red cow.

Parashat Ḥuqqat, our Parsha, opens with God’s command concerning the para aduma, the red cow. When she is sacrificed and her ashes are mixed in a bath, a man who has been in any kind of contact with a corpse is rendered pure— but the red cow also makes those who prepare the ritual impure for a time. Though commentators have tried to rationalize the super-rational Divine ordinance: red is the color of sin, our sinful selves will be rendered white as snow; God can draw purity out of impurity; etc.— the red cow digs in her heels and stubbornly refuses to be rationalized away. She is a four-legged, earthly manifestation of a Divine reality that passeth understanding. It’s completely arbitrary that the red cow fulfills this role. It’s a statute not susceptible to analysis by reason— the term is ḥoq, a Semitic word meaning something transcendentally true (the Arabic cognate, Ḥaqq, is one of the Names of God), and this word gives its name to the parsha.

The perplexing, detailed, arbitrary laws concerning the red cow are laid down. Then what happens? Miriam dies. When Moses’ sister was alive, water always sprang forth for the parched Children of Israel in our long peregrination through the trackless desert. Now, with her dead, the life-giving streams have ceased, and the fickle people as usual blame Moses and Aaron for their predicament. We whine, not for the first time, that now we’re going to die of thirst and we were better off as slaves in Egypt. Okay, says God to Moses and Aaron, ve-dibartem el ha-sela‘, “speak to the rock” and water will spring from it. What happens instead? Instead of speaking to the rock as clearly commanded, Moses hits it with his stick: Va-yarem Moshe et yado va-yakh et ha-sela‘ be-maṭehu pa‘amayim. “Moses raised his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice.” The Bible is often telegraphic, and here, too, we are not told why the normally attentive Moses did not follow the order verbatim. Was he distressed and distracted by Miriam’s death? By the pressure of the uncontrollable mob? By the heat? It’s left to you to imagine the scene. You can supply a motive, if you wish. But you can never prove it.

God’s judgment, at any rate, by contrast, is instantaneous, precise, and draconian in its severity: Va-yomer Hashem el Moshe ve-el Aharon, ya‘an lo he’emantem bi le-haqdisheni le-‘einei benei Yiśrael, lakhen lo tavi’u et ha-qahal ha-zeh el ha-areṣ asher natati lahem. “And the Lord said to Moses and to Aaron, ‘Because you did not believe in Me to sanctify Me before the eyes of the Children of Israel, therefore you will not lead this assemblage to the land which I have given them.’” Disobedience will not be tolerated, especially if it displayed is in public, as was the case here. It is lèse majesté.

In this sublunar world, which is governed by logical physical laws, the way you release a spring from behind a rock is by breaking the rock in two— hence, perhaps, Moses’ double blow, or maybe one blow for him, one for Aaron. (The commentators venture all sorts of explanations for why he struck twice.) And a leader who does this will be obeyed and celebrated by his unruly followers: he’s strong enough to break a boulder in half, his staff is magical, and so on. But Moses, the ra‘ya mehemna, the Faithful Shepherd, is no mighty strongman, no awe-inspiring sorcerer. He is the humblest of men. He stutters: that is why Aaron has accompanied him all this way in the first place. Our teacher Moses works for a boss Who created the whole universe, not with a lightning bolt, but by His Word, coming from a place outside all space and time where Word is Act. There is that about God which is beyond any logic, supra-rational, ineffable. The episode of the red cow has introduced us to, conducted us into, that supra-rational world.

Not only is God’s dictate above earthly interpretation. There is no place in the Divine universe for cults of personality to form around charismatic heroes and powerful dictators. To forestall any such misperception of Moses and his brother, Aaron is shortly to die, in this very Parsha; and Moses, towards the end of Devarim (Deuteronomy— the next and final volume of the Pentateuch) is to see the Land of Israel from above and afar. But the unique prophet who led Israel between the towering, uncannily solidified walls of water of the cloven Sea of Reeds, is never in this life to cross the sweet little brook of the Jordan. He is never to tread the soil, smell the frankincense and roses, hear the soughing of the warm wind through the shaggy fronds of the regal date palm. He is never to rest in the company of friends and brothers in the Promised Land. (Well, yes, he did visit Rabbi Akira’s classroom once, in Tractate Menaḥot of the Babylonian Talmud, but time travel doesn’t count.)

The unknown soldier has his plinth; but the grave of Moses is unknown. There will never be a mausoleum there, no embalmed cadaver, no changing of the guard. Balaam was right. We Jews are completely alone in this world. We bow to no hero or earthly monarch. We care nothing for physical prowess. Although bound by justice, we do not even consider rationality to be existentially decisive. We are servants of the God Who ordained concerning the enigmatic red cow, Who commanded Moses to talk to a stone wall.

Parashat Ḥuqqat, then, is our journey through the cloud of unknowing in the company of God, Who (as the Qur’an teaches) is closer to us than our jugular vein, Who is always there, and Whom we cannot understand.

Then there’s another way our Chazal (sages of blessed memory) interpret the tense narrative of Parashat Ḥuqqat. I’ll conclude with their ingenious, mystical explanation. The whole episode of Meriva, the waters of Contention— rock, command, disobedience, staff, condign sentence— is a cover story. You see, Moses doesn’t really die— his soul is immortal— and the episode with the rock is just the formal reason he doesn’t enter the Land. It’s not the real one.

Here’s the inside story: Moses doesn’t just have an individual soul. He has a root soul, like a tree, and that tree has branches, and those numerous branches convey sparks of Moses’ soul into not one, but multiple reincarnations in the future. Wherever and whenever he’s needed, he can be in several places at once, and over and over. I haven’t made any of this up: it’s standard Hasidic doctrine.

Now here’s the thing, the escape clause if you wish. Once an embodied soul— a person— fulfills all 613 Commandments, he is freed from further incarnation in this world. He’s paid his dues in full. He can ascend to heaven and not come back. But some of those 613 can be fulfilled only in the Land of Israel. Had Moses crossed the Jordan, he would have been able to complete the whole lot and his soul would have been free to depart this vale of tears forever. But God foresaw the troublesome centuries of our history to come, and knew Israel would still need the company, wisdom, love, and guidance of our Faithful Shepherd. So He kept Moses from crossing the Jordan. Thus, the tsaddik ha-dor, the Righteous Man of every generation, has a spark of Moses in him, even right now as I speak to you. The 36 Just Men, the Lamedvovniks— they’ve each got a spark. Ленин всегда с тобой, “Lenin is always with you,” Soviet songsters used to croon. No, he isn’t. But Moses? Moses is always with you.

Now, my spouse of 44 years, Dennis, who died six months ago, was a Tibetan Buddhist, a follower of the Vajrayana philosophy of instantaneous, lightning-like enlightenment. Buddha means one who has attained awareness, who is spiritually and mentally awake. Vajrayana Buddhists belong to a larger philosophical school called Mahayana. The latter reason that a righteous man near death realizes that perfect enlightenment has not happened if anybody in the world is still in darkness, that no joy is true if suffering persists anywhere among sentient beings. I am not truly free if any man, anywhere, is unfree.

Thus, that righteous, seemingly enlightened, seemingly perfected man understands that all this enlightenment-in-part is still illusion, still suffering unless he renounces Parinirvana, total blowout, the bliss of permanent ascent to Heaven, and freely elects to return, to be reincarnated and to continue to serve his fellow beings. He would not be righteous, enlightened, or perfected, indeed, if he chose otherwise. Such a soul is called a Bodhisattva. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, for instance, is a reincarnation of the Bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteshvara (in Tibetan, Chenrezig).

The brilliant English Jewish scholar Louis Jacobs is the first I know to have perceived the comparison between Moses’ reincarnation and the Bodhisattva vow. Did Moses choose his fate? What we know is that when it came time to ascend the mountain and die, he obeyed God. The Midrash, or homiletic tradition, relates that Moses begged to be a bird, to fly over the land of Israel and come home to his little nest. (Psalm 84 speaks of such a sweet nest; Jesus Christ said that the bird has her nest but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head down.) God said no. Moses obeyed, But God turned aside and cried. Did Moses understand what it was all about, why his beginning had been so glorious and his end was so cruel? Maybe he did. Maybe we will understand, too, when our time comes. Or maybe not.

Why the similarity between this Buddhist idea and our own? Historically it would seem these Indian teachings came over time to be embraced by Kabbalists and Hasidic Jews, not as cultural borrowings but as insights into what is true. The parable of the phantom city in the Buddhist Lotus Sutra, for instance, has undergone many permutations and is now a Hasidic tale, too— one of those teaching stories at the heart of Hasidism that Martin Buber loved and retold so masterfully.

In an age when savants were expected to be humble, an Arabic book ended with the assertion, Hadha ‘indi, wa Allah, Hu al-‘ãlam. “This is all I’ve got, but God, He is the knower.” I do not know, I can only report what I have read and thought. But Parashat Ḥuqqat is an invitation to contemplate what is beyond the mind, and to enter the service of an utterly transcendent being Whom we can never know, but Who is, paradoxically, also our Father in Heaven. Who loves and cares for us. Who will bring us home.

Amen. Shabbat shalom!