Chukat - Balak
This week’s double sedra begins with God instructing Moses and Aaron regarding the red heifer; Miriam dies; Moses hits a rock to bring forth water rather than speaking to it; Aaron dies. In Parashat Balak there is the story of King Balak of Moav, who asks the prophet Bilaam to curse the Israelites. God intervenes and makes Bilaam only able to bless the people instead. The Israelite men mix with the women of Moav and Midian and worship strange gods, angering God. The parsha concludes with the story of Pinchas slaying an Israelite man and Midianite woman.
Malya Kurzwell
Malya Kurzweil is the Marketing and Outreach Co-Chair of Limmud NY 2010. She is starting Brooklyn Law School this fall, and is currently spending the month in Bali, Thailand and Cambodia.
This week's Parsha opens with God giving instructions to Moses regarding the Red Heifer. When slaughtered and subsequently burned correctly, the ashes of a Red Heifer can be utilized to purify a person who has been rendered impure through close contact with a corpse.
This commandment falls into the category of "chok", a commandment for which there is no rational explanation or logic. Indeed, the Red Heifer is known as the meta-example of this type of commandment. Not only does the commandment itself, the connection between ashes from a particular type of animal and purity from proximity to death, seem inexplicable, the commandment itself is fraught with contradictions. Though the ashes themselves purify, the priest who burns the heifer to create the ashes is rendered impure. Indeed, it is said that King Solomon himself, the wisest man who ever lived, did not understand this commandment.
It seems to me that we live in a time when it is hard to integrate into our lives practices in which, by their very definition, we will never find reason or logic. It implies a certain submission, a surrender, that may feel foreign or distasteful to many of us. It is not surprising, then, that this commandment is involved with purifying those who've come into close contact with death. For in encountering death there is a similar feeling of facing something that defies logic, something that, by its very nature, can not be grasped by the human mind. Though death makes perfect sense from a scientific, biological point of view, there seems to be something deep in the human psyche which views life as the natural state, and death as something incomprehensible and foreign.
I'm certainly not going to attempt any explanations here, when even Solomon was stumped! I think, however, that grappling with how Judaism attempts to integrate that which is beyond the rational mind into the life of the community is an important element of claiming and shaping our own Judaism. Reason is merely a tool and can not encompass all of life's experience, and it is often when we come face to face with that which reason can not explain away that we need ancient wisdom the most.
Another Voice - Alex Rinsler
Alex has been the Programming Chair for Conference as well as for LimmudFest over the past few years.
Parshat Chukat is brutal. The very title – 'decree' – leaves us cold, echoing the word 'chakah' – bound, engraved, set. The severity of God's decree is felt by all. There's no romance, no pillars of fire: only death, diplomacy and rough justice.
The text is abrupt; one verse puts down Miriam, another condemns Moses to exile. Moses has fulfilled his role as a revolutionary, leading a generation into the unknown. Now he seems remote from the people, fearful of them and increasingly reliant on instruments of power to implement God's will. This revolutionary is not to become a statesman.
Still, the Israelites accrue a string of impressive military victories, each one bringing them closer to the Promised Land. Moses does not falter despite the weight of his sentence and will steer the people through plague, and prevent a civil war in the next sedra. This resilience is unrecognised and makes God's judgement all the more choking.
What a journey. Dissent and rebellion have exhausted the great leaders - it's said that fatigue can make a coward out of anyone. Miriam and Aaron pass on and Moses' days are numbered. Their moments have passed, their glories bound forever into myth and legend. It is decreed.