Congregation B'nai Israel

Chukat

 

This is the ritual statute that the Lord 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…It shall be taken outside the camp and slaughtered…

19:2-3

 

 

Since Satan and the nations of the world ridicule Israel, saying, “what is the meaning of this commandment of the Red Heifer?’ therefore the Torah uses the term “statute” in connection with it, meaning ‘It is a decree from before Me, and you have no permission to question it.’”

Rashi (11^th Century)

 

The nations of the world taunt us about this commandment as they taunt us about the rest of the offerings which effect atonement and some of which bring about purification.

Ramban (13^th Century)

 

The rites pertaining to the red heifer were designed to discourage association with the dead, prompted by the bereaved’s love for the departed and excessive grief.  Alternatively, that people should not make a practice of consulting the dead or familiar spirits, the text pronounced the defilement of the dead person as more contaminating than all other defilements, making it the prime source of uncleanliness, defiling both man and vessels...

Yosef Bechor Shor (12^th Century)

 

 

The crux of the mystery is its property of contaminating the pure and purifying the contaminated…one of the fundamental requirements is that the heifer had to be completely red.  The prophet has explained that sin is described as red…

Sforno (16^th Century)

 

Rav Yochanan said to his disciples (concerning the red heifer)  “By your life, neither does the dead defile nor the water purify, but the Holy One blessed by He said:  it is a statute I have laid down, a decree that I have decreed and you are not authorized to violate my decree.

Yochanan ben Zakkai (1^st Century)

 

The chapter on the Red Heifer with which our Sidra begins is one of the most mystifying in the Torah.  Our Sages observed that it was one of the matters which even the wisdom of the wisest of men failed to fathom…Let us not be among those who seek for rational explanation for those things, to which the laws of reason do not apply.  May we be like the disciples of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai who accept the yoke of the statutes just as they do the yoke of the other commandments of the Torah.

Nechama Leibowitz (20^th Century)

 

When it comes to legal and theological pronouncements in which the Torah abounds, Aaron and his successors play no role at all.  The silence of Israel’s priests contrasts sharply with their counterparts in contemporary Egypt and Mesopotamia.  There, the priests were the sole transmitters of the divine word, which they safeguarded jealously in their temples…Israel’s priests spoke in rituals, not in words…Biblical impurity laws have nothing to do with disease.  They constitute a symbolic system unified by a basic rationale…impurity symbolizes the forces of death.

Jacob Milgraum (Contemporary)