Tag Archives: confronting our own mortality

Shabbat Parah : the red heifer ritual and our own mortality

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The temple system of ritual purity and impurity continues to have an effect on Jews even though the Jerusalem Temple itself is long gone, replaced by synagogues, and prayers have taken the place of sacrifices.

Rooted in biblical texts, and greatly expanded in rabbinic ones, Jewish daily life continues to play out the concepts of tahor and tamei, of ritual cleanness and ritual uncleanness, of our appropriateness or not to enter the Temple courtyards to bring sacrifices – a paradigm of supreme practical futility given that we have lived in diaspora for over two thousand years and have had no Temple in which to take such offerings.

Be it the kashrut system and our attitudes to the food we eat, of blessing God before eating or drinking, be it the use of mikveh after menstruation or giving birth, or before the festivals, or be it the practice of Cohanim not to enter the Ohel of a cemetery or come too close to either the dead or their graves, everyone washing hands after leaving a cemetery, the system of tahor and tamei continues to be quietly yet powerfully expressed.

While there is an enormous and complex rabbinic explication of the system – almost entirely long after it has ceased to be of use in the Temple, there is relatively little actual explanation about its purpose beyond being fit or unfit for Temple activities. Yet the concepts are critical to understanding Jewish life across the millennia.

To begin, the words tahor and tamei, usually translated as to do with purity or cleanliness, express ideas that do not exist in other languages or cultures. Samson Raphael Hirsch suggests they are words expressing a blockage of (tamei) or a freedom for (tahor) the transmission of holiness. Someone who is tahor is able to be a conduit for God’s will in the world, someone who is tamei is not. The words are certainly nothing to do with physical cleanliness, even though one way to remove most states of “tumah” is mikveh – immersion in living waters. 

Essentially when we talk about these states, we are in the world of moral concepts, in particular the world of kedushah, of holiness, and of the efforts we make to express God’s will in the world by our mundane and quotidian actions.

The Parah Adamah, the second reading torah reading that is read on the shabbat before shabbat haChodesh, the shabbat before Pesach, and which gives this shabbat its name (Shabbat Parah) is placed here in our liturgical calendar in order to remind the people to make themselves ready to offer the Pesach sacrifice. The “impurity” caused by contact with the dead is unlike any other impurity – it cannot be solved by time, washing and mikveh alone, but only by this arcane and opaque ritual of the ashes of a red heifer. Since the impurity can be passed on to others who did not have contact with a dead body, the chances are high that at any one time we are all in this state of tumah -of ritual impurity. While we cannot resolve this state without the ritual of the ashes which no longer exist, and in any case will not be offering the Korban Pesach, it seems at first glance odd that the tradition has insisted that it be read. There must be another reason for us to keep it so prominently in our liturgical calendar.

One reason is a may be a reminder that death is a disrupter of the importance of bringing holiness into the world. Judaism is a religion of life, we can only perform mitzvot in our lifetime (the reason why a Jew who is buried in tallit will have the symbolic knotted threads on each corner cut before burial), the dead do not praise God says the psalmist. While death is normal and natural, we do not look forward to it as the gateway to heaven. Our focus is on living a life that allows us to bring God and holiness into the world, not on a life whose meaning is particular only to ourselves or one that is a precursor to some “real life” in the afterlife.

Yet death is always around us, it can create fear in us and the deaths of others can destabilise us. The death of one we love can cause us to reject life, or to reject God. Death rarely comes at the right time, we all want more life if we can.

So the idea of death causing this highest form of tumah, of impurity, a form that requires a special and esoteric ritual, is a reminder that while we recognise our own mortality in theory, we find ourselves blocked or in denial about what this might really mean for us – our lives and our selves too will end.

Yet there is a way to resolve this that is held out to us on shabbat Parah – we have the almost fantastical ritual of the Parah Adamah – and some way in some time this ritual will be available to us once more, the conduit between us and the divine caused by our own mortality and the mortality of those we love, can become cleared. Death will not be the end.

Another reason we read of the Parah Adamah is that the rabbis who mandated it and who built the complex and enormous system of theoretical ritual purity and impurity were focused not on any physical state but on our spiritual state. The second torah reading this shabbat is paired with a special haftarah. In the book of Ezekiel we read that “I will sprinkle “mayim tehorim” – ( pure water) on you and you shall be tahor (pure). From all your tumah (impurities) I will purify you.” (Ezekiel 36:25). It is an echo of the ritual of the red heifer, but it takes the ideas of purification further and explicitly moves the arena to the spiritual rather than the physical and ritual purification.

Ezekiel continues

 “נָתַתִּ֤י לָכֶם֙ לֵ֣ב חָדָ֔שׁ וְר֥וּחַ חֲדָשָׁ֖ה אֶתֵּ֣ן בְּקִרְבְּכֶ֑ם וַהֲסִ֨רֹתִ֜י אֶת־לֵ֤ב הָאֶ֙בֶן֙ מִבְּשַׂרְכֶ֔ם וְנָתַתִּ֥י לָכֶ֖ם לֵ֥ב בָּשָֽׂר׃

And I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit into you: I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh;

וְאֶת־רוּחִ֖י אֶתֵּ֣ן בְּקִרְבְּכֶ֑ם וְעָשִׂ֗יתִי אֵ֤ת אֲשֶׁר־בְּחֻקַּי֙ תֵּלֵ֔כוּ וּמִשְׁפָּטַ֥י תִּשְׁמְר֖וּ וַעֲשִׂיתֶֽם׃

and I will put My spirit into you. Thus I will cause you to follow My laws and faithfully to observe My rules.

God says “I will give you a new heart (Lev Chadash) and a new spirit (Ruach Chadasha)… and cause you to follow my laws etc

The purification here is one of a moral flaw – the heart of stone we have demonstrated in our lives so far, a heart that has been unable to hear the needs of others, unwilling to respond with compassion and thoughtfulness, that heart will be replaced by God with one of flesh – a heart of humanity, of openness to others, a heart that sustains life.

Rabbi Jacob Milgrom teaches that the ritual of the red heifer is a ceremony of ethical cleansing for the self and for the community.  He writes “Ancient Jews believed that acts of immorality affected more than just those involved in them. There are consequences of wrongdoing that infect and pollute the entire community. … [the sins] have a contaminating effect, not only upon the guilty individuals but also upon the community and sanctuary. Asking forgiveness through sacrifices and prayers, even repairing the wrong through apology or restitution, is not enough to purify what is soiled by wrongdoing.

“For the ancients, the ritual of the parah adumah alone has the power to remove or exorcise such sinfulness. ‘By daubing the altar with blood or by bringing it inside the sanctuary, the priest purges the most sacred objects and areas of the sanctuary on behalf of the person who caused their contamination by physical impurity or inadvertent offense.’ The person and the community corrupted by wrongdoing are restored to a state of purity and can then go on without the burden of guilt.” Jacob Milgrom, JPS Torah Commentary ad loc)

Reading this extra piece of torah within days of celebrating Pesach functions not only as a prompt for us to examine ourselves and our lives half a year after the period of teshuvah of Elul and Kippur, it also reminds us that our lives have value and meaning, that we must live them the best way we can, renewing ourselves and behaving with greater humanity and renewed spirit in the world. It reminds us that lives are finite, that each one of us is a conduit for holiness, that the world is mysterious and while we cannot understand everything, we can understand the importance of a life searching for the divine.

And finally, why did the rabbis spend so much time and thought on a system that no longer existed? It is I think an act of hope, a belief in redemption and the forging of an identity that would be clearly and powerfully based on the activities of everyone’s daily life. The majority of the Jewish world were no longer living in Eretz Yisrael. There was no temple extant. But what better way to keep a people and a religious and cultural system alive and connected than the system of ritual purity they created. Every moment of this system is a reminder of our covenant relationship with God. Every tiny detail ensured that the Jewish world stayed focused on that, on the Land, on God, and on our peoplehood we would not be lost while in exile, the fate of so many peoples displaced at the whim of great empires.

It was, I  think, a religious act and a political one too. The Jews, wherever they find themselves, are part of a system designed to bring us closer to God in a specific and unique way. The system kept us from merging with the cultures surrounding us, yet allowed permeability so that we could absorb enough to live and survive in them. It gave us the flexibility to live in diaspora yet with our eyes towards Jerusalem, and the structure to retain our particularity and act out and understand our covenant relationship with God.

The ritual of the red heifer may continue to be mysterious and inexplicable, a law of God with no obvious rationale, but the system within which it sits is the air that we breathe. It is an imperative towards life, an imperative towards holiness, a reminder to check ourselves and repair what we can in timely fashion. A reminder of our mortality, and of the life we want to live.

Ha’azinu – what might we say and write when we confront our own mortality?

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Moses knows he is going to die.  Not in the way we all ‘know’ we are going to die, the coldly logical knowledge that doesn’t impact on our emotions in any way, but in the way that some people who are very close to death know with a certainty that no longer expresses itself as fear or self-pity but with a clarity and sense of purpose.

I have sat at many deathbeds. I have seen denial and also acceptance, whimpering pain and alert peacefulness, sudden startling requests – for toast, for touch, for people long gone, for non-existent sounds or lights to be turned off or up.  What I have learned is that we none of us know how we shall die, how our last days and hours will be, but that at many, if not most of the deathbeds I have observed where there is some time for the process to be worked through, there is an opportunity to express what is most important to the dying person, to project themselves one last time into the world.

It is human to want to survive. Life wants to continue despite pain or confusion or fear. Even when a person seems prepared and ready for death there is often a moment where there is a struggle to continue in this world. Even Hezekiah who famously “turned his face to the wall” having been told that he must set his house in order for he would die and not live, then prays to remind God that he has done God’s will with his whole heart, and weeps sorely.   His prayer (found in Isaiah 38) resonates today “In the noontide of my days I shall go to the gates of the nether world, I am deprived of the residue of my years…. O God, by these things we live, and altogether therein is the life of my spirit; so recover Thou me, and make me to live.”

It doesn’t matter at what age we come to death – we want more life, we want to go on in some meaningful way, we want to be part of the future.

We all know we will die. We share death with all who have ever lived and all who will ever be. We may fear the how or the when, but generally we get on with life as if death is not real. And we don’t plan for how we might continue to be a part of the future, for how our life may make a difference for our having lived it, or for how or what might be remembered of our existence.

Yet sometimes we are forced to confront our own mortality. And when that happens, these questions demand to be asked.

The whole period of the Days of Awe which are now coming to a close forces us to acknowledge our own transience in this world.  Be it the wearing of the kittel we shall don for the grave, the taking out of a whole day from time to focus on how we are living our lives in order to reset and readjust our behaviours, or the saying of yizkor prayers and visiting the graves of our families. Be it the autumnal edge we feel as we shiver in the sukkah, or the browning and falling of the leaves, or the daylight hours shortening perceptibly – we are viscerally aware of the darkness that is coming, the lessening outer energy alongside the power of the interior life.

Sometimes this knowledge that we will inevitably cease to be in this world brings out a search for meaning, for a sense of self that will transcend the physicality of our existence. Sometimes we become engrossed in our own personal wants and needs, sometimes we look further outwards towards our family and our relationships, sometimes we gaze further out towards our community or we look further in time to see what will be after we have gone.  I think often of the story of Moses in the yeshiva of Akiva (BT Menachot 29b), comforted by seeing that Rabbi Akiva is citing him as the source of the teaching being given, even though he does not understand anything of the  setting that is 1500 years after his own life.  It is a story of not being forgotten, of projecting values down the generations. Talmud also tells us that R. Yochanan said that when a teaching is transmitted with the name of its author, then the lips of that sage “move in the grave” (BT Sanhedrin 90b.  Rabbinic Judaism gives great honour to the idea that we live on in the teachings we offered, but also in the memories of those who choose to remember us. It is commonplace in the Jewish world to be named for a dead relative in order to honour their memory, to tell stories about them long after the hearers (or even the tellers) have a first-hand memory of the person, to fast on the day of their yahrzeit (anniversary of their death) as well as to light a 24 hour candle and to say the kaddish prayer.

So it is time for us to give serious thought about how we project ourselves into the future, what we pass on in terms of life lessons, the stories people will tell about us, how they will remember us, how they will carry on the values that we have cared about enough for them to see and for them to choose too.

All rabbis have stories of sitting with the dying as these desires clarify. One colleague has I think the ultimate cautionary tale of being asked to come out to a deathbed of a woman he barely knew, a long way out from where he lived, in terrible weather, and sent in the form of a demand. Deciding that he must go but unsure of what was wanted, he collected together a number of different prayer books to be able to offer her the spiritual succour she wanted. Her final wish was that her daughter in law would not inherit her fur coat. She was taking her feud past the grave.  I remember the woman who sat in bed in her hospice writing letters to everyone in her life, beautiful letters – but she refused to actually see any of the people she was writing to. I remember the people who made great efforts to right wrongs and those who tried to comfort the people left behind. I think with love of the woman who sent an audio file with her message that she had had a wonderful life with the right man and they were not to grieve, even though her death seemed unfairly early. I think of the woman who, having lost her fiancé in the war, proudly told me she was going back to her maker virgo intacta, and the woman who told me of her abortion while she was hiding in Nazi Germany, and her belief that the child had visited her alongside its father who died some years later.

Many a personal secret has been recounted at a deathbed, but often having been released from the power of that secret if there is time, the soul continues its journey in this world, and suddenly all sorts of things come into perspective. And it is these stories that I remember with such love and that have had such great impact on me.  The stories that people had hidden from their nearest and dearest but which explain so much of who they are and why they have done what they did. Their belief that they were not loved enough which led to them thinking they were not able to love as much as they wanted. Their umbilical connection to Judaism that they had not lived out publicly for fear of what might happen to them or their children should anti-Semitism return as virulently as they remembered in their youth.  Their subsequent horror that children and grandchildren were not connected to their Jewish roots, and their guilt at having weakened this chain. There are multiple examples but what I see again and again is the need for good relationships with others, for human connection with others , for expressing warmth and love and vulnerability, the need for living according to clear and thoughtful moral values, and for a sense of deep identity that passes from generation to generation and connects us to the other in time.

Moses in sidra Haazinu is just like any other human being, wanting his life not to be wasted but to be remembered, wanting his stories and his values to be evoked in order to pass on what is important to the generations that will come after him, however they may use them.  He needs to be present in their lives, albeit not in a physical way.  The whole of the book of Deuteronomy has been his way of reminding, of chivvying, of recalling and reimagining the history he has shared with the people of Israel. He uses both carrot and stick, he uses prose and poetry, he is both resigned and deeply angry, he is human.

There is a biblical tradition of the deathbed blessing, a blessing which describes not only what is but also what is aspirational.  Rooted in that has come the idea of the ethical will to pass on ideas, stories and thoughts to the next generation of one’s family, a tradition that has found a home also in reminiscence literature.  Sometimes we find out much more about the person who has died from their letters and diaries than they ever expressed  in life – and often we mourn that it is now too late to ask the questions that emerge from these, or to apologise or explain ourselves.

As the days grow shorter and we have spent time mulling over how we are living our lives and trying to match them to how we want our lives to have looked once we see them from the far end, we could take a leaf out of Moses’ life’s work in Deuteronomy and write our own life story, not just the facts but the stories around them, how we understood them, what we learned.  Next year we might write it differently, but what a rich choice lies in front of us, to explore what is really important to us and to ensure that it, like us, will live on.