Two Minute Torah Podcast

Hukkat-Balak 5769 by Rabbi Charles L. Arian

Shalom! I am Rabbi Charles Arian of Beth Jacob Synagogue in Norwich, CT. Welcome to Koach's Two Minute Torah, a project of the College Department of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.

King Solomon, our tradition teaches us, was the wisest of men. According to the Midrash, he boasted that he knew the secret reasons behind all of the mitzvot of the Torah except the one which opens our Parasha this week. That mitzvah is the Parah Adumah, the "Red Heifer." According to this Parasha, a person who came into contact with a corpse contracted ritual impurity and needed to be cleansed. This cleansing ritual involved slaughtering a red heifer -- a female cow -- and then burning her to ashes outside the camp. The ashes were then gathered, ground to a powder and mixed with water in a vessel. This water was then sprinkled on the person who had become impure, and thus they were purified.

However, the person who gathered the ashes and the Kohen, the priest, who sprinkled the ashes -- they themselves contracted ritual impurity as a result of performing their ritual obligations.

Since the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, this ritual is inoperative and everyone is presumed to be in a state of impurity. Nevertheless, there is an important life lesson that this ritual can teach us.

In Temple times, a priest was to strive to maintain himself -- and of course, it was always himself -- in a state of ritual purity. As I am preparing this D'var Torah several weeks in advance, I just finished going over the weekday Torah reading for Parashat Emor, which enumerates the very few people for whom a Kohen is allowed to enter a cemetery and contract corpse impurity. They are very few indeed -- in the case of a sister, he is only allowed to do so while she is unmarried and still living in her father's house. So we see that if he is not even allowed to incur impurity for his married sister, maintaining ritual purity is a very high priority.

And yet, if the kohanim are never willing to incur impurity then all the rest of Israel cannot be purified. Because in the process of performing the necessary purification ritual, the priest himself contracts impurity. A priest who is never willing to incur impurity would be like a nurse who was never willing to come in contact with sick people lest she herself be infected!

The lesson, it seems to me, is clear. If you are reading or listening to this D'var Torah, chances are your level of Jewish commitment is higher than average. As a committed Jew, you have an opportunity to be a role model, to positively influence your friends or classmates or family members to observe more mitzvot, to study more Torah, to perform more acts of tzedakah. But, you can never do that if you insist upon only associating with other Jews who are like you. If you are afraid that Jews who are less observant, less knowledgeable, less committed will somehow drag you down, you are like the priest who cannot perform the ritual of the Red Heifer lest he contract ritual impurity himself. And a Kohen who will not purify the people is not much of a Kohen. If we are so concerned with our own purity that we will not be a part of the larger community, we are failing in our calling as Jews.