#chukkat

Mosheh may have been Yisra’eil’s greatest prophet, but even he fell out of favor. This is the week it happens. For his actions at the waters of Mərivah, G-d informs him along with his brother, Aharon: לֹ֤א תָבִ֙יאוּ֙ אֶת־הַקָּהָ֣ל הַזֶּ֔ה אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ | lo taví’u et haqahal hazeh el ha’áretz | “you will not bring this congregation into the land” (Bəmidbar 20:12). Mosheh offers no resistance, and it’s just as well — when he pushes back on this decree elsewhere, G-d doesn’t budge. The decision is final.

One would expect Mosheh to have committed a grave sin to be handed this fate, but on the surface of the text, it’s hard to find it. The people demand water, G-d tells Mosheh to take his staff and order a rock to bring forth water, Mosheh hits the rock with his stick, and out comes some water. What’s the big deal?

I’ve heard many attempts to explain this over the years. Most interpreters seize on a slight discrepancy — G-d tells Mosheh to command the rock to yield water, but Mosheh hits the rock instead — and try to wring a major crime out of it. He was symbolically resorting to violence when diplomacy would do, or he was acting like a sorcerer instead of a prophet, or some such similar profound betrayal.

But what if his transgression was, in fact, very slight? What if G-d didn’t revoke his status because of some grave crime, but because G-d just wanted him gone and latched onto the first pretext that presented itself? To take a modern parallel: It’s not uncommon for workplaces to be a little lax about enforcement of minor rules. Perhaps the dress code mandates business casual attire, but in the summer people regularly come in wearing tank-tops and cutoff jorts. Perhaps lunch is officially 30 minutes, but most people stretch it closer to 45.

This laxity lasts only until management decides you’re a problem and wants you gone. Perhaps you tried to start a union or filed a HR complaint about your supervisor — suddenly you’re being written up if your skirt is a quarter inch above the knees or if you’re 45 seconds late to the start of your shift. They’re not retaliating against you, they’re just enforcing the formal terms of employment, honest. It’s a total coincidence if that means you’re fired for cause over a technicality that no one else would ever be flagged for. They said to take your staff and command the rock, not take your staff and hit it. Turn in your ID badge and get out.

Why would G-d want Mosheh gone? Well, the very first time we meet the adult Mosheh, he intervenes to stop a Mitzri overseer from beating an Israelite slave. When G-d tries to wipe out the Israelites in the wilderness, Mosheh often intercedes on their behalf, and is often successful. Not always, but often when Mosheh sees the powerful striking the powerless with fatal violence, he tries to put a stop to it.

Which is laudable! But also, to answer the Israelites’ question in this chapter: Why did G-d bring them up out of Mitzráyim? Not to die in the wilderness, but to kill in the promised land.

Admittedly, the Mosheh we get in the text is mostly pretty on board with this plan. But he only knows it in theory; he never sees it put into practice, and he wouldn’t be the first to balk at the reality of a thing that he didn’t object to in the abstract. We can imagine a Mosheh who gets to Kəná’an and once again stands up to G-d to say, “This isn’t right. These people deserve to live.”. Perhaps G-d can imagine this, too. Safer to go with Yəhoshú’a, who’s already shown such a zeal for dispossessive conquest.

We get a taste of what this Mosheh can do in this very chapter. Just before the rock incident, something very strange happens: The Israelites express dissatisfaction that their core needs aren’t being met, and instead of lashing out and killing a bunch of them, G-d responds to Mosheh and Aharon’s wordless request by acceding to the people’s demands. Nobody dies. Just this once, everyone lives. The next time the Israelites complain, with Aharon dead and Mosheh demoted, G-d unleashes burning serpents and a great many of the people perish.

But still, for a moment, it all worked out. Even if only for a short time, a great many people were kept alive. They demanded their due from the most powerful power of all, and they received it, and they were not harmed.

I hope you, gentle reader, have the moral clarity to know when a thing is unjust, even if the highest power around commands it. I hope you have the courage to act on that knowledge. These are terrible times, and they are probably going to get worse. Even our best leaders will fail us, and our most passionate collective action will not always carry the day. People are going to die, needlessly, and the butchers who signed their lives away are going to laugh at their families’ grief.

And. Also. People are going to say this is wrong. Sometimes they will murmur it quietly and privately; sometimes they will get right up face to face with G-d and scream. Tyranny attacks on many fronts; that’s daunting, but it also means everywhere you turn is an avenue to resist, to beat oppression back. Some of this resistance will be big and splashy, grabbing headlines around the country. Some of it will be secret, obscure to the point that only the people directly involved will ever know about it.

There are many fights, and many niches in them. I know many of you have already found your roles, inside and outside of electoral politics, inside and outside of what can be posted online, inside and outside of what the law condones. (And here, in a week when we read about migrants in the desert begging for water, it is worth noting that people in this country have been convicted for giving water to migrants in the desert. It’s a shameful philosophy that equates what is legal with what is right.) If you haven’t found your niche, I gently encourage you to keep searching for it, even in the teeth of despair. Seek out people doing work you align with — pursuing a strategy you think will be effective in the service of a cause that feels like yours — and join them. Consider what you have to offer, and offer it. (And when you are offered help in turn, accept it.) Shift with the circumstances, and be alert for unexpected opportunities. And if it’s all you can do to live, if surviving one more day takes everything you have, then live. The fascists want us dead; don’t do their work for them.

We cannot choose which generation we are born into. We cannot choose how others will act. We cannot choose how the world lurches, and what avenues of action open and close for us with each jerk. But we can choose to act for justice, even if those choices are very small. We can choose to join together with others to push back against immiseration and death. We can choose to act on the knowledge that this isn’t right, that all these people — people like us and people not like us, for every us you’re a part of — all these people deserve to live.

We will not always prevail, but sometimes we will. Sometimes, if we are very bold and very committed and very lucky, we will band together and say to the mighty — even directly to G-d — “No. This sucks, we deserve better.”. And we will be heard, and we will have our way, and we will tear up the evil decree, and everyone will live, even if just for one day, everyone will live. The rock in the wilderness will pour forth water, enough for everyone to drink, and there will be no serpents, and nobody will die.

Parah Adumah

This is famously really difficult to understand, but nevertheless there are some things that can be said.

There’s an interesting Rashi I found that draws a parallel between the parah adumah, the red heifer, and the egel hazahav, the golden calf. It begins when we read this ritual described as an “עֲדַת” (translated as “keepsake” – it shares a shoresh, a root, with the word eid “עֵד” meaning witness). Rashi asks why it’s a keepsake or a witness, and shows that it parallels how the egel hazahav was never punished (and thus is with us until Mashiach comes), moving on to speak about how just as the calf defiled, so does the heifer – and the ashes of the both purify. Another thing you can say on why the people who make the purifying mixture become impure through it – apart from, of course, “it’s a chok” (reason-less law or decree) – is from the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who I’ll now quote: “The fact that the ashes of the heifer “purify the contaminated and contaminate the pure” carries an important lesson to us in our daily lives: If your fellow has been infected by impurity and corruption, do not hesitate to get involved and do everything within your power to rehabilitate him. If you are concerned that you may became tainted by your contact with him, remember that the Torah commands the kohen to purify his fellow Jew, even though his own level of purity will be diminished in the process.” (Parenthetically, this is considered one of the meanings of the blessing in the Amidah “Baruch… magein Avraham”, the One who shielded Avraham is the source of blessing – the shield being that spiritually, Avraham was protected from the influences of the people he was converting or hosting)

Another really interesting thing I found was on the ingredients (as it were) of the purifying mixture. Along with the ashes of a perfectly red heifer, about which we have spoken, we have cedar wood, scarlet thread, and hyssop. Rashi says that this, the constituents of a substance to re-purify people, symbolise an element of teshuva, again something that removes defilement; the cedar wood, from very tall cedar trees, symbolises haughtiness which must be humbled to be low to the ground like the hyssop in order to do teshuva. The red thread is, apparently, dyed with the blood of a worm, again with the whole close-to-the-ground = humility thing, although we also know that red symbolises sin (like the totally red heifer), as in Yeshayahu (Isaiah) 1:18, “Come now, and let us reason together, Saith the LORD; Though your sins be as scarlet, They shall be as white as snow; Though they be red like crimson, They shall be as wool.” But where else do we see scarlet thread, hyssop, and cedar used in the Torah? In the Mishkan! Cedar wood for the poles, hyssop for the sprinkling of blood, and red thread for the curtains. So what are we meant to make of this – are they good or bad? I’m not really sure, but what I take from it is that one ought to use all one’s personality traits in avodat Hashem, service to G-d, if one can (the definition of a tzaddik, or one definition anyway, is one who has not exactly conquered their yetzer hara, urge to evil, but rather subjugated it and made it serve G-d). However, teshuva is not about holistically serving G-d – it is about recognising one’s wrong and changing to become a better person, impossible to do from a place of arrogance.

Mei Merivah

“Waters of dispute”, the dispute of Moshe and the people and perhaps the disagreement between Moshe and G-d. On this, Rashi brings a fascinating Gemara – Sanhedrin 101b: “These [waters] are the ones mentioned elsewhere. Pharaoh’s astrologers saw these [when they foresaw that] the savior of Israel would be smitten through water, and that is why they decreed: “Every son who is born you shall cast into the Nile.””  The final, true smiting (?) and defeat is through separation from G-d, even more so than all the death. This is … intense. It’s an intense thing (if I’m reading this right, anyway). It’s scary, and hard to stomach, and it makes me want to daven more.

Prayer, bloodlines, and closeness to G-d

Later in the parsha, we ask to go through Edom and are refused. There are all sorts of things Moshe promises to avoid being any inconvenience, even to the point of promising to buy water (rather than drink their own) to avoid loss of potential profit to the Edomites, but the Edomites “came out toward them with a vast force and with a strong hand.”. The Midrash Aggadah says on this that it’s related to their ancestry: “and with a strong hand (20:20): With our grandfather’s promise: “the hands are the hands of Esav” (Bereishit/Genesis 27:22)”. So, the Edomites are the descendants of Esav, and they have his violent traits and his hatred of us. What do we have? How can we protect ourselves, and what do we inherit? The answer comes from the same source, now commenting on 20:16, “We cried out to the Lord and He heard our voice. He sent an angel, and he took us out of Egypt, and now we are in Kadesh, a city on the edge of your border.” “and He heard our voice: through the blessing that our father [Isaac] gave: “The voice is the voice of Jacob” (Gen. 27:22). When we cry out we are answered". 

How blessed are this group of miserable “rebels”, constantly complaining! All of them, at this point, apart from Aharon (who dies at the end of this parsha) and Moshe, will make it into Eretz Yisrael – and more, G-d hears their voice and answers their prayers! What could this come to teach us but that no-one’s cry goes unheard by G-d? Even if you are haughty as a cedar, so what? You still have a voice. The thing that will put a fence between you and G-d is not your sins, G-d forbid (we say, as part of the service – “it is not on our righteousness that we lay our prayers before You, but on Your great compassion”) – it is your disengagement, your walking away. 

The people Israel, in this parsha, become discouraged – the people became disheartened, ותקצר נפש העם. They complain, they speak to G-d no longer willing to listen or respect. They speak against G-d and Moshe, they complain, and they are punished with a plague of snakebite (as the snake spoke evilly to Chava in Gan Eden, so did b’nei Yisrael speak evilly of Moshe and Hashem). And yet, they apologise, Moshe prays on their behalf (21:7) and they are cured. It is that easy for them, G-d is that close to them. So close should we all be to G-d, and may we never be disheartened so that we speak evil.