Rav Chaim Lifshitz
Chukat

Essays and Articles:

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 Translated from Hebrew by S. NAthan

l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai

Purity:
A Means for Directly Expressing A Direct Connection

Where does purity belong?  Religion after all deals with values.  The purpose of religion is to draw the sharpest possible distinctions between truth and falsehood, between good and evil.  The sacred and the secular, and discerning one from the other may be called the essential and nearly exclusive subject matter of all religions. 

The sacred is perceived as the ceremonial.  The sacred is perceived as being a shining solitary state, a lofty position raised high above life, where it radiates its exquisite heavenly light.  The sacred belongs entirely to heaven; that is its place.  Few if any are those who clear a space for it down here in this lowly world.  Kedushah is understood in the Torah as being the removal of the secular, or at least its reduction.  “ ‘Be sacred:’ Be removed.”  As in Lavan’s words to Eliezer: “I have cleared the house,” meaning I have cleared the house of idolatry.  In the Torah, kedushah is perceived as the presence of the Shechina within man and within a designated place: The Holy Land, the Beis HaMikdash, the Holy of Holies.

Where does the distinction between purity and impurity belong?  After all, it does not deal with the values of sanctity and it does not deal with moral distinctions between good and evil.  What does sanctity have to do with a red heifer?  You might say, that is the whole idea of the hok, the statute, that it has no logical explanation, and we must uphold it simply because it expresses the will of the Creator.  Without reasons and without conditions. 

Nevertheless, the red heifer holds an ingenious response to Korach’s cunning.  Korach’s claim was: “All of the congregation are totally sacred, and God is among them.”  By this claim, Korach removes God from a position of authority, from above, from on high, and brings Him down to the lowest point within the framework of society.  Democracy at its best.  A kibbutznik is incapable of digesting the idea of a supreme authority.  At a general meeting in the lunchroom, every member has the right to vote, with one finger only.  Neither does the rabbi have any voting right that is above the right of any member of the group.  This was the claim made to me by members of the Religious Kibbutz movement, which for generations had refused to accept the authority of a rabbi over the congregation.  Their claim was reminiscent of their master’s claim, their rabbi and teacher, who is Korach himself, and Korach was not just your average rabbi.  His high-ranking status was almost equal to that of the rabbi and master of all Israel, Moshe Rabeinu himself in all his glory.  It was specifically an individual of high status who held himself far above the masses, who conspired to undermine the authority of the Holy One – a claim that has been sanctified in our own day as the law of democracy, a law that has become sacred in modern society.  Democracy has become a sacred framework that hides all crime.  An individual who commits a moral crime in modern society – his moral crime will be considered no sin at all as long as he commits it within the framework of the law.  Thus did man create a framework to conceal every crime.

On the surface of things, purity and impurity seem to have been turned into a framework as well.  Chasidim have turned immersion in the mikveh into a ceremony of purity.  Nevertheless, the Torah uses this framework to foil the plot of framework-ism completely.

A person has become impure.  This is usually not of his own doing, and generally he is not to blame.  Being under the same roof with someone who dies, usually unbeknownst to him, has rendered him impure, with all of the prohibitions that this entails.

During the era of the Bais HaMikdash, a death penalty awaited him if he entered the sanctuary while still impure, or if he ate of the sacred offerings of the altar.  Only ashes of a red heifer, which had been mixed with the waters of a mikveh, could remove his impurity from upon him, after he had waited out the seven days of purification.

Water and time…  Not repentance and no moral lesson whatsoever could do the work of purification.  Enough that he had entered a mikveh; time would now work its effect upon him.  Both tumah, impurity, and the ways and means of taharah, purification, seem to come from another world, a world where logic does not rule, but only the Godly authority, which is too high to be afraid to take such an arbitrary approach, where contradictions fall thick and fast, one upon another.  The ways of purification can never be turned into a hardened framework.  In the blink of an eye, the means of purity can become the means for impurity.  “The red heifer renders the impure pure, and renders the pure impure.”  This makes it impossible to attribute any magical charm to the heifer itself.  Here we see that the cow itself has no segula, no uniquely characteristic feature of purity; it can never become a sacred cow.  The will of the Creator remains the sole and single authority, radiating its brilliant light over the entire universe.

This is how the Torah’s treats the danger of the rigid framework that Korach offered to the world.  To this day, Korach’s offer has been undermining the firmness of every value.  Every one of the events in this Torah portion comes to rebut Korach and to explain and to illustrate the principle of supreme authority.

Mei Meriva: “The Waters of Quarrel.”
“Because you did not speak to the rock…”   Why is speech so much more preferable?  We have already discussed this at length elsewhere, and our conclusion, briefly stated, was that a distinction must be made between speech and action.  It should be recalled that the people tended to attribute to Moshe Rabeinu supreme powers in his own right.  “And they believed in God, and in Moshe, His servant.”  The wise among them viewed Moshe as a servant of God, who represented Him.  They did not attribute the supreme powers to Moshe himself, but viewed him only as a representative.  Yet there were among the nation those who attributed these powers to Moshe himself – to Moshe personally, and to the staff that he carried in his hand.  When Miriam died, the nation thirsted for water.  Had Moshe sufficed with the power of speech alone, as he had been commanded, it would have been easy for the nation to believe that the miracle had come from a Divine source.  However, when Moshe struck the rock, with his staff, the nation tended to believe that the powers of Moshe, the man himself, had worked this wonder.  There was thus in his act of striking, something of a reduction of the heavenly phenomenon, a reduction of the supreme authority.

So too with the nachash nechoshet, the “snake of copper.”  A nation accustomed to having miracles rolling around underfoot might tend to attribute sanctity to everything that surrounds them.  Such a nation might tend to believe in the magical power of the snake.  Therefore when the nation avoided this trap, and believed in the authority that was higher than the snake, this brought them healing.  “Does a snake put to death?  Does a snake give life?  Rather, when Israel would look upward, and subjugate their hearts to their Father in heaven, they would be healed.”

In this spirit we may understand also the different attitude towards Edom, who was privileged to be bypassed and was saved from confrontation with Israel, a privilege that Sichon and Og were not granted, despite Edom’s equally hostile and vicious attitude toward Israel.  Thus has the Holy One commanded.  No clear reason is given. 

We may also understand the death of Aharon in this light, and his son Elazar’s stepping into his position, without any democratic elections and without any involvement on Moshe’s part.  The Creator’s involvement in every single stage of the taking of Aharon’s sacred soul – this too was the most persuasive performance possible for removing all doubt as to any competition from any other authority.  This was the manifestation of a supreme authority, a splendor-filled manifestation of the Creator of the universe.

In summary, it would appear that purity does after all contain a value.  The one who is purifying is expressing his powerful yearning to attach to the Creator who has commanded personal attachment, pure of any ulterior motive.  Purity is an expression of the pure intention – devoid of all other interests – to attach oneself to one’s Godly source.