Shira Smiles shiur
– June 26, 2011/Sivan 24, 5771
Summary by Channie Koplowitz
Stein
Parshas Chukas begins with
the commandment for
the ultimate chok, a law for which we can
discern no humanly logical reason. These are
the instructions concerning a red heifer whose ashes, when mixed with
water and sprinkled upon someone who has become defiled by contact with
death, have the ability to return him to a purified state.
Nevertheless, our Sages try to explain the purpose of this
law as an expiation for the sin of the golden calf, that the mother,
the heifer, must clean up the mess caused by her son, the calf. With
the sin of the golden calf, death was reintroduced to the world as it
had been originally introduced into the world through
Adam’s sin. The red heifer would in some way nullify the
impurity of death these sins caused.
While this explanation
carries the element of
truth, we must look more deeply into the connection between the two
ideas to understand the root that unites them. In what way is
Adam’s sin similar to the sin of Bnei Yisroel forging the
golden calf? What was the status of Man and of Bnei Yisroel prior to
each of their sins? How do the ashes of the red heifer bring us back to
the mindset we were meant to have at creation and that we achieved
again at Mount Sinai?
Rav Pincus, the Tiferes
Shimshon, shows us that the sin of
Bnei Yisroel in creating the golden calf was not a sin of idol worship.
After all, they went to Hashem’s second in command, Aharon,
with
their request, and his response was, “Tomorrow is a holiday
for
Hashem,” not a holiday
for calf worship. So what was their sin? It was a sin of faulty
reasoning, of using human logic to replace what Hashem had either
explicitly commanded or explicitly omitted from his commands. Bnei
Yisroel did not want to replace the true God with an idol; they
merely wanted a tangible symbol to represent God as Moshe had done
before he seemed to be “missing”. And thus, this
great people who had rectified Adam’s sin when they stood at
Sinai and proclaimed, “We will do and we will
listen,” who had reinstated the purity
of man and nullified the death decree against mankind, now fell victim
to the same hubris that had claimed Adam.
The Tallelei
Chaim, Rav Chaim Hakohen, shows
us that the phrase Hashem uses to introduce this ritual,
“This is the unexplained law of the Torah,” points
to the underlying basis of all
sin. He explains that just as the laws pertaining to the red heifer are
beyond our comprehension but we perform them because they are the will
of God, so must we approach the performance of all mitzvoth in the
Torah, simply doing them because they are God’s
will, whether we believe we understand the reasoning behind them or
not. The snake undermined
this fundamental premise by telling Adam and Chava that if they ate of
the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge they would rival God. They used
their own reasoning not to rival God but to hope to serve Him better by
using the enhanced intellects they would acquire
if they ate of the Tree Of Knowledge. By choosing to act on their own
logic rather than on God’s command, irrespective of the
reason for their act, they transgressed God’s explicit
command not to eat of the fruit of that tree. By not submitting their
mind and
their will to the will of their Creator, they set the stage for all
their descendents to put the reasoning of their own minds as a higher
priority than the will of Hakodosh
Boruch Hu.
The Tallelei
Chaim sees an allusion to the sin
of Adam in the very letters spelling out the red heifer in Hebrew, the PaRaH
ADuMaH.
That first sin was a sin of the fruit of Adam, PRI
ADaM.
The letters of the two are almost identical in Hebrew, except that the
“Yud” (I)
with a numerical value of ten got divided into two “Heh”s,
each with a numerical value of five. According to Rav Chaim Hakohen,
one of these
Heh’s represents
the upper, spiritual realm of the neshama, the soul, while the other
represents the lower,
physical realm of the body. Originally these two elements were meant to
be in total harmony, with the spiritual aspect ruling over the physical
desires. In that state, the Tosher Rebbe points out in Avodas
Avodah, man would have been
immortal, rising up to heaven as one entity as Elijah had done. But all
that spiritual potential within man dies when he dies. This loss of
potential
is the greatest impurity. When mankind and later Bnei Yisroel sinned
they split the two realms, and that potential became obscured. At death
then the spirit would return to its Source, and the body would return
to the earth from which it was created, to the
ADaMaH.
The snake introduced
impurity to a pristine world.
He closed off the physical body, the vessel for the spiritual soul,
from the source of spiritual blessing. By sublimating our physical
bodies and desires and opening ourselves up to the will of a Higher
Authority, we open our beings to all the blessings our
neshamos want to bestow upon us.
Conversely, when we impose our own will over our beings,
we close ourselves off from the flow of the spiritual blessings. As the
Tallelei
Chaim
explains, we do not feel the beauty and rejuvenating effects of
Shabbos, the gift of our neshama, because we have been sealed off from
receiving its blessing unless we can counteract the effects of sin on
ourselves.
True, when we die, we atone
for these sins and
return to the source from whence we came, the earth. When we do
teshuvah, we are also
trying to return to our original source. Part of the parah
adumah ritual included immersing
in the mikvah before being sprinkled with
the ashes of the red heifer. Immersion in the
mikvah waters is a symbolic
reentering into the womb to emerge reborn in a new, purified
state. (Indeed, Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, in Waters
of Eden, speaks of a
woman’s monthly immersion
in the
mikvah as purification from the
death of the potential of a new life as if it were
the actual death of a human being.) Being sprinkled with the
ashes/water mixture of the red heifer was the final phase in the
process of symbolic rebirth.
Rav Goldwasser in Yalkut
Lekach Tov illustrates for us the
conundrum presented by the parah
adumah
and the sin of the golden calf. Not only do the ashes of the red heifer
purify those upon whom they are sprinkled while defiling those involved
in its preparation, but both the red heifer and the golden calf were
transformed through fire. In the case of the
golden calf, an inanimate object was transformed into the image of a
living creature, a calf, and in the case of the red heifer, the
opposite occurred; a living creature was transformed into the inanimate
ashes. In essence, explains the Yalkut
Lekach Tov, we can never know the
purpose or end result of anything in this world. That is the domain of
the Ribbonoh
shel olam alone.
Today, in the absence of the
red heifer, how can we nevertheless strive for purification? We begin
by focusing on the spiritual
aspect of our lives, by realizing that our essence is the holiness
within us. As the Tosher Rebbe tells us, when we recite the daily
morning blessing thanking Hashem “that He has not made me a
slave,” we should reflect on the idea that we have the
ability to
free ourselves from the acquisitive demands of the material and
physical aspects of our lives. We have the choice to fill our time by
satisfying every physical desire, or by opening ourselves up to
spiritual fulfillment.
In Getting
to Know Yourself (Da Es Atzmecha)
elucidates this idea more
fully. One can achieve
happiness, he explains, only when he stops running after his physical
desires. (Running, ratz,
and desire, ratzon, share the same root.) The
new car, the better job, more money, instead
of satisfying us merely generates a desire for more acquisitions. That,
explains,
is because material items are external to our true essence which is
spiritual. As long as we focus on these physical things, we will never
achieve true inner peace which is a manifestation of understanding our
spiritual essence and appreciating it. With our
focusing inward rather than outward, we stop running, discover our true
self, and open ourselves up again to enjoy the blessings of the soul,
of the reflection of Hashem within us. We will begin to again approach
the ideal condition of Man as a being whose
spiritual essence bursts forth to elevate and animate the physical
vessel which contains him. We will again commit ourselves to the vision
at Sinai and achieve the purification the red heifer symbolized.