Shabbat of… the Cow?

I’m writing to share with you the teaching I delivered this past Shabbat, a Shabbat which called upon us to begin spiritually opening ourselves in preparation for the Pesah (Passover) holiday:

There are nine special Shabbatot, special Sabbaths, sprinkled throughout the Jewish year that receive their own name because of special rituals or readings associated with them, and this Shabbat is one of them. The names of these Shabbatot connote lofty themes of Jewish tradition: Shabbat Zakhor, the Sabbath of Remembrance, we honor just before Purim; Shabbat HaGadol, the Great Sabbath, we honor just before Pesah; Shabbat Shirah, the Sabbath of Song, honored when we chant the Song of the Sea in the Torah — when the Israelites finally break through to freedom; to name a few.

So what is this week’s Shabbat? What is its name, and what lofty theme does it represent? You ready? This week is Shabbat Parah, the Sabbath of… the Cow.

The Sabbath of the Cow. Ok, doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as the Sabbath of Remembrance, or Shabbat HaGadol, the Great Sabbath, but surely the ancient rabbis knew what they were doing. Surely they had an important lesson to teach us with calling this Shabbat “Shabbat Parah,” the Shabbat of the Cow.

As a baseline, Shabbat Parah refers to an ancient ritual involving a parah, a cow, and more specifically a parah adumah, a red cow, a red heifer, a reddish brown young cow, about which we read a short Torah portion this week. And its meaning? What does this ritual, which I’ll describe more fully in a moment, come to teach us? For this, the rabbis defer to their elder, King Solomon, considered the wisest man in all of Tanakh, all of the Hebrew Bible, to explain it, and here is what he says:

I have labored to understand the word of God and understood it all

Al kol eleh amadeti

עַל כָּל אֵלֶה עָמַדְתִי

But the portion of the red heifer, the red cow

ufarasha shel parah adumah

וּפָרָשָׁה שֶׁל פָּרָה אֲדֻמָה

I investigated, I asked, and I searched

hakarti vesha’alti ufishfashti

חָקַרְתִי וְשָׁאַלְתִי וּפִשְׁפַשְׁתִי

and it remains ever distant from me. I do not understand.

vehi rehokah mimeni

וְהִיא רְחוֹקָה מִמֶנִי

To this day, the rabbis have no explanation for why we were called upon to fulfill the ritual of the red cow, the red heifer.

So what can we learn from this?

Let’s describe the ritual a little more fully: in ancient times, come Passover, Israelites from all over the Near East, no matter where they lived, were called upon to make a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem to bring a sacrifice, an offering, in remembrance and celebration of the Exodus and of spring.

But the Temple, for all its power and glory, was considered especially delicate and fragile. For it to serve effectively as the earthly symbol of God’s presence, no impurities could encroach upon it, or the Temple would be inhospitable to God’s sacred presence, and the sacred connection between God and the people would be in danger.

What was meant by “impurities?” Impurities resulted from events, either ritual or moral in nature, which brought you out of alignment with God. Typically they could be remedied through simply immersing oneself in water and waiting until nightfall. Then, you would be pure again.

But there was one impurity which required the special ritual of the parah adumah, the reddish brown cow, and that was the impurity of hanoge’a bamet — coming in contact with a dead body. Something about that contact, tradition says, rendered one impure, and the only way to achieve purity after that was for a priest to take a parah adumah, a red cow, burn it up, mix up the ashes and some other ingredients in water, and sprinkle that water on the person who had come into contact with the deceased, twice over the course of seven days, and only at that point would they become pure.

Why did it work that way?

This is what has the rabbis and King Solomon so completely stumped. They did not know. They couldn’t find anything in scripture to explain this ritual.

But, they effectively said, there is nothing in our inability to explain it that takes away its power, its magic, its majesty.

Today, we do not make a special potion out of a parah admuah, a red cow, and purify ourselves before going to the Temple. There is no Temple, there is no potion; with few exceptions in Jewish tradition, there is no purity or impurity.

And yet, there are countless rituals that we participate in that, on their face, have no rational explanation.

On Passover, we’re called upon to wash our hands not once but twice during the seder — no antibacterial soap, no hot water; the hand washing isn’t actually killing any germs; it’s a purely ritual act.

Most mornings, I wrap t’fillin, leather boxes with parchment and straps, around my left bicep and on my forehead.

Some of us make sure to wait multiple hours after eating meat before eating dairy.

We can speculate as to the reasons behind all of these, but to the extent the actual reasons ever existed, they have largely become lost to time; we do not know them.

Still, there is nothing in our inability to explain them that takes away their power, their magic, their majesty.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel explains this as follows:

We should not evaluate the mitzvot [the sacred callings of Jewish tradition] by the amount of rational meaning we may discover at their basis. Religion is not within but beyond the limits of mere reason. [Religion’s] task is not to compete with reason, to be a source of speculative ideas, but to aid us where reason gives us only partial aid. Its meaning must be understood in terms compatible with the sense of the ineffable. Frequently where concepts fail, where rational understanding ends, the meaning of observance begins.

Spiritual meaning is not always limpid [a word I had to look up which means “completely clear”]. Transparency is the quality of glass, while diamonds are distinguished by refractive power and the play of prismatic colors.

Indeed, any reason we may advance for our loyalty to the Jewish order of living merely points to one of its many facets. To say that the mitzvot have meaning is less accurate than saying that they lead us to wells of emergent meaning, to experiences which are full of hidden brilliance of the holy, suddenly blazing in our thoughts.

We don’t engage in the Jewish order of living because each act has a perfectly understandable explanation; we participate in the sacred drama of Jewish life because we sense that there is meaning in the mystery — not that that we’ll always be able to discern, but whose waves we want to be caught up in, whose symphony we want to be a part of.

As Rabbi Neil Gillman points out, life contains the same mystery that ritual does. “Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do we have to die? How can we believe in a God that we can’t see?”

To live in concert with the mysterious patterns of ritual is to live in parallel with the mysterious patterns of life — to acknowledge the limits of our capacity to explain, but not the limits of our capacity to engage.

On one level, Shabbat Parah has nothing to teach us. Its explanations are lost to time if they ever existed.

But on another level, it has everything to teach us: about the limits of our understanding, paired with the infinite nature of the holiness to which we aspire.

Wishing you a Shabbat of holiness. Shabbat shalom.

Rabbi K.