Imu Shalev: Welcome to Into the Verse, where we share new and unexpected insights about the parsha… diving deep into the verses to uncover the Torah’s own commentary on itself.

Hi, I’m Imu Shalev. Parshat Chukat is known for one of the most mysterious laws in the Torah: the law of the red heifer, the parah adumah. It requires us to use an animal of a very specific color, its ashes have to be mixed with water and used in a purification ceremony… I could go on and on about the bizarre details. But I kind of feel like asking: What about this matters for us today? After all, we don’t have priests or a Temple nowadays. None of those rituals apply to us. So what should I take away from hearing people talk about this weird, inexplicable red heifer law? 

Well, I got a whole new way to think about the parah adumah when I heard today’s conversation between Rabbi Fohrman and Daniel Loewenstein. They ask the same question I had – What does this mean for us today? – and they end up suggesting that this ceremony might be nothing less than a way to help us human beings relate to one of our greatest fears: the fear of death. And not only that… it may even help us reflect on huge questions like: How should we determine what’s right and what’s wrong? What is for us to judge, and what is for God alone to decide? It’s a fascinating conversation that includes some amazing insights. Let’s go hear from them now.

Rabbi David Fohrman: I hear that you have prepared something to share with us, or with me, and I am eager to see what you might have come up with, so take it away.

Daniel Loewenstein: Thank you so much. The opening of Parshat Chukat is about the parah adumah, the red heifer, which is used in purifying someone who came in contact with a dead body. So one very basic question right at the beginning is: Why a red heifer?

Rabbi Fohrman: And by that you mean…

Daniel: Why red?

Rabbi Fohrman: Why red. I mean, the whole procedure seems a little bit on the… I don't know if I would say bizarre, but it's certainly got all sorts of quirks in it. It's this red heifer turned to ash, essentially, and then the ashes are kind of mixed together, and there's this red thread that's thrown in, and these ashes are sprinkled, and it makes the person who was tamei, who was impure, pure, and it makes the sprinkler impure. So there's a lot of strange qualities about this. You want to focus on the redness of the heifer and why is it red.

Daniel: That's where I wanted to start, and I wanted to know if you had any thoughts about that.

Rabbi Fohrman: You know, I've kind of wondered about that. One thing just sort of jumps out at me. Don't know if it is significant, but the redness of the parah is referred to as פָּרָה אֲדֻמָּה spelled Alef-Daled-Mem-He, and part of this really specific procedure which is done with the parah adumah involves the sprinkling of the blood of the heifer. If you look at the word for blood – first of all, blood of course is red – and if you look at the word there, it's דָּמָהּ or “its blood.” דָּמָהּ (damah) just happens to borrow three out of four of the letters, in order, of אֲדֻמָּה (adumah). So you have a red heifer of which its dam is sprinkled, leaving only the Alef kind of dangling out there as the difference between the redness of the heifer and the blood of the heifer. I offer that without any explanation. I'm not sure that's where you were going, but just thought I’d throw it out there.

Daniel: Rabbi Fohrman, I love that you paid attention to the spelling of the word  אֲדֻמָּה (adumah) and noticed also the connection between the redness of the blood and the spelling of the word dam or damah and adamah – adumah, excuse me, I just tipped my hand there for a second. But also, we notice that the spelling of אֲדֻמָּה (adumah) is also spelled with the same letters as the word אֲדָמָה (adamah), which means earth.

Rabbi Fohrman: That is kind of interesting. You've got earth in there. Parah adumah is vowelized as אֲדֻמָּה but could just as easily be read without vowels as “a heifer of the earth.”

Daniel: And it's not like they're not connected at all, because the reddish-brown color of the heifer actually does approximate the reddish brown color of soil. So there's an interesting possibility there.

Rabbi Fohrman: Are you suggesting, just to interrupt you, that the color of soil and the color of blood is similar?

Daniel: I'm suggesting that the color of the heifer is similar to the color of blood and similar to the color of soil.

Rabbi Fohrman: Because it is kind of interesting, if you think about it. We do think of blood as red, but if you prick your arm, you'll notice that it's really a very dark crimson that almost approximates a brownish or at least a very dark burgundy red, which kind of is close in some ways to the color of earth. Interesting that the word אֲדֻמָּה (adumah) and אֲדָמָה (adamah) and earth and blood should be so close when their pigmentation is close. So yeah, kind of interesting.

Daniel: There's one more thing that strikes me as interesting that I wanted to get your opinion about. If you look in Bamidbar chapter 19, verse 9, this is what it says: 

וְאָסַף אִישׁ טָהוֹר אֵת אֵפֶר הַפָּרָה וְהִנִּיחַ מִחוּץ לַמַּחֲנֶה בְּמָקוֹם טָהוֹר וְהָיְתָה לַעֲדַת בְּנֵי-יִשְׂרָאֵל לְמִשְׁמֶרֶת לְמֵי נִדָּה חַטָּאת הִוא

A pure person should gather the ash of the red heifer that's been burned, and he should put it aside outside of the camp in a pure place, and it will be for the congregation of the children of Israel for a safekeeping; it will be waters of niddah and it is a chatat.

That phrase mei niddah, it's an interesting phrase, and I wasn't sure what to make of it when I first saw it. What do you think, Rabbi Fohrman? What does it say to you?

Rabbi Fohrman: It's certainly a rather striking piece of language. Generally, when we think of niddah we think of a woman who is ritually unclean by virtue of menstruation. I guess you’ve got redness there with the blood of menstruation, perhaps, if you want to continue the redness theme. It's certainly not the simple meaning of the phrase, but what the simple meaning of the phrase is is kind of up in the air.

Daniel: Definitely agree. I have something I'd like to suggest, but you know, anybody's guess really. Rabbi Fohrman, do you know the first time that we encounter the word niddah, or some similar form and similar meaning of the word niddah?

Rabbi Fohrman: The first time we ever – oh, would it be – oh, I know where you're going now. Ha ha. Clever, clever, clever. If I'm going to guess your train of thought, the first time we ever have that language of niddah is going to go back to Cain, the punishment that he gets. That he's נָע וָנָד תִּהְיֶה בָאָרֶץ. He is a wanderer without a place (Genesis 4:12). Right?

Daniel: Right.

Rabbi Fohrman: As if he's lonely and isolated.

Daniel: Exactly. The word נָד (nad) in that context means someone who is cast out, exiled, condemned to wander.

Rabbi Fohrman: Which may be where the idea of niddah comes from, because there's something that's lonely about her or cut off while she's in an impure state, much like Cain is cut off in a sense that he's wandering and cut off from society.

And I see where you're going now with the ideas of blood and with ground, because with Cain, right before we hear נָע וָנָד תִּהְיֶה בָאָרֶץ – what you have with Cain right before that is that God exclaims to Cain אָרוּר אָתָּה מִן-הָאֲדָמָה אֲשֶׁר פָּצְתָה אֶת-פִּיהָ לָקַחַת אֶת-דְּמֵי אָחִיךָ מִיָּדֶךָ – cursed are you from the ground that has opened its mouth to take in the blood of your brother from your hands (Genesis 4:11). So there's that image of blood mixed with ground. Blood coming into the ground that maybe somehow comes out in this parah adumah, which has the language of  אֲדֻמָּה (adumah) or אֲדָמָה (adamah) and you're not quite sure which, and just so happens to have that element of נָע וָנָד תִּהְיֶה בָאָרֶץ – of separation – involved with these waters of mei niddah.

Then, by the way, Daniel, if you're going in that direction, that would explain the phrase לְמֵי נִדָּה חַטָּאת הִוא. This offering, strangely, has the quality of a chatat, which by the way, Daniel, is also unusual, because you wouldn't think of an offering which is just there to make someone pure as a sin offering. But if you think about it in terms of coming back from Cain and Abel, that again echoes with the language that God uses to Cain, specifically when He says: Cursed are you from the ground that's opened its mouth to take the blood of your brother from your hands. What God says to him right before that is לַפֶּתַח חַטָּאת רֹבֵץ. There's that language, that sin lies crouching (Genesis 4:7)...

Daniel: I didn't even notice that.

Rabbi Fohrman: Of course that's the title of my book, but that sense of chatat also goes straight back to Cain. The sin, perhaps, of murder. And of course Cain is that first story of death at the hands of another human being, and here somehow this animal is being used to somehow give us a way of coping with death.

Daniel: So Rabbi Fohrman, just to briefly review what we just discussed. We noticed that the spelling of the word אֲדֻמָּה (adumah), red, is also the same spelling as the word אֲדָמָה (adamah), earth. And we also noticed that the waters, or the ash and water mixed together, that's used in the sprinkling to purify the person is referred to as mei niddah. We then noticed that the same elements of niddah or nad, and adamah and blood and redness, all show up also in the story of Cain and Abel, of Kayin and Hevel, when Cain murders his brother, and God tells Cain that the blood of your brother is screaming to me from the adamah, from the earth, and therefore his curse will be that he will be נָע וָנָד – that he will be forced to live permanently in exile and as a wanderer.

Rabbi Fohrman: And that theme of exile, by the way, is also present here, not just in the mei niddah, but in the fact that the אִישׁ טָהוֹר – this pure person who takes the ashes of the parah – it says in the same verse וְהִנִּיחַ מִחוּץ לַמַּחֲנֶה בְּמָקוֹם טָהוֹר – is to place the ashes outside the camp in a pure place. That again sort of seems to conjure up that image of exile for which the story of Cain and Abel comes to mind.

Daniel: There's definitely a lot of themes of exile and separateness involved in this whole narrative of the parah adumah. There's one more piece that I want to introduce, which I think will sort of lead us into a theory. Rabbi Fohrman, I'm going to actually rely on you for this part, because you have a very elaborate theory of the sins that happened in the beginning of Bereishit, in the beginning of Genesis. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Daniel, I've been seeing this in terms of the notion of knowing good and evil with the Tree is affecting the next generation. What I mean by that is that “good” and “evil” are the words that a creator uses to describe the system that they've created. It's specifically the way that a creator or master of the system evaluates his world. Hence, when God evaluates His world, וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים כִּי-טוֹב – God sees that it's good. Later, when He decides to destroy the world, He sees that it's evil and He goes and destroys it.

So “good” and “evil” are these words associated with a master of a system, God, declaring whether something should exist or not exist within the system. As such, these are not words for human beings, because we are not outside the system, we're inside the system. To use my Monopoly analogy, we're not Parker Brothers, the creator of the game. We're little hat and little shoe, who go around the board. And little hat and little shoe are not allowed to make proclamations about the way things should be on the board. You get to decide whether you're building a house on Park Place. You don't get to decide whether or not, when you roll doubles, you get to go to Free Parking and collect $1 million and win the game.

Daniel: Right. So when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree, what they essentially were doing was, they were deciding to step outside of the roles that were given to them. And they decided that they wanted to think like a creator as well, and they wanted to be able to declare what is good and what is bad.

Rabbi Fohrman: Exactly. In the next generation, this leads to murder. Murder is something which you'd be horrified of doing if you realize you're little hat and little shoe. Little hat and little shoe don't get to make those ultimate decisions about which piece stays on the board and which piece doesn't stay on the board. That's not a little hat and little shoe decision. But if you think that you're the master, then you think you get to make those decisions, and murder becomes at least thinkable once you've eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Where would you take that, Daniel?

Daniel: Here's my theory, and please be honest and let me know what you think.

Rabbi Fohrman: Daniel, I'm always ruthlessly honest.

Daniel: When a person encounters a dead body, what kind of effect does that have on him psychologically? I would venture to say that if you are little hat or little shoe, faithfully sticking to your role, and murder is unthinkable, but you hang out around death all the time, you see people die… so it could be that seeing death will make you appreciate life all the more. But it could also be that when you encounter death, it sort of makes death a little bit less taboo, a little bit less scary. Maybe, if you encounter death, then you can think: Oh, death happens in the world. It's not such a big deal.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's kind of interesting, because if you think about that, that is truly the way it does work with us human beings. Normally, we have this aversion to death. Death spooks us out, which is why all the scary movies are all about death. It's about graveyards and about skulls and haunted houses, really exploit our sense of fear of death, which is a natural part of being human and maybe the way God wants it to be, because little hat and little shoe should have an aversion to death. Death means you're going off the board, and the whole point of being little hat and little shoe is that you're living on the board. You should be scared of going off the board. But, as you suggest, nothing can inure you to a reality that you should be scared of like constant exposure can. Constant exposure changes things. If you're on the battlefield, you can get numb to death.

By the way, maybe you even see the beginnings of that with Cain and Abel. Because even though Cain has only experienced one death, and you would expect him to be shocked, one of, in fact, the most shocking things as a reader in reading the story of Cain and Abel is how unshocked Cain is, when God confronts him and says, What have you done?

Daniel: Right. Cain isn't distraught. He isn't weeping and horrified by what he did. He just says, leave me alone.

Rabbi Fohrman: הֲשֹׁמֵר אָחִי אָנֹכִי – “Am I my brother's keeper?” (Genesis 4:9) What's awful about that is, it's not just his dismissal of responsibility for his brother, but just the casual sense in which he's assimilated this terrible reality. The first death in the history of mankind just rolls off his back like he lost a squash tournament, and what the heck, it's not my problem, let's move on. You're suggesting that maybe at some level the parah adumah is trying to guard us against that?

Daniel: Exactly.

Rabbi Fohrman: It's almost like the anti-Cain experience?

Daniel: What I'm suggesting is that the next step off the wagon, let's say, after exposure to death, is being inured to death, and then feeling like potentially you could be the arbiter of death and not feel like it's a big deal. So in order to protect us from making that jump, we have this ceremony of the parah adumah. What I'm suggesting is that the parah adumah is filled with all these symbols of Hevel (Abel). If you think about it, the parah adumah – we, number one, have the reference to adamah. What we do with the parah adumah is, we turn it into ash and we take that ash, ash that's like dirt or dust that symbolizes Hevel…

Rabbi Fohrman: Wait, just let me slow you down here. When Daniel, fair reader – or listener – says that it was talking about Hevel here, he is referring obliquely, if I'm not mistaken, not just to the name Hevel but to the meaning of the word. The word hevel means that which dissipates, that which is fragile, as Hevel himself is. Hevel just dies and literally goes up in a puff of steam. It's strange to have a brother named “puff of steam,” but that's what happens to poor Hevel: He's fragile, he dies. And you see the fragility of life and how easily it evaporates from the quick loss of Hevel, which is encapsulated in his name.

So Daniel is saying, you've got this heifer, which is a very sturdy thing. We turn it into ash, showing its fragility. We take the ash and mix it with water so the ash completely disappears, so there's really nothing left – and then, Daniel?

Daniel: And then we collect this water-ash solution, we call it mei niddah.

Rabbi Fohrman: Water to be stayed away from?

Daniel: So what I want to suggest is actually, it's a warning. These are the waters that represent how you can become exiled. These are the waters that represent the first murder, the first death, and the first event that led...

Rabbi Fohrman: So it's almost like we're throwing cold water on you.

Daniel: Actually, that's a great way to talk about it. We're alerting you to the fact that you are on this slippery slope towards viewing life in a very callous way.

Rabbi Fohrman: So in other words, just your contact with the dead, the fact that you’re an undertaker, the fact that you're seeing all these bodies – it can have a deleterious effect on you. It can take away the natural horror that little hat, little shoe feels toward death. So what we do is, we try to shock you with the sprinkling of this death water, this mei niddah, which could also mean stay-away water, which also – because of that sense of niddah, to stay away, like the Ibn Ezra says – but also niddah going all the way back to Cain and Abel, going all the way back to the fragility of Abel that is distilled down into the essence of these ashes, that is distilled down into this water we sprinkle with its fragility… to remind you that life is fragile and hence, by implication, precious, not to be trifled with. That it can easily be gone. Therefore, treat death with a sense of reverence and horror and natural aversion which you naturally ought to. It's kind of rebalancing that system. Very fascinating, Daniel.

If I could just add something more, that one of the paradoxes of the red heifer is that the ashes make the person who was tamei (ritually impure), i.e. the person who came into contact with the dead, tahor (ritually pure), but the person who sprinkles it becomes tamei, becomes impure. Maybe the answer to that, along the lines of your thinking, is this: When you've come into contact with the dead, that has the deleterious effect of desensitizing you to death, which is dangerous for you, little shoe. Therefore, the best we can do for you is to sort of pour the water of the haunted house upon you, splash cold water on you to try to re-shock you with the fragility of life. That will bring you back from the brink, which is the sense of casualness that you might be experiencing with death, and bring you back to normalcy.

The tragedy is, or the irony is, is that the person who has not been exposed to death, the regular little shoe who then so much as comes into contact with these haunted waters, himself becomes haunted with them and becomes spooked by death, and therefore himself attains a certain kind of tumah (impurity). Because for him, just coming into contact with that cold water – or that sense that, oh my God, life really is fragile in that way – when you're just sort of coming along and going through your life, is enough to precipitate a kind of death crisis for you, which can then pull you into a kind of tumah (impurity) as well.

Daniel: Fascinating.

Rabbi Fohrman: In other words, it feels like life as it should be is that little hat and little shoe kind of have to pretend there's no edge of the board, or have to not get near to the edge of the board naturally. They go about their way, and their focus is on Park Place and their focus is on Tennessee Avenue, even though there's this joke at the heart of it all, which is that everybody dies. It's a journey, and no one knows where it goes. It's horrifying and it's scary, but that's life. You somehow have to live your life.

There are certain things that can throw you off-kilter. Contact with the dead, those that are outside the board, throws you off kilter. But for someone who hasn't even had contact with the dead, just contact with the waters that are intended to remedy you throws you off-kilter in a way. It makes you no longer think about buying a house on Tennessee Avenue, and somehow you need a period of readjustment for your life as well.

Daniel: Rabbi Fohrman, what are we to make of this theory in terms of our lives today? We don't have these waters, and I think culturally, where we're located nowadays, they might not even mean all that much to us. We don't have the same frame of reference to symbolically see Hevel, both in the character sense and in the puff-of-smoke sense. How are we to guard ourselves against this possibility?

Rabbi Fohrman: So I don't know. I mean, what does the parah adumah tell us in a world in which there is no parah adumah? According to what you're arguing, it feels to me like the Torah is sensitizing us to this dance that we have to play with death in the world, which is that we're all going to die. It's the most ubiquitous event in the world. They make the joke about death and taxes, the only things that are certain.

Yet despite that, somehow, any time we experience death, it's like we can never see it coming, and it just strikes us as horrible and horrifying. It might not in fact be horrifying, but we are engineered as human beings to regard it as horrifying. For all we know, the dead are on the other side having a grand time and thinking, oh my gosh, can't believe we were so scared of this! But the fact is that human beings are supposed to find it horrifying, even if it's wonderful on the other side, because that's not our job, to be on the other side. Somehow we have got to be able to encounter death, which happens all the time, and still maintain the normal sense of horror and the normal sense of staying away and not to become inured.

The parah adumah says that you got to be careful about that, and that when you come into contact with death, you got to somehow get yourself back into real life by recovering your ability to be shocked at death. It just strikes me as the Torah being gentle with us and helping us maintain the delicate dance of what it means to be little hat and little shoe in the world.

Daniel: I just want to add a personal level from my end. I think this conversation is actually making me think a lot about modern media, at least the way I consume it personally, and how ubiquitous death is in so many different forms. What we're seeing here with this parah adumah process and with the mei niddah warning is that it's important to take steps to sensitize ourselves, like you were saying, to recover the horror. That may not be so simple.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah. It may be one of the takeaways is: Stay away from gory crime movies. There are things in life that are meant to shock you. NPR had a thing the other day about the ubiquity of curse words in society. They said, if you're using curse words for shock value it doesn't work, because once you use them five times, they don't shock you anymore. It's the same thing if you use death to sell tickets at the movies. It doesn't work after a certain point. It doesn't shock you anymore. But what you have done is something deleterious and painful and difficult and tragic for the humans that watch the movies, which is, you've taken away the natural sensitivity to death, which impairs our ability to live full lives. There's something about the horror of death which is part of living.

Daniel: And something that needs to be preserved.

Rabbi Fohrman: And something that needs to be preserved. Yup. Daniel, this has been fantastic. I really need to tell you that. 

Daniel: This was a real honor for me to be able to come on the podcast. Thanks for having me.

Imu: So I want to share some reflections on this conversation Daniel and Rabbi Fohrman had. And I think the story they’re beginning to tell is really fascinating. The ritual of the parah adumah has so many parallels to the story of Cain. Cain is someone who was flippant with his brother Hevel, either knowingly murdering him or accidentally murdering him. Either way, in the aftermath of the death of his brother Hevel, one thing Cain does is, he walks away. The thing that God says to Cain, when He forces him to reckon with what he’s done, is קוֹל דְּמֵי אָחִיךָ צֹעֲקִים אֵלַי מִן-הָאֲדָמָה. It means: The voice of the blood of your brother is crying out to me from the earth (Genesis 4:10). There you have dam and adamah, blood, ground. It’s such a haunting phrase, because for Cain to be able to walk away from the murder of his brother, he sort of has an accomplice. The accomplice is the ground. We are of the earth and we return to the earth, and in this case Cain was hoping that the earth would cover his crimes. But what God says is, the dam in the adamah, the blood in the earth, has voice. God hears the cry of the blood, and Cain is forced to reckon with what he has done. נָע וָנָד תִּהְיֶה בָאָרֶץ. His punishment is exile. The earth that he sought as an accomplice now rejects him. He’s forced to wander. He can’t plant. He can’t harvest. Kayin is somebody who in the face of death chose to hide. 

So what’s all that supposed to mean to us? Why would God take all of the trappings of the story of a murderer, an accidental murderer, or someone apathetic about the death of his brother, and somehow give that to us as a ritual for those of us who’ve been exposed to death? I’m not sure that the Torah is saying: All of you who are gravediggers and can be inured to the feeling of loss, I have a ritual to shove it in your face, as it were. I think this ritual matters even to those of us who want to dwell on our loss, to feel that sense of separation and loss, or maybe alienation from our home. When I lose somebody, I feel like I have no place on this earth. Maybe I’m angry with God. Maybe I take the position of little hat and little shoe and say: This shouldn’t have happened! 

I think this ritual and many of the other rituals of tumah and taharah actually make space for those kinds of reflections. They give space for mourning and maybe even rebellion, because you need to have your feelings, or your feelings will have you. Your feelings are going to come one way or the other. And the Torah prescribes a ritual, a way to contend with the terrors of death, and maybe at the end of it to be able to say, in honesty, the common Jewish phrase uttered when somebody loses someone: Baruch dayan emet, blessed is the true Judge. If you think about that phrase, it’s nothing other than acceptance that we don’t get to decide who lives and who dies, how they die, when they die. Sometimes I think we say that phrase too early, right when we hear of the death. To me, it feels much more appropriate to say after a ritual when one leaves the camp, when they mourn for seven days, and they’re in a place where they’re able to come to terms with what they’ve lost and finally enter the camp again. 

Anyway, that’s where my mind went after listening to this conversation between Daniel and Rabbi Fohrman. I’m curious what this episode meant to you. If you have thoughts I’d love to hear them. Please send us comments at info@alephbeta.org. Thanks for listening. 

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Credits

This episode was recorded by Rabbi David Fohrman and Daniel Loewenstein. 

When this episode originally aired on Aleph Beta, it was edited by Rivky Stern. 

Into the Verse editing was done by Sarah Penso.

Our audio editor is Hillary Guttman. 

Additional audio editing was done by Veekalp Sharma.

Our editorial director is me, Imu Shalev. 

Thank you so much for listening.