Parashat Hukkat – 5786

What do you think is the strangest commandment in the entire Torah? There’s some pretty stiff competition. Is it the prohibition on combining wool and linen? The insistence that it’s fine to eat cows and goats but not pigs? The sandal and spitting ritual that accompanies a brother’s refusal to marry his widowed sister-in-law? The prohibition against rounding the corners of one’s beard? While some commandments are morally challenging, others are intellectually puzzling, making them difficult to explain, much less defend against criticism.

Parashat Hukkat opens with a novel Israelite ritual: in order to prepare a special liquid that will be used to ritually purify individuals contaminated by contact with a human corpse, an unblemished red heifer must be slaughtered outside the camp and (after some priestly blood-sprinkling) completely burnt, together with cedar, hyssop, and crimson dye. Although this ritual was unique, many of its component parts were not: slaughtering an unblemished animal, sprinkling its blood, and partially or completely burning its body were standard procedure for most Israelite offerings.

Most contemporary Bible scholars, following the lead of Jacob Milgrom, agree that the red heifer is a specialized type of hattat or purification-offering. The species and gender of the hattat sacrifice depended on its bringer’s means and status, but since a High Priest (on his own behalf or for the entire community) was supposed to bring a male herd-animal, a bull, it’s not surprising that there would also be a female herd-animal hattat, and the red heifer is just that.  The remaining components of the special purification mixture made from the red heifer’s ashes (blood, water, cedar, hyssop, and crimson dye) also feature in the purification rites of a person suffering from tzara’at, who shares with the red heifer the designation of being taken “outside the camp.” In other words, the red heifer fits logically enough within the larger system of Israelite sacrifice envisioned in Leviticus and Numbers.

Rabbinic tradition, however, came to identify the red heifer ritual as the single strangest commandment in the Torah. This development had a lot to do with the opening words of the parashah: “This is the statute [hukkat] of the Torah” (Num. 19:3). In Torah and Tanakh, hukkim are interchangeable with mishpatim and even mitzvot as divine statutes or commandments, but in the rabbinic imagination, hukkim were specifically the commandments with no rational explanation. As early as the third-century Sifra (Aharei Mot 13:9), the prohibitions against eating pigs and wearing wool-linen mixtures – as well as a different unique animal ritual, the Yom Kippur scapegoat – are grouped together as hukkim, impossible to justify and therefore vulnerable to challenge by both the evil impulse (i.e., Jewish questioners) and idol worshippers (i.e., non-Jewish questioners).

A later midrash collection (Bamidbar Rabbah 19:8) depicts a confrontation between the third-century Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and an idolater who asks why the red heifer ritual is not simply sorcery (k’shafim). Rabbi Yohanan successfully encourages the idolater to compare the red heifer to a quasi-medical ritual for curing seizures. Rabbi Yohanan’s students, however, challenge this solution, and he admits to them that the red heifer’s ashes have no intrinsic power: rather, the entire purification ritual is simply an act of obedience to God’s decree. From here it is only a small step to viewing the red heifer ritual as the ultimate hok, a commandment that even the wise King Solomon could not understand (Bamidbar Rabbah 19:3) and a statute that God initially hesitated to share with Moses, much to the latter’s confusion (Midrash Tanhuma Hukkat 6:1).

Today’s Jews are more likely to find themselves struggling to explain Torah commandments on moral and ethical grounds: how can there be a mitzvah to exterminate another people? Why is slavery tolerated in the laws of a people whose origin story revolves around escaping from slavery? Why are women’s vows conditional on the approval of fathers and husbands, while men’s vows are not? Next to these and so many other difficult questions, the intellectual challenge of explaining the red heifer ritual can seem trivial or even quaint. Jews from more liberal backgrounds may prefer to skip past this esoteric section of Torah, while Jews from more traditional backgrounds may not be too sorry that the ritual itself continues to be obsolete.

But today’s Jews do live in a world where many aspects of Jewish teaching and tradition are questioned and challenged from both inside and outside Judaism – just like the rabbis who interpreted the red heifer ritual (also obsolete in their day). The hok of the red heifer can still remind us to respond to all genuine inquiries with seriousness and honesty. As Rabbi Yohanan admits to his students, it’s not enough to make up a glib response. Sometimes, if we are very lucky, we learn something new, or find something new to value, in the process of wrestling with a difficult passage or responding to a challenging questioner. And sometimes, like King Solomon and Moses, we have to admit that we are stumped – but we’re committed to engage with the persistence of human inquiry and the strangeness of mitzvot. Even this one.