SHABBAT SHALOM: The purifying paradox
By Rabbi Shlomo Riskin

(February 24) "And when the people saw that Moses was
taking so long to come down from the mountain, 
the nation gathered around Aaron and said to him:
'Rise, make us a god to lead us. As for Moses, the
man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we
do not know what has become of him.' " (Ex. 32:1) 

Our portion of Ki Tisa centers on one of the great
paradoxes in the history of our nation. The Israelites have
just been redeemed from slavery by the eternal God; they
have received His eternal message at the Revelation of
Sinai. And yet, barely 40 days later, they dance before a
golden calf. How could they have backslided so quickly -
and for an Egyptian idol which had already been proven
impotent by the 10 plagues?! 

There is another paradox involved. When the Israelites
revert to their "Egyptian," their wanton behavior doesn't
escape God's notice. God addresses Moses: "Let me
alone so that My wrath may wax hot against them, and
that I may consume them; I will make of you a great
nation." (Ex. 32:10) God has had enough of this people.
He is ready to destroy them and start all over again. 

After all, God started over again with the Tower of
Babel, when the confusion of languages caused mankind
to return to a primitive state. God again re-created
mankind after the Flood, when He destroyed the world's
population and made a second Adam with Noah and his
family. And to a certain extent, He did it with the
destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah - a devastation so
terrible that the daughters of Lot believed that no one else
was left alive. 

So why not start again with Moses? By its worship of the
Golden Calf - after all that God had done for it - this
nation is clearly beyond purification. 

But when Moses refuses God's offer - declaring that he
would rather himself be blotted out from God's Book
than see Israel destroyed - what he's really saying is that it
is forbidden to despair of the Jewish people. Moses is
insisting with consummate faith that there is an essential
purity residing within the nation which can redeem the
most egregious sin. There is a fundamental goodness and
life force which can resist the most corrosive acid of
dissolution. 

The special readings which are determined by the festivals
confirms the paradoxical mystery of Israel. Our portion of
Ki Tisa usually corresponds to the sabbath of the Red
Heifer, one of the four special sabbaths that precede
Pessah - although it does not do so this year, which is a
leap year. The reason why this is interesting, in addition to
the connections between our portion's story of the
Golden Calf and the special powers of a red cow whose
ashes have the power to purify those defiled by contact
with the dead is that Moses "burnt the golden calf with
fire and ground [it] into a powder" (Ex.32:20) which the
Israelites drank and then continued to live. 

THE ashes of the red heifer foreshadow the ashes of the
Holy Temple destroyed by Rome, the ashes of the autos
da fe of the Inquisition, the ashes of Auschwitz and
Treblinka. As long as our people are willing to return to
the guardians of our sacred tradition and be taught and
inspired, there is no sin which can ultimately defile us, no
enemy which can ultimately vanquish us. 

We are a living paradox, a nation whose continued
existence - despite statelessness and persecution - defies
logic and historical precedent. We make direct contact
with death, we are touched by the fire and ashes of guilt
and destruction - but nevertheless have the capacity to be
redeemed. 

The mystery of the red heifer is called a hok by our
Torah, generally understood to define a ritual without
rational explanation. The sages of the Talmud go so far as
to maintain that even King Solomon could not fathom the
paradox of the red heifer. (B.T. Yoma 14a) And not even
the wisest of historians can explain the survival of the
Israeli nation. 

There is one more piece to this puzzle. Although the ashes
of the red heifer purify the impure while they defile all who
touch them, what we sometimes forget is that one person
in the process does not become impure. 

Rashi alerts us to this generally overlooked fact.
Commenting on the verse: "And it shall be a perpetual
statute unto them, and he that sprinkles the water of
sprinkling shall wash his clothes" (Num. 19:21), the
greatest of commentators writes: "Our rabbis said, the
one who actually does the sprinkling remains clean."
(Rashi, based on B.T. Yoma 14a). 

This too defies logic. After all, if one descends into a
swamp in order to save an individual sinking in the mire,
the rescuer himself will be muddied. But in this case, the
Almighty is granting us a double gift: not only will He see
to it that the sinner who wishes to be purified shall indeed
be purified, but also that the purifier him/herself will
emerge unscathed. 

Only recently I met a young Habad representative in
Bangkok - a city still living under the cloud of idolatry,
where every depravity in the world is commonplace. It is
a city with traffic at a constant standstill, paralyzed by
wretched heat and saturated with a nauseating stench. 

In the midst of all this, a young man - sent by his Rebbe -
serves the tiny Jewish community of less than 40 people,
teaching Torah in the midst of impurity. The morning I
was there, we did not even have a quorum for prayer.
After we prayed privately, he led a class of two students
in a difficult passage of the Babylonian Tractate Nazir. 

"Sometimes," he said, "no one attends. I then give the
class anyway - to myself. I have to do this, otherwise I
would never prepare and I would then become too far
removed from Torah." 

He, who came with his wife to attempt to purify those
mired in impurity, has succeeded - despite his
environment - in creating a beautiful family, an oasis of
purity. 

A committed Torah scholar in Bangkok is a paradox; the
red heifer is a paradox; the secret of Jewish existence is a
paradox. 

By these paradoxes do we live and become purified. 

Shabbat Shalom