Living a Paradox - Parshat Chukat

There's some things that I just don’t get. It took me a while to learn to say that. I used to think I understand, or at least was capable of understanding, everything. Then I learned that even though I don’t understand stuff, I still try and figure it out. "Isn’t that a waste of time?" I thought. You don’t get it so just accept it. So there were times I did. And there were times that I didn’t.

I found that kind of struggle at its height in this week's parsha, Parshat Chukat. The Torah   discusses the laws of the purification through the ashes of a red heifer, the Para Adumah. Its laws present a paradox. On the one hand, its ashes mixed with water provide purification for the spiritually defiled individual, yet as Rabbi Riskin explains "it is the very mixture which purifies those who are defiled which defiles the people involved in the act of purifying."1 Yet not everyone who comes in contact with that mixture changes his status. So what gives? How do we understand this?

We don’t.

This is one of those parts of the Torah that are beyond our comprehension. Everyone agrees. Even King Solomon, the wisest of all men, writes in describing his struggle to understand this paradox "I said, "I will become wise," but it was far from me.".2  He couldn’t get it.

Okay, now what?

Fascinatingly, we don’t give up. We still try and make sense! "But even King Solomon said…" Yes. True. But we still don’t give up.  Rabbis throughout the ages still try and teach us what is behind this paradox. Recently, though, rabbis have started talking about accepting the paradox as part of life.3 We surrender the need to know everything, without surrendering the fight to understand, to learn what we can from this paradox.4 Just as suffering does not always "make sense" so too this paradox is baffling to us.

Yet we continue trying.

We accept the limitation of our understanding and we continue trying. That too is a paradox. We surrender to our fate yet we continue to struggle to discover our lives meaning.

Perhaps that is the meaning.

Click here to read another logoParsha article on Chukat (Can Death be Understood)

Notes

  1. Taken from an article written by Rabbi Riskin about this paradox. http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Judaism/Parshat-Hukat-The-red-heifer-paradox-360685.

    The actual description of the laws can be found in Bamidbar chapter 20.

  2. Kohelet 7:23
  3. Rabbi Aryeh Leibowitz discusses this on the yutorah.org site
  4. The concept of surrender vs. 'don’t surrender' I discussed at the recent logotherapy congress in dallas

 

 

Have A Great Shabbat!laughing

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