Understanding The Ritual of the Red Cow in Chukat

As I was conducting a Friday evening Shabbat Service during the week of Korach and speaking about the portion, I said that every time the Israelites stray or exhibit a moral downfall, there is a ritual section allowing them to reconnect with God. After the sin of the Golden Calf (Parashat Ki Tissa), the section allowing us to reconnect is a moral section, known as the Thirteen Attributes of God. After the Sotah instructions in Naso, where there may be adultery on the part of a wife or there may be causeless jealousy on the part of a husband, the ritual section is about the Nazirite, a temporary nun or monk. When the Scouts return from scouting out the land of Canaan and give a negative report in Shelach Lecha, demoralizing the people who then refuse to enter and possess it, there are three ritual sections: libations to accompany offerings, a fire offering of a small piece of dough, known as Challah, which is one of the last remaining fire offerings that is still done today, and the commandment of Tzitzis, wearing fringes to help us remember who we really are and what we are capable of. In Korach, I said that there is Pidyon Haben, the redemption of the Firstborn.

When I said Pidyon Haben in that service, I was immediately dissatisfied with it. This was not a new ritual, it having been mentioned in Exodus 13:13, when the Israelites were leaving Egypt and again in Exodus 34:20, after the Golden Calf. So where was the ritual section for Korah, I asked myself? And the answer came immediately: it is the Ritual of the Red Cow in Chukat, the portion which directly follows Korach.

The ritual of the Red Cow is notorious for being difficult to interpret. Even King Solomon was to have said (Numbers Rabbah 19:3, commentary on Ecclesiastes 7:23) that it was beyond him. The chok, decree, of the Red Cow is the ritual section we expect after all the deaths in the portion of Korach. Now, all of a sudden, this ritual makes perfect sense because it deals so much with death. In Parashat Korach, he, Datan, Abiram, and also 250 leaders die. As reported in Torah, 14,700 more people die in a plague, bringing the total to almost 15,000 people. In this time of Coronavirus, so many people have died. We are mostly shielded from all this death, as the majority of people have died in hospitals. We don’t see corpses lying in our streets or on our sidewalks, but the Israelites did see the almost 15,000 corpses.

The people say to Moses and Aaron, “You have killed the people of God,” (Num. 17:6) and then, “Behold we perish, we are lost, all of us are lost. Everyone who approaches closer to the Tabernacle of God will die. Are we doomed to perish?” (Num.17:27-28) This wail of fear is reminiscent of the cry of the Egyptians in Bo (Ex. 12:33) of “We are all dying!” The Israelites have been traumatized by all the death around them. They need a way to reconnect with God and feel cleansed.

When someone wrongs us, they cannot look us in the eye. It seems as if that should be reversed – that if someone wrongs me, I should be angry at them and should not be able to look them in the eye. But what actually happens is that the person who wrongs another knows, at some level, that they have done wrong and cannot look the person they have wronged in the eye. The Israelites could not, figuratively speaking, look God in the eye, knowing they had done wrong. They needed a way to forgive themselves, to feel forgiven, cleansed, and renewed. They had been defiled on an inner level, by the horror of death, with no way to recover their inner goodness and feel blessed again by God.

The Ritual of the Red Cow directly addresses the effects of death on the living, and there are three instances in Chukat where people must be purified: 1. Anyone who touches a corpse (19:11) 2. A person in the tent or entering the tent of someone who has died (19:14) and 3. Anyone who touches a slain person, a bone, or grave (19:16). These are the people who have seen death and who need the Holy Water, the Water of Sprinkling.

The ashes of the Red Cow dissolved in spring (or living) water are sprinkled on the person who has come in contact with death, which purifies by calling forth our intrinsic ability to rise to a higher self. The Jewish Path to holiness is a setting apart something to make it special or Holy, and we, ourselves, are the ones who create the holiness. One who has touched ashes of the red cow is impure, and one who sprinkles is impure, because of all the contact with the ashes. This is not inconsistent if seen as a ritual to call forth the person’s holiness. The ashes themselves are from a dead body, which causes impurity.

In Chukat being sprinkled is very different from touching. The ritual has its own logic, which is that ashes from death cause impurity, but holy water set apart for purification and designated as holy, even containing some ash, perhaps something like activated charcoal, causes a person to FEEL cleansed and released from the death all around. This ritual changes death, which is something AW-Ful to a connection to the Divine, which is AWE-Some. In Torah, God always gives us a means to find our way back when we are lost, despairing, or have fallen down. We are given tools to continue to grow and choose inner goodness, connecting to our inner holiness. Torah sets out many pathways to reconnect with God. The ritual of the Red Cow is one of them.(July 2020)