Hello folks and welcome to the latest installment of ideas I have had or heard regarding the weekly torah portion…
This week’s parsha (portion) jumps 38 years as we go into the last year of being in the wilderness. However, before we get there, we read about how the ashes of a red cow can make a not pure person pure while making a pure person not pure. Right after the details on how this process works, we read about the death of Miriam, the people wanting water, Moshe hitting a rock instead of talking to it (though it still produces water), Aharon’s death, avoiding our cousins, the Edomites (the red ones, as Esau was known), and fighting off the Moabites (the people from the father) and the Amorites (the speakers).
I found this to be a very deep parsha, with lots of questions. The first one is: what is the connection between the red cow and Miriam? The laws and events around the red cow actually took place almost 40 years earlier, back when the some people wanted to participate in the 1st Pesach (Passover) in the wilderness and couldn’t because they had been involved with the dead. At that time, haShem gave them a second Pesach. But, they also needed to be pure of death energy, and the only way to do that was with the ashes of the red cow. My guess is that haShem wants to show us that everybody, no matter how great they are, when they die, they lower the purity level of the living folks that touch them. Why do we need to know this? Perhaps because our family tradition says that the body of a great person (a tzadik) does not decay when it is buried, and this might lead some to think that their bodies might not give death energy to the living.
What I found more interesting about the red cow, however, is the teaching of the last Lubavitch Rebbe. He taught why a pure person loses his purity when purifying another person. He said that sometimes one has to dirty oneself in order to help another person, and this is what we are being taught: we need to be willing to let go of how “high” or “pure” we are, when it comes to raising another person up. For the Torah says that the helper who becomes less pure, can always improve his purity later. Hence, he has to be willing to inconvenience himself for the betterment of another!
A lot is said in regards to the red cow, however, this is all I want to share on it today. Instead, I want to share a couple of teachings I heard in regards to Moshe and the hitting of the stone instead of talking to it. Before I share their thoughts, I want to share a couple of my thoughts. I had two questions regarding this. The first is: why is Aharon punished for this? He didn’t do anything; it was Moshe who hit the stone. The second is: why did Moshe hit the stone in the first place? After all, he was plainly told to talk to the stone.
The only answer to the first question that I like has to do with the wording in the Torah itself. haShem told both Moshe and Aharon to gather the people and talk to the stone. The Torah then says Moshe and Aharon (they) assembled the people to the front of the stone and (he) said to them… The reason I have “they” and “he” in parenthesis is because the words don’t exist explicitly in the Torah; the conjugation of the verbs, however, is what I want to emphasize. The first is plural 3rd person and the second is singular. This singular is important, especially if we remember that Aharon’s job was to be the spokesman for Moshe. So, the implication here is that they are of one mind/intention. Moshe’s sin was to hit the rock. Aharon’s sin was speaking angrily and saying that the power to bring water was in his and Moshe’s hands, and not in haShem’s hands.
And speaking of anger, at a Shabbat lunch a few years ago, my friend Asher Lazar gave a nice teaching: when one is angry, one tends to make mistakes; hence, one should not act out of anger. At this point, the children of Israel are angry, and Moshe and Aharon are angry. Now, when one is angry, one is unreachable. You could say that person is as accessible as a stone. Hence, the stone, itself represents an angry person. HaShem is telling us that the best way to get an angry person to release their pent up emotions (the water) is be speaking gently, and not by hitting. Moshe, in his anger, hits the stone. His sin is teaching that violence is the best way to deal with anger.
Another question that arises is: did Moshe and Aharon have to sin? In the parsha with the spies (from a couple of weeks ago), haShem says that all the men must die, except for Caleb and Joshua. One must conclude that this includes Aharon and Moshe. As was pointed out over lunch, they couldn’t go in to the promised land because they were associated with that generation and not the next generation. Moshe is the proverbial captain of the ship and must go down with it. So, I think the answer is yes, they had to sin. Of course this begs the question of free will, and I think the free will comes in with how they sinned. It was at the rock, but it could have been in another way and/or in another place.
On a fun note, I wonder could Moshe have intentionally chose to hit the rock, thereby sinning? After all, he never wanted the job of leading the people, and the people were always creating problems for him. So, maybe, when haShem told him to take his staff and talk to the rock, he thought, “here is my chance. I can mess this up and haShem will let me off the hook.”
On that note, I wish everybody a week of the releasing of stuck emotions in a healthy way ,as we prepare to enter into the promised land – a land flowing with the healthy emotions of milk and honey.
Shavuah tov/Have a good week,
About the Author
Shmuel Shalom Cohen spent 10 years studying Torah in Jerusalem. Six years ago, he started Conscious Torah to help Jews connect to their tradition in ways they didn’t think possible. Shmuel also started, and is the executive directory of Jewish Events Willamette-valley, a non-profit whose mission is to build Jewish community, pride, and learning. In his free time, Shmuel likes walks in nature, playing music, writing poetry, and time with good friends.