Have you ever watched a drill-sergeant marching his new recruits round and round the parade ground? Barking out instructions at the top of his voice, he marches them right and left, halting them at random intervals and then marching them off again. Other than providing entertaining viewing, it all seems rather pointless. The true reason for it is to implant in the soldiers military discipline, so that when it comes to action on the battlefield, when the troops are under enemy fire, they will be accustomed to blindly follow their superiors’ instructions. By repeatedly following the drill-sergeant’s orders without question, they become conditioned to act on command without hesitation.
This idea, suggests Rabbi Yosef Salant, is the reasoning behind the Mitzva of Poro Adumo – the ‘red heifer’, whose ashes are mixed with spring water and sprinkled on anyone who has been in contact with a corpse. This Mitzva is termed Chukas Hatora – the quintessential statute, which doesn’t seem to have any rationale behind it. However, the Midrash tells us that Moshe knew the reason for it, but this reason was deliberately concealed from everyone else, including King Solomon, the wisest of all men. What could be the benefit of deliberately concealing the reason for a Mitzva.
When tragedy strikes, people tend to question Hashem’s judgement. Whether it’s 22 innocent people, including many children, blown up in a terrorist attack in the Manchester Arena, or it’s the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, people cannot fathom Hashem’s reasoning, “how could He let such a thing happen?” This type of question has caused many people to lose their faith, but they are hardly new. The Talmud tells us that Moshe himself was troubled by them!
Intellectually we all understand that mere human intelligence cannot hope to challenge or probe the depths of Hashem’s infinite understanding, much the same way that many decisions parents make can’t be explained to their young children. However, emotionally we still struggle with what seems to our limited understanding to be unfair.
This is where the Mitzva of the red heifer comes in. Anyone having been in contact with a corpse – a typical candidate for such queries about the fairness of Hashem’s judgement – has to undergo this purification ceremony, which seems to have no rhyme or reason. By performing acts of blind faith, carrying out Hashem’s Mitzva without knowing the reason behind it, we internalise the message that Hashem’s knowledge is far superior to ours, and this helps us cope with questions which disturb our faith. In the same way that soldiers are trained to follow orders without querying them, so to the red heifer ceremony conditions us to accept Hashem’s decree and to understand that we can’t understand.
Today we no longer have the Mitzva of the red heifer, but there are many other commandments that we carry out without knowing fully the reason behind them, like eating only Kosher or giving our children a Bris, which can help us strengthen our faith in Hashem’s boundless understanding. May we all be spared tragedy and suffering!
Good Shabbos, Rabbi Masher