Shabbat Shalom: Parshat Hukat 
By Shlomo Riskin

Efrat, Israel - From Ashes to Ashes…”, From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back Again.

One of the most profound mysteries of the Bible is the rite of the red cow, called a hok (Hebrew for statute) because it is an illogical Divine decree, concerning which we may not even speculate in an attempt to understand it (Numbers 19:1, Rachi ad loc).

Detailed in the first twenty- two verses of our Torah reading, the ceremony certainly sounds strange to the modern ear: a completely red cow, without blemish and upon which no yoke has been brought, shall be entirely slaughtered outside of the encampment of Israel; cedarwood, hyssop and a scarlet thread shall be cast into the burning pyre of ashes, and a “personage of purity” (Ish Tahor) shall gather the ashes in a sacred place, mix them with spring water (mayim chayim), waters of life, and use the mixture to purify those who have been contaminated by contact with a corpse. What can we possibly make of such a primitive sounding ritual?

We must be mindful of the fact that all other impurities other than a death impurity find their purification by the defiled individual’s immersing himself/herself in a mikveh, a gathering of freshly running spring water or specially collected life-giving rainwater; in effect, in all these instances, the defiled individual actually purifies him/herself! Only in this rite of the red cow does the Kohen, representing G-d Himself, effectuate the purification. It is as though the Bible is teaching us that we can save ourselves from many of our weaknesses, we can rise above many of our temptations, but only G-d can ultimately redeem us from death.

And from this perspective, the symbolism of the red cow ritual begins to make sense. A cow is the consummate symbol of life, cow’s mother-milk serving as the universal expression of maternal nurturing of her young; red is likewise the color of blood, and blood is the life-force, the very nefesh, of the living organism. However, although human beings come in various shapes, sizes, personalities and powers- they can be as tall and proud as the cedar tree and as mean and humble as the hyssop plant- nevertheless the angel of death ultimately conquers them all, because the scarlet thread of human sin condemns each of us to the common destiny of mortality. The “personage of purity” then gathers the ashes of the remains, mixes them with the life-giving waters of the Divine, and born again, purified life emerges even from the surrealistic specter of death itself.

This symbolism of the red cow has assumed new significance for me since my recent trip to Frankfurt and Berlin. Ohr Torah Stone’s Joseph Straus Rabbinical Seminary has sent close to two hundred rabbis and their families to communities throughout the world, from Caesarea to Curacao to Guatemala City to Johannesburg to Lincoln Center- with six of our graduates presently in Germany. This past week we sponsored two inspirational events- replete with cantorial music and messages of Torah- one in Frankfurt and one in Berlin. While in Berlin, I took advantage of the opportunity to visit their newly completed Holocaust Memorial at the very center of the city, not far from the last bunker from which the mad fuhrer committed suicide. The open air memorial consists of 2,711 stones, monuments of various shapes and sizes. Walking amongst the narrow, massive slabs of stone, one becomes lost within a giant cemetery, feeling helplessly and hopelessly minute and insignificant within a maze of monuments whose eerie, death- imbedded caskets seem to have overtaken world and life; one then descends into a netherworld of hell, where pictures and life stories of Holocaust victims evoke live experiences, and potentials which were, which could have become, but which were cruelly and inexplicably torn asunder from the tree of life by monstrous and sub human hands.

I stumbled away from the experience feeling as though I had just awakened from a horrific nightmare. The symbolism of the monuments continues to haunt me days after I returned to Efrat; after all, those who lost loved ones in the Holocaust don’t even have grave site monuments to weep over. Each empty stone screams out with any name, with every name, with my name and with my children’s names because a part of each human being was killed in those death camps whose perpetrators attempted to destroy every last vestige of humaneness.

But I also came away from the experience feeling cheated by the Memorial. Something was missing, the essence was missing, the victorious ending was missing. Because, you see, the Jewish people, won the war which Hitler tried to wage against us. Yes, he succeeded in destroying six million of us, but as he records in Mein Kampf, he wasn’t waging a war against six million Jews. He was waging a war against the last Jew, against Judaism.

And we won that war. Alas, the brilliantly alive red cow which was the Jewish people, a people who nurtured the world with the milk of the morality of the Ten Commandments and the milk of human kindness of “you shall love the stranger” and “You shall love your neighbor like yourself”, was to a large extent, tragically and inexplicably slaughtered beyond the human encampment in Auschwitz and Treblinka. But the Almighty G-d, the “Personage of Purity”, Himself gathered the ashes, Himself mixed them with living waters of rebirth, and Himself transformed those ashes into the fertile soil of the re-created sovereign State of Israel. And the “Personage of Purity” Himself mixed the ashes with the life-giving well springs of Torah, our tree of eternal life, and revived Torah centers and Daf Yomi Talmud study groups to an unprecedented and unparalleled degree all over the world. Take note: there are 2,711 monument stones in the Memorial, and, as pointed out by Rav Moshe Kotlarsky of Chabad, there are 2,711 folio pages in the Babylonian Talmud! Adolf Hitler is thankfully dead, and discovered alongside of his self-inflicted suicide-tomb was a Tractate Pesahim which tells of the Passover Festival of Jewish freedom and redemption; he apparently had hoped to bury the last Talmud tome in existence, but instead the Talmud tome buried him! Indeed, 2,711 pages of the Talmud have literally walked out of the 2,711 monument stones, and have granted to the Jewish victims the eternal life of Jewish victors!

The Bible promised us 4000 years ago that despite exile, persecution and death, G-d would sprinkle upon us His revivifying waters of purity and rebirth, and would restore us to our land, our law and our lore. And so, “from Zion is coming forth Torah” to the world at large with the scores of rabbis and educators we’re sending all over the globe every year. Judaism is re-awakening even in the failed fuhrer’s own home city of Berlin, where three new Yeshivot (Torah Study Academies) have been dedicated during the past several years. Imagine the historical irony in the fact that the only two growing Jewish communities in the world today are Israel and Germany!

We learn from the rite of the red cow that only G-d, the Personage of Purity, can redeem from death; and in our post-Holocaust generation, He certainly has. There ought be a final glorious exhibit in the Holocaust Memorial which features pulsating present day- religious Jewish life in Germany, as well as a magnificent tribute to the State of Israel reborn.

“Thus says the Lord your G-d….I will open your graves and cause you to come up out of your graves and bring you into the Land of Israel…And I shall put My spirit in you and you shall live and I shall place you in your land”. (Ezekiel 37:13,14)

Shabbat Shalom
Shlomo Riskin
Chancellor Ohr Torah Stone
Chief Rabbi - Efrat Israel