Parshas Chukas- Balak 5763- Cleaning Up the Mess
By Rabbi Joshua (cinematically known as The Heifer) Hoffman

  Parshas Chukas begins with the laws of the Parah Adumah or Red Heifer, which is the paradigmatic instance of a chok, or a law whose purpose is not easily discernible, in the Torah .Despite the difficulty involved in understanding the meaning behinds these laws, Rashi brings the symbolic explanations offered by Rabbi Moshe Ha Darshan, some of which can also be found in the Midrash Rabbah. He writes that the Parah Adumah was to serve as an atonement for the sin of the golden calf. It is comparable he says, to the son of a maidservant who dirties up the palace. The mother is called on to clean up her son's mess. So, too, in regard to the sin that the nation committed with the golden calf, the mother- the red heifer- is called on to clean up the mess of her calf. The Midrash Rabbah adds that this is the reason why the offering comes from a female animal. This analogy, however, is a bit difficult to understand, as Rav Kook points out in his Midbar Shur. After all, the calf that was worshipped by the nation was not a real calf, but one made out of molten gold that had been thrown into a fire. Even the symbolism, it seems, appears to defy reason! How are we to understand this midrash? 

Rav Kook explains the midrash on the basis of Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi's explanation, in his work Kuzari, of the sin committed with the golden calf. The Kuzari explains that when Moshe delayed in returnnig from Mt. Sinai with the tablets, the people panicked, and felt a need for a visible, physical reference point by way of which the could direct their prayers to God. Although the Torah recognized the need of man, as a physical being, to have physical symbols, as witness the command to build a tabernacle, and to have cherubs sitting atop the ark within it, man cannot decide on his own what kind of symbols are appropriate. The Torah in fact forbids the making of images other than those prescribed by it. Man cannot use his own common sense in determining the manner in which he is to serve God. Rather, he must follow the directives given in the Torah to serve Him. The mistake that the people made, then, was to follow their common sense in determining how to worship God. The command of Parah Adumah, which seems to defy rational explanation, was, therefore to serve as an atonement for this sin.

Based on our explanation of the midrash, we can understand another midrash, cited by Rabi Avraham Yudelevitch in his Darash Av to parshas Korach. The midrash says that Korach rebelled after learning the laws of Parah Adumah. What connection is there between his rebellion and this enigmatic mitzvah? Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik termed Korach's campaign as the common sense rebellion. All of the nation is holy, he said, so why should one group rule. His specific complaint, of course, was Moshe's choice of Aharon as the kohein gadol, the high priest. Actually, it was Aharon who fashioned the golden calf, acquiescing to the people's request. Although, as Rashi explains, he did so as a stalling tactic and hoped, in the end, to be able to deter them from their grave sin the fact is that he is the one who made the golden calf. Perhaps then Korach was arguing if it weren't for Aharon, there would not be a need for the mitzvah of Parah Adumah, and, on a wider scale, there would not be a need for the institution of chok, of mitzvos which are not readily understandable .Therefore, he rebelled against the choice of Ahron in hopes of restoring what he deemed as the common- sense approach to the Torah.

     Korach, however, was mistaken. The mitzvah of Parah Adumah, in fact, was given to the nation at Marah, as a p\reparation for their receiving of the Torah. Rav Ya'akov Kamenetsky, in his Emes L'Ya'akov, explains that at Marah, God told Moshe to throw a bitter tree into the bitter waters and, as a result, the waters became sweet. This phenomenon seemed to make no sense, and to commemorate the event, the people were given the mitzvah of Parah Adumah, which also does not seem to make sense, to study m in preparation for the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai.  As Rav Yehudah Amital has explained, there is a need for chukim, for mitzvos whose rationale we cannot easily understand, because we must always remember that the Torah comes from God, whose ways, ultimately, are inscrutable. As Rav Kook says, because we cannot know all the details of God's wider plane for the world, we cannot understand how His entire Torah, and the way that He rules the entire universe, serve His ultimate goal for the world. We must therefore follow His directives, as outlined in the Torah, in order to serve Him in the proper way. This necessity was not understood by the nation when it worshipped the golden calf, nor was it understood by Korach as he learned of the laws of the Parah Adumah, which was to serve as an atonement for the sin of the golden calf. 

  Readers who have seen the 1956 version of the film The Ten Commandments may recall that toward the end of the movie, when Moshe descends the mountain and witnesses the people worshipping the e golden calf, he proclaims " there is no freedom without the Law," takes the tablets and hurls them at the calf. The earth then splits open, swallowing up the calf worshippers as well as those who rebelled against Moshe's leadership including Dathan, who was part of Korach's company. This depiction of the events is an obvious distortion of the Biblical text, an the apocryphal story is that the director, Cecil B, De Mille, didn't have enough film left to include the entire story of Korach's rebellion, and therefore incorporated it into the episode of the golden calf. Although the events did not occur as depicted in the film, following our explanation of the midrash, the two episodes were not entirely unrelated.