From: JoshHoff@aol.com <joshhoff@aol.com>
<br>To: "joshhoff@aol.com" <joshhoff@aol.com>
<br>Sent: Friday, July 1, 2011, 12:40:48 PM EDT
<br>Subject: Netvort: parshas Chukas, 5771- corrected

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                                            Soul Sacrifice                                           

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            By Rabbi Joshua (mysteriously  known as The Heifer) Hoffman
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Parshas Chukas presents us with the laws of the Parah Adumah, or Red Heifer, which is used as part of the purification process for f someone who has become spiritually defiled  (tamei) through contact with a human corpse. The heifer is burned outside the Temple, and its ashes are mixed with especially pure water (mayim chayim) and sprinkled on this person. The rabbis tell us that King Shlomo thought that he understood the rationale behind all of the mitzvos, until he delved into the mitzvah of  Parah Adumah and could not understand it. There are many opinions as to what aspect of this mitzvah mystified  King Shlomo, but the most popular one is that when that while the process of Parah Adumah serves to purify the tamei person, all of the kohanim involved in carrying out the process become impure, although with a lesser degree of tumah than the  erstwhile tamei had.  How can the same process have two such opposite, contradictory effects? I once heard, from the late Rabbi Oscar Z. Fasman, who served as president of the Hebrew Theological College of Chicago , an explanation which does not actually decipher  how this process  can have these opposite effects, but takes this phenomenon as a moral message to the nation as a whole.
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Rabbi Fasman related that the leader of Mizrachi in the United States, Rabbi Meir Bar Ilan (Berlin), son of the Netziv from his second wife, once came to the yeshiva  in Chicago and asked the students to take off some time from their Torah studies in order to go around and speak to groups of people about Zionism and aliyah to Eretz Yisroel. The students protested that, while in the yeshiva, they were learning Torah on the highest level. How could they take time off from this all-important endeavor to go on a speaking tour? Rabbi Bar-Ilan  answered that this was the need of the hour, to arouse people  from their lethargy regarding Eretz Yisroel,  and when you wash the floor, so-to-speak, you get your knees dirty. In other words, sometimes, in order to raise the spiritual levels of others, you need to sacrifice your own opportunity to raise your own level. This, he said, is the message of the Parah Adumah.
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Actually, Rabbi Bar-Ilan was preceded in this concept by Rav Avraham Yitzchak haKohein Kook, in his aggadic commentary to Tractate Bikkurim, Eyn Ayah. The Mishnah  there (3:7) teaches that, originally, when one brought  his new fruit to the Temple, and needed  to recite the section of parshas Ki Savo in which the farmer  thanks God for bringing him to Eretz Yisroel and giving him his new fruit, if he is able to recite it on his own, meaning, as the Rambam explains, that he knows Hebrew,  he does so, and if he is unable, the kohanim  read it with him.  However, the illiterate then stopped bringing their Bikkurim, out of embarrassment, and, therefore, the rabbis instituted that the kohanim would read the section with anyone, literate or illiterate who brought Bikkurim.  Rav Kook comments that the need for unification of the nation  sometimes calls for a relinquishing of honor on the part of its more learned members  Without a certain level of unity, the  spirituality of the nation would be lowered to an unacceptable level.
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In a similar way, Rav Kook explains the institution of a fixed  text of prayer..At first, everyone was allowed to pray according to what his heart ld him to say. There was no fixed text, and the main obligation, according to Biblical law, following the Rambam' opinion, was to speak to God in prayer once a day, with whatever words one chose. However, as the generations passed and people became less adept at composing their own prayers,the rabbis composed a fixed text to be said three times a day.  Here, too, says Rav Kook, for those who are able to do so, a personally composed prayer would be much more meaningful than one said in a fixed form, and would uplift the person  saying it much more, but there was a need to enable the entire nation to reach a modicum of spirituality, of closeness to God,  through providing them with a fixed text.Once this form of prayer was instituted, everyone became obligated in it. My friend, Rabbi Betzalel Naor, wrote, in his work Of Societies Perfect and Imperfect, which is, in part, a translation of Rav Kook's work on Bikkurim,   notes that the great tzaddik, Rav Aryeh Levine once said that an important lesson that he learned from Rav Kook  was that of the need for spiritual sacrifice.
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The kohanim who prepared the Parah Adumah and carried out the purification process could have surely attained a higher level of closeness to God by remanning in a state of impurity  and continuing to serve in the Temple. However, they needed to elevate the level of the rest of the people, and therefore performed the service that rendered them  impure. The message of the Parah Adumah, then , is that each of us, on our own level, should be prepared to make such sacrifices  for the good of our nation, which was charged, at Mt. Sinai, to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.