Tomorrow, on Shabbat, we read Parashat Parah, which is about the Parah Adumah, the Red Heifer.
It’s one of the four readings we do in Adar. What is the lesson of Parah, and how does it relate to Bitachon?
Firstly, Maran says in Shulchan Aruch that reading Parah Adumah might possibly be from the Torah. It comes from a Tosafot.
The question is, where does G-d say to remember Parah Adumah? He said remember Amalek, remember Yetziat Mitzrayim and remember Shabbat. But where does it say to remember Parah Adumah?
Many commentaries say that G-d says to remember the sin of the Golden Calf, as one of the ten daily remembrances (Many siddurim have a list of these ten daily remembrances, which can be found after Alenu, in Shaharit. Look at them and familiarize yourself with them. You get a mitzvah for that.)
Remember the sin of the Golden Calf. To do this our rabbis could have told us to read and focus on the sin of the Golden Calf once a year. But G-d doesn’t want us to focus on that. He doesn’t want to stress our downfalls and weaknesses.
So, since we know that the Parah is the mother of the calf, the Parah Adumah is coming to fix the sin of the Golden Calf.
Imagine a boy who threw a rock through a window and shattered it. The father, wanting the boy to remember what he did, could tell him to pick up a piece of broken glass once a year. Or, he could have the son fix the window with a little putty, and then once a year he could have his son take a little bit of putty and look at it, so instead of remembering the actual break, he can remember how he fixed it. So too, G-d says, Remember the Parah Adumah, remember how you fixed the sin of the Golden Calf.
How does it fix the sin?
Because of the mother/child cow/calf connection? That seems a little loose.
The rabbis explain, namely the Bet HaLevi, that the sin of the Golden Calf was that we took matters into our own hands, whether for the right reasons or wrong. We thought Moshe was gone and we needed an intermediary. We needed something to help connect us to G-d. We twisted the law a little bit to get to the end goal. They thought the end would justify the means, but that’s wrong. The end never justifies the means. They took religion into their own hands and that is what backfired.
We’ve had other instances of this in history. G-d told Adam and Chava not to eat from the Etz HaDa’at, but they thought it would be good for them, and good for creation to bring freedom of choice into the world. They wanted to help G-d. Instead, it backfired.
Etz Ha’Daat means the Tree of Knowledge. But sometimes you have to shut your brain off and say, “I don’t understand, but I am a servant of G-d, and I have to follow rules and instructions.”
The sin of the Golden Calf and the sin of Adam both stemmed from the same root. How do you fix that?
Take a Parah Adumah, which the Gemarah tells us is the quintessential Hok/ a law we don’t understand.
It contaminates the pure and purifies the contaminated.... The wisest of men, Shlomo HaMelech said,
אמרתי אחכמה והיא רחוקה ממני
“I said, I thought I’d be wise, but wisdom is far from me.”
He understood all 613 Mitzvot, except for the Parah Adumah- here he said, I don’t understand what’s going here. I have no explanation.
Therefore, Parah Adumah is training ground for “I don’t know.” We don’t understand. We do it because Hashem said so. And when you do the sprinkling of the ashes and you say, “I don’t know,” that purifies you.
Consider this beautiful thought: The Parah Adumah wasn’t used for touching a dead rodent or other such contaminants. It was used for contamination of the dead. If, in the times of the Bet HaMikdash, you went to a funeral and touched a dead body, before entering the Bet HaMikdash again, you had to go get sprinkled with a bowl of water mixed with the ashes from the Red Heifer. It purified the contamination from death. What’s the connection between the two?
Death came from Adam and Chava.
It came from “I know better.” So, contamination from a dead body is actually the “I know better” contamination.
You walked into a funeral and just got touched by the toxic “I know better.”
How do you fix that? You shut your brain off and you say, “I don’t know anything!”
G-d said we have to sprinkle the ashes even though we don’t understand how it works. And this lack of understanding gets rid of the toxic “I know better” contamination.
It’s interesting that this Parah is connected to Purim. On Purim, you get drunk until, in the words of the Gemarah,
עד דלא ידע until you don’t know. That’s the goal.
“I Don’t Know” or IDK (in texting shorthand) is a great level, especially versus IKE -I Know Everything. No, you don’t. We try our best and go through the process but we can’t say that we understand G-d, or that we understand His mitzvot, or why He’s doing things. We thought we understood Purim, throughout the whole story, but then we got to the end, and we said, “Wow, I didn’t know any thing!” That’s a principle. We can try hard, and we want to be smart, but at the end of the day, we don’t dare to claim that we understand more than G-d, or anything like G-d. We are just going along for the ride.
Have a great day and a Shabbat Shalom.