In the Space Between Two Verses

In the Space Between Two Verses
Rabbi Ari Lorge

Sefer Bamidbar, the book of Numbers is one of the most carefully constructed books of Torah. It is careful work crafting a communal memory. Scholarly consensus is that the experience in the wilderness was compiled to help each generation make sense of our moment, warn us of potential pitfalls, and guide us toward the right path for the future.

Tonight, I want us to ask a strange question; a question we don’t often ask. I want us to ask, “what isn’t the Torah telling us? And why?” I admit, this is not the question we typically pose about our text – especially not about parshat chukkat!
Why look for what is absent when there is SO MUCH PRESENT. This week’s parshah details the mitzvot around the Red Heifer (that mysterious crimson cow whose ashes cleanse Israel of impurity from corpses), we learn of the death of Miriam, of Moses’ sin and punishment by God to die outside the promised land, and then we also read about the events of Aaron’s death.

As you can already sense, Parshat Chukat focuses on death in an unusually concentrated way. So, I apologize if this is not the most lighthearted drash. We work with the material we’re given.
But clearly, Chukkat is a packed parshah. We wouldn’t naturally ask ourselves what is missing. But that really is the question. Tonight, we will choose to notice what is absent, because this absence stood out to our ancestors as chilling, terrifying, and maybe the crux of the most important lesson of the entire book of Torah.

What isn’t Torah telling us? Between the end of the last parshah and the beginning of this parshah about 38 years has passed. That is a lot of the story to skip. A majority of our people’s wandering goes unreported. In the silence almost an entire generation of Israelites dies. The slave generation who disobeyed God and listened to the wicked scouts slowly dies off in the wilderness, and Torah is mute.

Yes, there are a few exceptions. We know that Korah’s band is swallowed up. We know a plague kills those who engaged in Midianite idolatry. We get the stories if they are tied to unusually sinful behavior. But most of this generation dies without a drop of ink spilled.
God edits out their names, the places they died, the tears spilled on the sand by their loved ones. Not a household in Israel was spared. And yet, we hear none of it. And when we realize this, we can’t help but ask, “Why does Torah glide over 38 years and the death of tens of thousands?”

In choosing to not tell these stories, Torah is asking two things of us. The tradition wants us to remember and forget all at once. Remember that a generation died, and why they died – but forget them. This act of forgetting is more distressing after the careful way the book began with a census counting them. Professor Adrienne Leveen notes this when she teaches “Those who were so meticulously accounted for at the outset are now left in their deaths unmarked, and perhaps unburied, somewhere in the wilderness…what became of them…”

In not telling their stories Torah ensures their teaching is lost. From this generation we receive no lessons. No wisdom.
They stand in stark contrast to Aaron and Miriam’s deaths in this week’s parshah. Both are remembered for the good and the bad they did. And we continue to enrich our lives by learning the lessons we glean from their doings. Their memory, as Torah constructs it, continues to bless humanity.

But not this generation, lost in a void, who slipped into sand and the space between two verses.
What is the point? What is the lesson?

The answer lies in the mystery of the Red Heifer. The purpose of the Ref cow is to wash away the impurities created by contact with a corpse. Many commentaries tie its inclusion in this week’s parshah to the deaths of Miriam and Aaron which follow. But, it makes more sense for its inclusion in this moment to be related to the fact that we just glossed over tens of thousands of deaths. Every member of the community came into contact with the dead. It is for them that this ritual became necessary.
And there is an important link between the Red Heifer and the dead of the wilderness. One of the laws of the Red Heifer is that it must never have been bound to a plow for field work. It has never been in service to anything. It enjoys a kind of freedom of which Judaism is suspicious. Unbounded freedom. Freedom to do whatever one wishes – not one what ought to do.

This is, in a sense, the sin of the slave generation. They wanted personal comfort over communal service. They wanted freedom without responsibility. They wanted to serve their own ends, rather than to serve God and future generations. Like the Red Heifer they would not be bound to anything – and yet, as we know, Jewish living is about binding ourselves to community, to service, to God. We go free from Egypt so that we may serve and fulfill the mission of Israel.