(for the week of June 19, 2010/7 Tammuz, 5770)

Parashat “Chukkat”
Numbers 19:1-22:1

This week’s Torah portion reminds us that an encounter with death always changes us in some fundamental way. The Torah’s literal concern is physical contact with the dead and the resulting ritual impurity. Numbers 19:11 instructs: “He who touches the corpse of any human being shall be impure for seven days.” But while it’s clear that tumah (ritual impurity) refers to a specific, physical status defined by Jewish law, the broader message may be that contact with death changes us in some unavoidable way. In other words, the concept of tumah may reflect more than just a concern about our physical fitness to participate in rituals. Tumah may demonstrate a recognition that such a dramatic change in our relationship (i.e., a human being with whom we’ve been connected has died) can’t help leaving its mark on us and on the way others see us.

I remember when some of the girls in my elementary school class first began to take an interest in the boys. The change wasn’t exactly subtle. Those girls suddenly started teasing the boys and chasing them around on the playground and wanting to play tag and be chased back. It also was clear that I wasn’t the only one who noticed this new interest. Some of my more ‘sophisticated’ classmates immediately chimed in with, “Ooo, you touched a girl! You’ve got cooties. Don’t come near me!” Setting aside the fact that my dictionary informs me that the word, “cooties” is a variation on a Malaysian word meaning, “body louse” (a fact of which I’m pretty sure my classmates were unaware), I think my classmates were expressing more than the idea that a boy had been contaminated by physical contact with a girl. I think they also were noting (some of them with a bit of jealousy) that relationships were changing in significant ways and the transition made them feel somewhat vulnerable, uncertain and uncomfortable. Thus understood, “You’ve got cooties!” may have meant something like: “You’re not the same, you’ve been affected by a mysterious change that makes me unsure of where things stand or how to relate to you.”

Hopefully, the analogy between “cooties” and tumah is pretty clear. Coming into close contact with death changes us, both in fact and in others’ perceptions of us. We’re declared to be in a state of tumah or ritual impurity. We’re not permitted to participate in the public life of the community in the normal way for a prescribed period of time. And we’re required to go through a mysterious ritual of purification and reentry before we’re allowed to return (I can’t remember if there was a prescribed ritual for getting rid of “cooties!”).

In the Torah portion, that ritual of purification centers on a mixture including the ashes of the parah adumah (red heifer). The precise mechanics of this process of ritual cleansing from the encounter with death are pretty mysterious. You’ll find the ritual described at the beginning of Numbers 19. The red heifer (an unblemished specimen) is slaughtered by the priest outside the camp, its blood is sprinkled towards the holy place, the cow is burned together with cedar wood, hyssop and crimson stuff and, eventually the ashes are collected and mixed with water to be used in the ritual cleansing. Not only is the reason for this mixture mysterious but, to make matters more confusing, all the folks involved in preparing the cleansing ashes themselves become ritually impure in the process.

In this case, perhaps, the mystery is the point. The process of healing and returning to life after the loss of a loved one is also mysterious. Notwithstanding the extensive literature on grieving and loss, there is no simple set of directions, no single path mourners can take as they attempt to reenter the world of the living. Contact with death inevitably takes us outside our ordinary world; it changes us. Finding our way back often takes patience and struggle and sometimes, the caring support of folks who are, themselves, touched and changed by our struggle with grief. Perhaps, those friends and caregivers who help us back are like the priests who also enter a state of tumah as they help us to gather the tools of cleansing. They also grieve; they also are changed.

Of course, once we do return to the community and to life, we are not the same. The journey we take up after we reenter cannot be the same one we were on before our loss. But the Torah’s promise, the lesson of tumah and the red heifer, is that reentry and new life are possible. The Torah does not say, contact with the dead changed you and made you forever ritually impure; leave the community, you can never come back. Instead, the Torah offers us a way to return and begin again—a ritual for taking up the crucial but difficult work of the new journey that beckons us as we try to discover and integrate who we are now that we’ve been touched by death. May we always find such tools and blessings and people to help, especially in the crises of our lives. And may we always find a way to return and begin again.