Parshas Chukas-Balak

This week’s Torah portion, Parshas Chukas-Balak, opens with the most perplexing law of the Torah, the Para Aduma, the Red Heifer. Its ashes, mixed with water, purified someone who became impure through contact with death. The ritual paradoxically purifies the impure person while rendering the Kohen who prepares it impure. Rashi explains the command is called a chukah (a law whose reason we cannot understand), because Satan and the nations of the world taunt Israel, asking what reason there could be for something this baling. The Torah’s response is built into the name itself. It is a decree from the King, and we have no standing to demand it explain itself.

The Kli Yakar reads Rashi’s two taunting voices as two angles of the same struggle. The nations represent mockery from outside, while Satan represents the doubt that creeps up internally, the questions we ask ourselves when a mitzvah does not make sense.

The Kli Yakar continues with a question from later on in Devarim (Deuteronomy). In Parshas Va’eschanan, Moshe says the nations will look at our chukim and exclaim, what a wise and discerning nation. But here, those same nations mock us for that very category of law because we cannot understand their reasons! How can both be true?

The Kli Yakar resolves this with a beautiful shift in perspective that not only resolves this apparent contradiction but also give us the tools to look differently at the entirety of the Torah. He says, isolate the Red Heifer alone, and it looks bewildering. Step back and view the Torah as one system, the wise civil laws and ethical demands standing alongside the mysterious ones, and the picture changes. Once you see how much of the Torah radiates wisdom you can verify, you extend trust to what you cannot yet verify. When one does that, truly steps back from the pernicious trap of tunnel vision, and sees the small part of wisdom our mortal minds can grasp of the Divine Torah, when we are confronted by questions, we are no longer forced to `believe’ or `have faith’ blindly on that which we don’t understand. No. In Judaism we are grounded by what Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb calls `rational trust’ based on the wisdom we can see and understand. But we can only see it if we see each law in the context of the whole.

We all meet ideas in Torah that strike us as diicult, whether the doubt comes from someone else or within. Our emotions, our struggles, compel us to see them in a vacuum. But those are the times we must step back and appreciate the whole.

May Hashem grant us the humility to trust what we cannot fully grasp, and in that merit may He help us see, in time, the wisdom hidden within it.