Purity of Freedom
In the introduction to the laws of the red heifer - which enabled the purification from the most severe ritual impurity, an impurity brought about by coming in contact with a dead person - the Torah states: “This is the law of the Torah”[1]. Not “the law of the heifer”, which would imply that this law is specific to the idea of ritual purity, but rather “this is the law of the Torah”. If you want to know what is the “law of the Torah”, what is the Torah’s essential message, look no further than the law of the red heifer .
Is there one word, or one idea, that captures the essence of all the Torah? There is no question that an essential and foundational message of the Torah is freedom.
Looking through the Torah, we find the message of freedom everywhere. The exodus from Egyptian bondage is central to our story, it is central to the biblical holidays, and the Torah insists that each of us “remember the day you left the land of Egypt all the days of your life”.
Freedom is much more than just an important part of our history, freedom is the foundation of all of morality. If we believe that we are unable to choose, that we are trapped by our nature, by our environment, and by our animalistic instincts then all of Torah is pointless. For the Torah and all its commandments are predicated on the idea that each of us has the freedom to control our instincts, change our nature, and follow, not the desire of our hearts, but rather the teachings of morality.
Impurity imparted by the dead, represents the greatest threat to the Torah’s message of moral freedom. When a human being confronts death, he is confronting his own limitation. No human being can escape death, and the thought of death forces the human being to acknowledge that he or she cannot escape fate, that ultimately life is progressing toward a specific end, and there is nothing that he or she can do that will change the fact that the human being is trapped by the laws of nature. This in turn can lead a person to mistakenly think that his spirit is also governed by fate; that he has no ability to choose freely, no ability to attain moral freedom, and that he is powerless to free himself from the grip of his nature.
Contact with the dead, coming face to face with human mortality and limitation, makes one spiritually vulnerable to the mistaken notion that, not only the body, but the soul as well is trapped by the confines of nature.
To achieve spiritual purity, is to understand, that while the body is subjected to nature, the spirit is not. Thus the Torah commands us to take a red heifer - a symbol of vibrant life - to slaughter it and to burn it to ashes. This is a stark acknowledgement and reminder of the truth; that the human body is destined to disappear, as we say in the high holiday prayer: “A man's origin is from dust and his destiny is back to dust... he is likened to a broken shard, withering grass, a fading flower, a passing shade, a dissipating cloud, a blowing wind, flying dust, and a fleeting dream.”
Yet, that is only part of the story. We take some of the ashes and place them into the “living waters”, water taken directly from a spring, and sprinkle them on the person who came in contact with a corpse. The message is powerful. Indeed the body cannot escape its destiny. The vibrant red heifer was just a temporary state in the journey to an inevitable end. Yet, the human spirit is like a spring of living water. The human soul is free of the limitations of natural physics. The human soul lives on and even while on earth there is nothing that can prevent it from making the right moral choices.
“This is the law of the Torah”. If you want to know what is the “law of the Torah”, what is the Torah’s essential message, look no further than the law of the red heifer.
[1] Numbers 19:2.