Rabbi Daniel Siegel – Head of Jewish Life

Reunion

This week’s parashah, Chukkat, derives its name from its introductory teaching: “Chukkat” parah ha’adumah/“the law of” the red heifer. Chukkat being the constructive form of the word “chok”, stems from the root word “chakak” meaning engraved, immutable.

Yet the chok/law of the red heifer is anything but absolute and fixed as we quickly learn that the red heifer ritual renders the impure pure and the pure impure. The case of the red heifer was instrumental in the Rabbis declaring a chok to be a law beyond human ken which does not yield any rational explanation. They therefore presented the wisest of men, Solomon, as declaring:

“I have laboured to understand the word of God and have understood it all, except for the chok/law of the red heifer”.

Parashat Chukkat provides us with another example of that which appears to defy understanding. An onslaught of snakes kill the people yet it is a snake that serves to heal them. How can opposing qualities inhere in or opposite effects derive from one undifferentiated being. The snake, as depicted in the ancient ouroboros (its head swallowing its tail, representative of eternal return) generates its new being by means of its self-destruction. We are challenged to understand how two opposing poles makes for holistic being.

The Rabbinic tradition points out that the Hebrew word for snake, nachash, has the same numerical value as the Hebrew word for Messiah, mashiach. The snake which beckoned us to eat from the “tree of knowledge, good and bad” introduced us to a world of opposites in which a perceived duality blinds us to its true unity. At the same time the snake and we are the healing source for the fragmented world of our own making. We are always the messiah in potentia.