ParashatTzav You Can Go Home Again Torah Portion: Leviticus 6:1-8:36 Maftir: Numbers 19:1-22 (Shabbat Parah) Haftarah Portion [Ashkenazim]: Ezekiel 36:16-38 Haftarah Portion [Sephardim]: Ezekiel 36:16-36
Shalom!
This Shabbat is known as Shabbat Parah, “the Sabbath of the Red Heifer.” It gets this name from the special maftir (concluding, Torah reading for the day). This Shabbat is the second of four special sabbaths, each with its own assigned reading, leading up to Passover.
This week’s unique maftir comes from the Book of Numbers, recounting the story of the “red cow” (Numbers 19:2), brought to the priest for ritual slaughter in the Tent of Meeting; the red cow’s ashes are used in certain purification rituals. Specifically, the ashes – combined with water and sprinkled – ritually purify anyone who has encountered a dead person.
Rabbi Mychal Springer notes the power of both the defilement and its solution:
Contact with the dead disrupts our ability to function, and [so] we must engage in a ritual in order to be restored into society and into proper relationship with God. … Death’s power is palpable and any encounter with death must be mediated through communal traditions. While these rituals demonstrate that those who have encountered the dead must exist on the margins, that status is temporary, and the path to returning to the community is clear. In a sense, the ritual normalizes the experience of death and provides clear guidance to all about how to navigate it. If death is a tearing apart, the ritual binds us up and offers hope of restoration.[i]
In this sense, the ritual of the red heifer is metonymic for the whole Book of Leviticus. This is the book that serves as an instruction manual about how to incorporate people back into community, and back into relationship with God, after a misstep – whether it be contamination from touching or eating something impure, or inadvertent or purposeful dishonesty. The practices described in our book show us that you can go home again.
The haftarah, or prophetic reading for this Shabbat, alludes to this same red heifer ritual. Speaking about the Israelites who profane God’s name, God tells the exilic prophet Ezekiel: “I will sprinkle pure water upon you, and you shall be purified … I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit into you: I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh and I will put My spirit into you. Thus I will cause you to follow My laws and faithfully to observe My rules” (Ezekiel 36:25-27). God’s promise to the prophet is that – even in the absence of the Temple – reintegration is possible.
The medieval French commentator Rashi explains the term “a new heart” as “an inclination that has been renewed for the better.”[ii] Rabbi Springer notes Rashi’s subtle move in this definition: He interprets “new” as “renewed.” Rabbi Springer writes:
The process of renewal is not the same as putting in something new. When we renew, we actually take something old and make it new again, we restore it. In a sense, it echoes the process of taking something that was made impure and purifying it. We don’t begin at the very beginning; we salvage what we have by finding the new in the old. The very imagery that was at work in the verse has been turned upside down. It’s not as clean as swapping out the damaged one for a perfect new one. The renewal depends on probing the good in what was deemed bad, which I believe is a hopeful stance about the capacity for redemption.
May we take to heart the message of renewal intrinsic to this special Shabbat. It comes as a reminder that hope, change, and lasting transformation is possible, in ourselves and in others. This Shabbat, let’s act on the optimistic truth that as long as we are willing to do whatever transformative work might be necessary, there is always a path forward. We can indeed make our way back home.
Shabbat shalom! Rabbi Salem Pearce ISJL Director of Spirituality
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