First Torah reading: Exodus Chapters 35 to end of Exodus.
Second Torah reading: Numbers Chapter 19.
Haftarah: Ezekiel 36:16-38.
For a diary on this week's regular Torah reading, check out my diary from last year, here.
Fortunately, for those of us who are not building contractors, interior designers, or clothing manufacturers, there's a second Torah reading for this week. This Shabbat is Shabbat Parah (the Shabbat of the Cow), the third of five special Shabbats during the weeks before Passover. God commands the Israelites to find a perfectly red cow - one hair of a different color disqualifies the cow, which has never worn a yoke or been used for work. The Israelites were commanded to slaughter this cow, and burn it into ashes, along with a piece of cedar wood and hyssop tied together with red string, which were also tossed into the fire. The Israelites were commanded to take the ashes, mix them with spring water, and sprinkle this mixture on anyone who was impure because of contact with a corpse. The rabbis decreed that this strange Biblical passage should be read several weeks before Passover to remind people to purify themselves if they had been in contact with a dead body, so they could participate in the Passover sedar.
If you are thinking, this is really bizarre, you are not alone, the rabbis thought the same thing. According to Numbers Rabbah, even the wise King Solomon thought it was weird. Rabbi Johanan ben Zakai, who single handedly saved the Jewish people and the Jewish faith when the Second Temple was destroyed, story here, confessed to his students that he could find no rational explanation for this command.
One of the things that puzzled the rabbis was that everyone who was involved in creating this "water of sprinkling" became contaminated, ritually impure, and had to purify themselves before they could rejoin the community. The priest who slaughtered the cow, the guy that burned it, and the guy who gathered up the ashes, all became ritually impure. Why?
The rabbis of old had no explanation, but Rabbi Joseph Hertz, author of a Torah commentary, published in 1937 and used in most synagogues in the English speaking world over the remainder of the 20th century, took a stab at it:
There have been great institutions and movements, in both the Jewish and general history, that have sanctified others, and yet have at the same time tended to defile those that created or directed those institutions and movements. The very men who helped others to self-sacrifice and holiness, not infrequently themselves became hard and self-centered, hating and hateful, elevating others, and themselves sinking into inhumanity, impurity and unholiness. It is a real, if disturbing, fact in the spiritual life of man.
Certain people come to mind.
William Aramony, who headed the United Fund for over 20 years while he stole over $1 million from the charity. And
Rabbi Menachem Youlus, whom I knew personally, who sold hundreds of Torah scrolls he had purchased off the internet, claiming that he had dug them up at death camps and other sites in Europe, where they had supposedly been secretly buried so the Nazis wouldn't desecrate them - they were all lies and the good rabbi is currently a guest of the United States government for having scammed so many people.
And what about the politicians we blog about here on Daily Kos? We gloat when a Rush Limbaugh gets busted as a drug addict, at the sex scandals engulfing a Mark Foley, David Vitter, Mark Sanford, or Larry Craig, at Joe Walsh the deadbeat dad. But what do we write when a Democrat goes down - an Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, Rod Blagojevich, or, most recently, Bob Menendez? Scandal and graft is not the exclusive province of Republicans. Democrats, liberals, are not immune. Power corrupts. We must be ever wary that the politicians we support are not just progressives, but are honest progressive who will resist the temptations of office.
Shabbat Shalom.