Chukath: immortal

Chukath: immortal

The parsha is introduced by a pronouncement:" This is the statute (chok)  of the Torah"   The Torah goes on to describe the ritual of the red heifer. What about all the rest: the ten commandments, Pesach, shatnez?  What is special about the ed heifer? 

The Yeshiva answer  is that the ashes of the red heifer are inscrutable, paradoxical.   A chok: a statute that  cannot be understood by reason ( the proof text of Goedel's theorem).  The ashes  purify the polluted and pollute the purifier. 

I think that the real chok is the underpinning of the ritual,  The purpose of the red heifer ritual is the  purification  of people and objects that have bee in contact  with human death.  That is the invariant rule, the chok: death.  And the ritual is a way to deal with it.  That is why the ritual is mysterious, it deals with the the ultimate mystery, the release from reason and time, the loss of impact in the world except through the memory of others, except for that which you have etched and cut.  Death cannot be understood, so it is confronted with mystery and ashes and water  

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

Jorge Luis Borges