Chukat | The Matter of Life and Death

זֹ֚את חֻקַּ֣ת הַתּוֹרָ֔ה אֲשֶׁר־צִוָּ֥ה יְהֹוָ֖ה לֵאמֹ֑ר דַּבֵּ֣ר ׀ אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֗ל וְיִקְח֣וּ אֵלֶ֩יךָ֩ פָרָ֨ה אֲדֻמָּ֜ה תְּמִימָ֗ה אֲשֶׁ֤ר אֵֽין־בָּהּ֙ מ֔וּם אֲשֶׁ֛ר לֹא־עָלָ֥ה עָלֶ֖יהָ עֹֽל׃

This is the embodied Code of Life that Eternally Present vibrates into beingness: Instruct the children of Israel  to bring you a red heifer without blemish, in which there is no defect and on which no yoke has been laid.

Num. 19:2

This week's Torah portion wrestles with the mysteries of life and death, asking: How shall we live and how shall we die? Spiritual and moral teachings invite us to connect with the reality and mystery in ways that guide us to living with greater and greater reverence for all life forms.

In the story the Awakened One of Torah hands down through Moses and Aaron an encoded instruction, a chukkat ha torah,  about an unblemished red heifer for all the worlds and times. The  meaning of this defies our conscious understanding, its performance is beyond our powers. We are learning to walk in the mystery, with reverence for all life, to  harmonize our lives with the inevitability of death.

Ancient Torah interpretation suggests that only Moses, standing for the fully enlightened possibility of humans, understood the meaning and purpose of the ritual, of the slog through life. The rest of us are walking the path toward that understanding.

The people are instructed to carry out ritual called a chukat ha Torah. Torah here, like the Sanskrit word dharma, embraces multiple meanings.  The meanings embrace teachings channeled from Awakened Spirit,  our personal destiny (trauma, karma, manifestation) and encoded organizing principles of the world of form in which we live. This week's Torah reminds us that these laws are right in front of us and engraved as chukat in our hearts. Learning to live in harmony with the universal laws of our world and our hearts is the key to fulfilling the prophetic and evolutionary possibilities for earthlings.

In the story, the people are in the thirty-eighth year of wandering. They are a new generation of millennials and post-millenials, inheritors of the promise, trauma and karma of their ancestors. The desert wilderness continues to fill with the carcasses of the first generation who fled Egypt and the generations that got in their way. Trauma is everywhere.

This is life in the kabbalistic worlds of assiyah (doing) and yetzirah (formation). We creatures in form live in worlds plagued with death and dashed dreams. How do we awaken and take heed, so that our fate will be different from our wandering ancestors?

Eternal Presence instructs Moses and Aaron, among the last of their dying generation, to reveal the way to harmonize living in light of disappointment and mortality. The way, the ritual of the Red Heifer, is mysterious and unreachable.

The encoded instruction is for the people to bring to the priest a “red cow without blemish.” What is this practice the people are directed to undergo, in the desert, after almost 40 years of wandering? Not convinced that living as a free people is worth the hardships, the people are repeatedly  pulled back to slavery. What is this practice? What is the skillful means, the upaya, to use a Buddhist term, that God is trying now. Godding, the movement of life, the ground of being, the karma of all our collective and individual actions, is continually pushing us to step more deeply into freedom.

The desert wanderers are instructed to go from household to household to find an “unblemished” red cow. What is to be learned in these processes? What is the “purification," the “letting go"?

This is the quest to which the Buddha sent a mother who was mourning her son's death.  Go from household to household and find a mustard seed from a family that has not experienced death. Carrying her dead son in her arms, the woman went from door to door. Every household had experienced death. Realizing its inescapability, she was able to let go of her suffering.

This doesn't mean ignoring loss or injustice or pain.  We may find that saying the names of the dead is a powerful tool of liberation. We may find the mourning process is what honors memory and heals the survivors.  We put the fact of death in service of compassion and liberation, connecting us to life. And it means that we do not take death lightly. We create a world where the fact of death generates greater reverence for life.

Our work from generation to generation is healing (a more contemporary way to encounter "purifying") ourselves and the global community. Torah is explicit that this is a law for all earthlings living in the realm of God-wrestling, the children of Israel and all who reside among them:

וְֽהָיְתָ֞ה לִבְנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֗ל וְלַגֵּ֛ר הַגָּ֥ר בְּתוֹכָ֖ם לְחֻקַּ֥ת עוֹלָֽם׃

This shall be a chukat olam for the children of Israel and for the strangers who reside among you.

Numbers 19:10

Buddhism and Torah have handed down these  teaching stories to help us realize the inescapability of death. Miriam and Aaron die and we learn that Moses too will not go on much further. Death comes. How can we go on, what is the meaning we can make of our lives, knowing this?

In the Torah, the people are surrounded by death in the wilderness and wander knowing that all of them will die there. Is this knowing, the timing of death, an inconvenient truth, a burden or a liberation? How would you live if you knew that all of your generation would die within the next forty years? The next two years?

Oh, wait a minute, my baby boomer generation does know this! We are living in a year when Covid began by striking down our elders and we have become the elders. Covid continues to mutate and to strike down vulnerable ones. Our children will inherit the earth we leave behind.

How does knowing this affect how we live?  We all are wandering in this desert, looking for meaning and rituals to help us make meaning of life in the constant shadow of death.

Miriam's Death; Water is Life

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר יְהֹוָה֮ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֣ה וְאֶֽל־אַהֲרֹן֒ יַ֚עַן לֹא־הֶאֱמַנְתֶּ֣ם בִּ֔י לְהַ֨קְדִּישֵׁ֔נִי לְעֵינֵ֖י בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל לָכֵ֗ן לֹ֤א תָבִ֙יאוּ֙ אֶת־הַקָּהָ֣ל הַזֶּ֔ה אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁר־נָתַ֥תִּי לָהֶֽם׃

But Eternally Present said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust Me enough to affirm My sanctity in the sight of the children of Israel, therefore you shall not lead this congregation into the land that I have given them.”

Numbers 20:12

The great prophetess Miriam who led the women in dance as they crossed the Sea into freedom, and whose presence channeled the life force of water, now dies in the wilderness. It becomes a parched desert. Moses' ignorance about how to honor the source and sanctity of water will keep him out of the promised land.

Today throughout the world, we are squandering the life source of water. The indigenous peoples of North America, like the indigenous peoples in the wilderness of Torah, know that a wandering people, a people cut off from their source, endanger life.

We are called to come into a right relationship with water and the elements of life we need to create mutual survival. We can no longer look at water and what lays in rocks under the earth as "our resources." Today we are called to make ourselves and our societies their resources. We humans must see ourselves and act as resources to preserve life, ending the destruction of treating what earth gives freely as "our resources."

The Torah of Nonviolence and Gun Control

וְכֹל֙ כְּלִ֣י פָת֔וּחַ אֲשֶׁ֛ר אֵין־צָמִ֥יד פָּתִ֖יל עָלָ֑יו טָמֵ֖א הֽוּא׃

...and every open vessel [that comes in contact with a dead body] , with no lid fastened down, shall be unclean.

Numbers 19:15

The new path that sanctifies life and harmonizes with death also calls upon us to recognize that the vessels that carry and touch death also are in need of transformation. Torah rejects the idea that weapons of any kind are acceptable. The vessel that kills, human hand or device, is impure and only purified through this unobtainable and unfathomable ritual. The message is clear. No killing, No harming one another. The very same law of all times that is engraved in spiritual and religious law.

We are all impure and in need of healing, in the sense that we are all carrying the trauma of violence. Today we live in a global world. The "children of Israel" are everywhere. Those who don't identify as children of Israel live in our midst, and we in theirs. This goes for white-identified people and people of color and culture in the US, Jews and Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank, everywhere. How do we come into right relationship with life and death, the most distinct markers of form?

Rise Up Singing

אָ֚ז יָשִׁ֣יר יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל אֶת־הַשִּׁירָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את עֲלִ֥י בְאֵ֖ר עֱנוּ־לָֽהּ׃ בְּאֵ֞ר חֲפָר֣וּהָ שָׂרִ֗ים כָּר֙וּהָ֙ נְדִיבֵ֣י הָעָ֔ם בִּמְחֹקֵ֖ק בְּמִשְׁעֲנֹתָ֑ם וּמִמִּדְבָּ֖ר מַתָּנָֽה׃

And from there to Beer, which is the well where the LORD said to Moses, “Assemble the people that I may give them water.” … Then Israel sang this song: Spring up, O well—sing to it—

Numbers 21:16, 19

The path becomes clearer. It is a rhythm, a rhythm that comes from embracing and singing out to each other of  the sanctity of water, our source in Oneness, and the unity of male and female. No more domination and hierarchy. No longer a patriarchy where one group exploits water and life at the expense of others.

In this verse, the people, who are the children of the first generation, are no longer children. They rise up together, singing gratitude to the well of life. This is the new way! They are a new generation singing a new song, creating their own rituals.  The new path, to bring all of our voices together in praise of the source, in the sanctity of all life, togetherness, no one taking more than their share.

It is Miriam's legacy and the possibility of healing the division and trauma that doomed the older generations.

Life in the Shadow of Death

About eight years ago I traveled to Plum Village Buddhist community in France to immerse in a three week retreat,  What Happens When We Die?  From there I traveled to Vermont, USA, for a 3-week Hebrew language immersion where we met on Shabbat morning to learn from the parasha of the week. This is what I wrote then about Chukkat:

The parsha starts with the laws pertaining to death.

The Buddhist teaching, what happens when we die- nothing!

The Jewish teachings, what happens when we die? All the people who come in contact with the bodies we leave behind become “Tamei.” They must separate from the community, undergo a complex ritual purification, to become “tahour”, and then can re join the community.  Tamei and tahour are generally translated as pure and impure.

The Buddhist teachings, posted inside the toilets at Plum village, for our contemplation while sitting:  “No pure, no impure. These are just concepts that arise in our mind. Interbeing is the true nature of reality.

What dies, we asked at Plum Village? What dies, we ask in Torah class? What lives, we ask at the Nonviolent Communication trainings, at Torah class, at Plum Village?

A Nonviolent Communication-based Practice to Contemplate Death

Begin by connecting to your experience

• Think about the death of a loved one or someone in your life — either it happened or will happen.
• How do I feel in my body, thinking about this death?
• Hold the parts of the body where I feel these.
• Hold back from naming, just feel.
• Breathe deeply.
• It will change, the sensations and words will change, as we are alive now.
• Feeling the feelings in the body, as you think now about this death. Feeling tears, feeling trembling…feel fully.
• Feel the life force as it manifests and moves in your body as you think now about this person's death.
• You may want to place your hands, move your hands, over  the parts of the body with the sensations.
• Slowly, without pressure, bring your mind into meditation on, and connection to, the emotional feelings  associated with the physical body feelings.
• Maybe its fear, anxiety, maybe peace… Rest in the emotions. Hold them where they manifest.
• Slowly, without pressure, bring your mind into meditation on, and connection to, the living energies of life — in NVC called the Needs.
• Rest in the beauty of the life energy of Needs as it comes up in relation to Death

Let me respectfully remind you,
Life and death are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost.
Each of us should strive to awaken…
Awaken… take heed!
Do not squander your life!