(1) Adonai spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying: (2) This is the law of the Torah that Adonai has commanded: Instruct the Israelite people to bring you a red cow unblemished, in which there is no defect and on which no yoke has been laid.

Numbers 19:1-2

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(43) Adonai said to Moses and Aaron: This is the law of the Pesach offering: No foreigner shall eat of it. (44) But any [enslaved person] a man has bought may eat of it once he has been circumcised.

Exodus 12:43-44

Introduction

Shabbat Parah, Sabbath of the Red Heifer, is a special shabbat observed on the Shabbat preceding Shabbat HaChodesh, in preparation for Passover. What’s Shabbat HaChodesh? Turtles all the way down, friends. Shabbat HaChodesh takes place on the Shabbat preceding the first of the Hebrew month of Nisan (or on the 1st of Nisan itself if it falls on Shabbat), during which Passover is celebrated.

• Today, Saturday, March 30 is Shabbat Parah
• Shabbat HaChodesh is Saturday, April 6
• Passover (Pesach) begins sundown April 22, and the actual “festival” observance period, when everyone becomes a creative genius with matzah (unleavened bread) for a week, concludes on April 30

Of course, expect a lot more writing about Pesach here, but for today’s post, let’s think more about Shabbat Parah.

Red Heifer Shabbat

Because Passover (Pesach) is central to the collective identity of the Jewish people, retelling one of our founding myths that root our existence in liberation and relationship to the Law, we tend to get pretty freaking psyched about these minor holy days leading up to the festival.

It’s good that we spent a little time already with the parshah this week, “Tzav” (“Command”), because we were able to do some re-imagining with the sacrificial system; namely, decoupling the concept of sacrifice from the concept of deity to envision sacrifice beyond its roots as a cultic affair filled with blood, fire, and ritual toward a basis for community care and a mandate to affirm and uphold community values.

The Torah reading for this special Shabbat includes excerpts from Numbers 19 and Exodus 12, both quoted above. Let’s first say something about the significance of the red heifer, then we’ll point out some features of the text, and ultimately conclude with a word through the lens of Modern Jewish Thought.

In the Temple era, so far as we know, as documented in the ancient writings, red heifer ash was used to purify those who came in contact with death, ensuring their ritual fitness to partake in the Passover sacrifice. Shabbat Parah thus serves as a symbolic start to Passover preparations, a time for cleansing and renewal. Interestingly enough, the priests who performed the sacrifice of the red heifer would themselves become contaminated in the process of rendering the sacrifice for its cleansing function.

What we often fail to understand about the impure ritual state originating in corpse contamination is that this impurity is not of a sinful sort of uncleanliness. The sources of ritual impurity were many, and each of them representing a natural state: Emissions, including ejaculation, menstruation, or bleeding, and corpse contamination to name a few of these sources for ritual impurity. The axis for ritual purity cuts along these “natural states,” which is to say that because, for example, a pregnant person has given birth, this is not to put them in a state of sinful impurity; rather, ritual purity is another “force” altogether; one that is dealt with through various rituals. It is natural at all times to flow in and out of states of purity and impurity, so governed by the interpretation of the law. This was true in the ritual baths surrounding the Second Temple in first century Judea, and it is true now at the ritual bath maintained on the north side of the city where I live.

I think it’s important to call out this pure/impure axis, disconnected from the notion of sinfulness, so that no one makes the mistake to think that being in a state of impurity presents an inherently bad state. Rather, to consider morality, that axis would cut across a holy and profane gradient whereby behaviors and actions are legislated by what is permissible and impermissible.

To say that someone is in a state of ritual impurity is not to say that someone is profane, and likewise, one could be in a state of ritual purity, for example, by following the prescribed cleanliness rituals following emission, and yet still be behaving in a profane way. I draw out these notions because in the Protestant-framed conception of religion, which is the default constructed view because religion itself as a conceptual category, arises in post-Enlightenment European modernity, driven largely by European Protestantism, it is common to conflate these notions: impure, sinful, dirty, etc.

Still, there is reason to address states of ritual impurity. The ancient notion of impurity is that impurity is a contagious “force” that can spread between individuals. Indeed, Matthew Thiessen, in a really terrific book, Jesus and the Forces of Death, argues that Jesus was likely devoutly committed to the Levitical purity laws, and many of his scenes of healing, as described first in Mark and later adapted in Matthew and Luke, suggest that Jesus was interested in removing the “force” of ritual impurity. As I’ve mentioned ad nauseam on this blog, a comprehensive understanding of the historical Jesus cannot be divorced from an understanding of Second Temple period Judaism.

Still, sinful or not, it is good to handle one’s ritual impurity. At least one significant motivation to cleanse oneself after impurity is to maximize participation in the cult. If you are in an impure state, you are not permitted to engage in cultic practices. The concern about staying in an impure state is that you would prohibit your own involvement in the cult, and because impurity is considered a contagion, you risk conferring the impurity onto another person, prohibiting their participation in the cult.

When it comes to impurity, corpse contamination is really a big one, requiring fairly elaborate cleansing rituals, including the red heifer sacrifice, so we note the significance of this Shabbat to prepare the community at large for the approaching month of Nisan, and with it, Pesach, a time of liberation and new beginnings.

On the Priestly Source

When we read the parshah together this past Tuesday (linked above), we touched on the Aaronic priestly line. The job of priest was assigned by genealogy; only men from families that were believed to be descended from Aaron could serve as priests themselves (source). We can say some things about the literature from this exclusive group.

The Priestly Source, “P,” and regular readers know this, is one of the major document source traditions in the Documentary Hypothesis that seeks to explain the composition of the Torah, along with the pre-P narrative accounts, E (Elohist) and J (Jawhist), the body of literature known as D (Deuteronomistic), and finally a Reactor, “R,” who weaved together the sources; crucially, weaved but did not harmonize. These are imagined to be the primary source documents: J, E, P, D, and R.

Everything we’re reading in today’s post has its roots in the P source material, and this is easy to spot. As a general rule, any Torah content that spends so much time unpacking specific rituals, rites, precise instructions for sacrifice, rules for the Sabbath, and the like are fairly easily identified as P. We also get some help from the mechanics of the text itself.

Pay attention to the structure of the text, especially the Priestly colophons that we encounter. A colophon is sort of like boilerplate language about the material. For P, look back to the passages from Numbers and Exodus that I quoted above, and also check these rules for sacrifices from Leviticus 6–7, a book of the Bible that is almost exclusively P in origin. Notice the structural similarities:

• Lev 6.2, This is the torah of the burnt offering
• Lev 6.11, And this is the torah of the grain offering
• Lev 6.18, This is the torah of the sin offering
• Lev 7.1, And this is the torah of the guilt offering
• Lev 7.11, And this is the torah of the sacrifice of well-being
• Lev 7.37, This is the torah for the burnt offering, the grain offering, and the sin offering, and the guilt offering, and the ordination offering, and the sacrifice of well-being, which the Lord commanded Moses

Here, “the torah of…” may be interpreted, in English, as “the law of” or “the instruction of…” What is easy to see is that the P authors and editors had a clear intent in the instruction they were providing. To be in the priestly class was to be exclusive in genealogy and function. This is a group that takes their performance of cultic rituals seriously for the sake of the community. This is a community mandate that I suggest we may apply in modern Jewish thought to figure our own lives.

Secular Humanism and Modern Jewish Thought

Beyond the specifics of the red heifer ritual, Shabbat Parah offers opportunities for modern interpretations. Secular humanists can find meaning in creating their own traditions that foster community, while modern Jewish thinkers reinterpret the story through lenses like environmentalism (seeing the Nile turning red as a call for stewardship) and Tikkun Olam (repairing the world). Similar to themes I developed in a post several weeks about an emerging diaspora sort of Judaism, a growing movement of secular Jews observe Shabbat, focusing on its cultural and communal aspects.

I spent much of my Shabbat completing this post. Maybe it speaks something to you on this special Shabbat.

xx. ❤