This isn’t a political space and I don’t intend to make it one here. But I also feel a need to talk about politics this week. Wish me luck.
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been experiencing a deep feeling of unease. I have found it hard to focus. I’m more easily distracted than usual. My sleep hasn’t been as good. And it’s not about anything in my personal life–everyone is more or less okay, thank God–or even, at this point, having to do with the situation in the Middle East, which we’ve been living with for too many months.
No, the source of my anxiety is pretty clearly the combined effect of some enormously significant Supreme Court rulings at the end of June and the national conversation that has erupted in the last two weeks around President Biden’s aging and his fitness as both a candidate and holder of his office.
When I sit with it, I find that my anxiety seems to be primarily rooted in both the instability of this moment itself, the prospect of instability in the future, and the powerlessness I experience of living with that instability. It feels like the earth is quaking beneath my feet and there is precious little I can do about it.
The thing is, of course, that that’s not really news–certainly not for many people in the world. While I happen to have been born into a set of conditions that has allowed me to presume a lot of stability (privileges both earned and, probably more often, unearned), so many other people have had a different, more precarious, experience. But this is happening to me now. So here I am, living with my experience.
Again, when I sit with it, I find that what I first really seem to want is just that basic stability. It was so much easier when I felt like I could rely on the idea that some things were settled, that there were big rocks to stand on. In the absence of those big rocks, I sense an impulse–a perfectly natural impulse–to find some other terra firma on which to rest. My mind starts spinning stories about what will happen. Even if they’re unhappy, negative stories, at least they’re rocks.
Chukat is a Torah portion about death and transition. In this Torah portion we read of the deaths of Miriam and Aaron and the transition of the High Priesthood to Aaron’s son, Elazar. Moses, likewise, learns that he will not enter the Promised Land, even as the Israelites make their way to its borders. The times, they are a-changin’: big rocks crumble, uncertainty abounds.
A counterpoint to that uncertainty is the opening section of Chukat, the law of the red heifer, which responds to the destabilizing reality of death through purification. “This is the ritual law that YHVH has commanded,” the Torah says: “Instruct the Israelite people to bring you a red cow without blemish, in which there is no defect and on which no yoke has been laid.”
Why a counterpoint to instability? On one level, because of its simple assertion: As the midrash notes, this is a “chok,” a law without reason (unlike, for instance, the commandment not to steal). Performing it is thus an expression of faith, an affirmation that we do some things because of our commitment.
But I think it’s deeper than that. Rashi, based on the Midrash, suggests that the entire ritual is tikkun, a repair, for the sin of the Golden Calf: “Since they became impure by a calf, let its mother (a cow) come and atone for the calf.” And the impulse to erect the Golden Calf was itself rooted in the dis-ease of living with the unknown: “Come, make us a god who shall go before us,” the people said, “for that fellow Moses—the man who brought us from the land of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him” (Exodus 32:1). The people’s discomfort at not knowing, their fear of living with uncertainty, prompts them to yearn for something solid: an idol.
We do not perform the ritual of the Red Heifer today, we only read about it. Yet I find that it speaks to me at moments of profound uncertainty, like this one. For me, it’s a reminder to be mindful of how I respond to the very human impulse for stability, to be careful in where I invest that yearning, to be wary of seductive solutions. Because in truth, instability is ever-present. The sands are always shifting beneath our feet–sometimes quicker and more visibly, sometimes slower and less obviously. The Red Heifer is an invitation to live with awareness of that instability, and to respond to it with wisdom, expansiveness, and compassion.