Parshah Commentary
Again and again, this week’s parshah, Chukat, returns to the question of death. It begins with the arcane ritual of the Red Heifer, designed to purify one who has come into contact with a dead body, and it ends with a strange account of deadly snakes sent to punish the Israelites for complaining once more about leaving Egypt. In between, the Torah describes the deaths of Moses’s siblings, Miriam and Aaron. Though no reason is given for Miriam’s demise, the impetus for Aaron’s is quite clear: When God instructs Moses and Aaron to speak to a rock to draw forth water for the thirsty Israelites, Moses instead strikes the stone—an act of defiance for which God decrees that both he and Aaron will die before the Israelites enter the land of Israel. Moses’s punishment is deferred, but Aaron’s comes soon after the incident. Moses is intimately involved in Aaron’s death: God instructs Moses to take his brother and his brother’s son Elazar to the top of Mount Hor, where he is to have Aaron transfer his priestly garments to Elazar. The ritual happens as prescribed, and Aaron then takes his final breath.
And yet, for all of Moses’s contact with death, the Rabbis imagine him as unable to conceive of his own death: “Why must I die?” Moses asks God in a midrash envisioning the end of his life. Would it not be better, he continues, for people to be able to see and learn from his deeds instead of merely hearing about his exploits? God responds with a verse from this week’s parshah: “This is the law when a person dies.” In the context of our parshah, the verse introduces regulations about purification rituals required when people or objects come into contact with a corpse. Yet the Rabbis read the verse as a literal, standalone statement: “This is the law: that a person will die.” As God explains in the midrash, death “is My decree for all people.”
In 1915, amid the ever-mounting horrors of World War I, Sigmund Freud argued that “at bottom no one believes in his own death.” Though we lose people we love and wish away those we hate, we, like Moses, are constitutionally incapable of imagining ourselves gone. “To put the same thing in another way,” Freud continued, “in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.” And yet, as Freud observed, the immensity of the war made such fantasies untenable. “Death will no longer be denied,” he declared. “We are forced to believe in it. People really die; and no longer one by one, but many, often tens of thousands, in a single day.”
Today, too, it is hard to ignore the pervasiveness of death. Each day, we see more and more horrifying images from Gaza: starving children, teenagers shot while desperately searching for food, parents mourning. Beyond Gaza, it is likewise difficult to look away from other ever-present, lethal crises: the climate catastrophe, the global resurgence of far-right nationalism, and the current Republican effort in the US to strip millions of people of healthcare or citizenship, among others. But Freud also recognized that even in the face of the most destabilizing encounters with mortality, we eventually tend to repress the intensity of those experiences. We all, surely, know friends who refuse to admit the degree of crisis, or insist that everything will work out somehow. Many of us may imagine we’ve escaped such a temptation: Are we not fixated on the horrors? Do we not keep them in mind constantly?
Despair often feels like the most sober assessment of our situation. What could be more hard-headed than hopelessness? Indeed, it’s easy to wonder what good it does to continue fighting for a ceasefire in Gaza when two years of protest have barely made a dent in Israel’s war machine, or to question the efficacy of local organizing in the face of an emerging polycrisis.
In many ways, hopelessness is the inverse of repression: Instead of a naive faith, it offers a pervasive melancholy. Nevertheless, the two often operate similarly. While repression numbs our pain by denying the crises around us, melancholy numbs our pain by insisting that there’s nothing we can do to stop the catastrophe. And it saves us from the disappointment of failure by telling us not to bother trying in the first place.
Perhaps this is what Chukat has to teach us: It forces us to look death in the face, again and again, without turning away. It does not offer the easy solace of a happy ending—in fact, it promises that the protagonist will die before the story is over, and as readers, we know that whatever the Israelites eventually achieve will be destroyed by war and exile. And yet, it insists nevertheless that we meet the crises as they come—death, plague, and disillusionment. It does not offer a blueprint or a theory of change, but rather a demand: to struggle on, no matter the odds. “Against this future we must fight like the Red Army in the rubble of Stalingrad,” insisted the historian Mike Davis. “Fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely.”
Aron Wander is a rabbi, organizer, and writer. More of his writing can be found here.
