by Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman

July 3, 2008

This week’s sedra opens with an arcane religious ritual that we might easily pass over were it not for the profound religious question it contains. The Bible classifies people who come into contact with a corpse (a relative, say, who dies at home) as ritually impure. The ritual in question prescribes the burning of a red cow, whose ashes “wash away” the impurity. With the destruction of the sacrificial system, the ritual ceased, but we still study it for what it can teach us.

It is, say the rabbis, a hok, the technical term for legislation with no logic behind it. “Don’t even look for reasons,” warns Kli Yakar. It is something we do on blind faith, a sign of our absolute loyalty to God.

Human beings do all sorts of things with no apparent logic to them, so except for the oddity of this one, the idea that we do things without obvious justification is not particularly scandalous. We happily light Shabbat candles, for example, presumably with logical justification; we would continue doing so, however, even if someone proved that justification false.

But an ultraconservative strand of our tradition takes the matter further. K’dushat Levi maintains that all of Torah is a hok. Even if some things are logical, we are not permitted to look for the logic. As the Ba’al Akedah explains, “Trying to explain mitzvot leads to not doing them, because we may conclude that the reason that gave rise to them no longer obtains in our time.”

These two commentators have in mind modern Jews, many of whom we would nowadays call Reform, but not just Reform. Other modern strands of the 19th-century movement toward reform — people we now consider Conservative or Reconstructionist — also sought the reasoning behind mitzvot, since what seems rational for one era may be irrational for another. Once you couldn’t have women rabbis; now you can, for example.

On what grounds could Halacha be viewed as changeable, if not on account of the logic that had seemed perfectly sound once but then failed the test of time? For the traditionalists, it followed that it is dangerous to look for logic.

But it was not just the traditionalists who tended toward extremes; the reformers too developed a position that went too far. “The Talmud was right for its time, and we are right for ours,” said the 19th-century rabbi Samuel Holdheim, not just about ancient ethical injunctions that seem immoral by current standards, but about absolutely everything — even, in theory, keeping Shabbat on Saturday, when the rest of our culture marks off Sunday as the proper day of rest. Maybe the day of Shabbat is changeable also.

One set of extremists said tradition always trumps reason; the other set thought it never does. For one side, the absence of logic was a virtue, demonstrating faith. For the other, it was an excuse by which even the most time-honored ceremony could be dismissed as out of date.

Most of us would reject the extreme reasoning of K’dushat Levi and Ba’al Ha’akedah, but we would also find troubling those who took the reform option to its ultimate conclusion. The truth must lie somewhere in the middle.

But where? How much logic should we demand of tradition? How much logic can we do without? Should our view of Torah change with history? If so, how much and in what ways?

In the necessary absence of certainty on such matters, all we can do is take our stand and hope it is right — trusting that hesitant and humble discussion with people on the other side will sharpen our clarity and vitiate the tendency toward extremes. What we should avoid is the judgmental charge that the other side is stupidly naive or wantonly sinful.

Our sedra delivers the law of the red heifer with the remark, Zot hatorah adam ki yamut b’ohel…. “This is the rule: If a human being dies in a tent….” Our rabbis read it as, “This is the rule: A human being dies in a tent.” At the moment of death, what the Chafetz Chaim calls harega hagadol, “the great moment,” life’s grandiose certainties collapse into the equivalent of a simple tent. All that is left is the hope that we succeeded in living righteously.

God must know that we cannot have known for sure what righteousness comprises. Surely, then, we need not have been altogether right; we need just to have been serious in our quest, to have rejected extremes, and to have dealt with those on the other side with the charity that comes from recognizing that they, no less than we, are trying to do their best.

Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, cofounder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He is the coeditor, with David Arnow, of My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Jewish Lights).

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