Biblical Snake Spray
I spent much of this week studying a biblical text that I didn’t understand. You see, last week, I had someone ask me about the tradition of the “red heifer.” I found this rather strange, it’s not a common question, in fact, it was not one that I had heard before. And then a second person asked the same question. This time I was wise enough to ask what sparked the curiosity in this peculiar ancient purification ritual.
“Dig.” A new cable mini-series, had featured the red heifer prominently in its inaugural episode. Well of course, I had to watch for myself. It begins by displaying the biblical text from Numbers, and our maftir from this morning:
“Instruct the Israelite people to bring you a red cow without blemish, in which there is not defect and on which no yoke has been laid.” From there we are brought to a barn in Norway, where a group of Hasidic men arrive for the birth of a newborn calf. Upon inspecting her it is declared that indeed, she is without blemish and without variance in coloring. She is, indeed, a parah adumah.
Parah adumah, sometimes translated as red heifer, more appropriately translated as brown cow is among the strangest rituals presented in the Torah. We are given details about slaughtering the cow and burning it into ashes along with cedar, hyssop and crimson. These ashes become integral in the formula for removing impurity from an individual who had come into contact with a corpse.
In the days of the Temple in Jerusalem the priest would use the ashes of the parah adumah to purify people who were in a ritually impure state in order make them suitable to eat of the Pesah sacrifice—it is because of this tradition that our ancient rabbis chose to have this reading as a special maftir leading up to Pesah, reminding us that even though we do not worship through ritual sacrifice, we are still obligated to seek purity in the days leading up to the holiday.
This text has baffled our sages and commentators throughout history. When I say that I spent the week studying a text that I do not understand, I do so with no embarrassment.
Our midrash imagines that King Solomon, known for his wisdom, said, “I have labored to understand the word of God and have understood it all, except for the ritual of the brown cow.” Some of our commentators focus on this ritual as an example of a law that defies rational explanation. They cite it as an opportunity to express our whole faith in God, following instructions without truly understanding their purpose. This type of answer has never spoken to me. I don’t think that God intentionally created rules or rituals that were simply meant to force the Israelites to show blind faith. Granted, there are certainly potential prooftexts that argue against my point from an academic standpoint, but my relationship with God demands that there be reason behind commandments, even if I’m not totally clear on the reason.
And I had certainly never come up with a good reason for the rituals associated with the brown cow. Until now.
Earlier this week, while already pondering this text, I took my children to the critter house at Leslie Science and nature center. It is a small room with animals—rabbits, iguanas, turtles, frogs…and snakes. I am petrified of snakes. They are literally the creatures of my nightmares.
When I was a child I had recurring dreams in which I was surrounded by boa constrictors and rattle snakes. My parents, either because of their wisdom or pushed to their wits end, invented “snake spray.” Each night before bed they would spray my room and hallway to keep me safe from snakes. Due to the wonders of the placebo effect, it worked.
As long as the snake spray was keeping me safe, I was able to go to bed at night. Okay, it was really a can of solarcaine, but I was four…
Reflecting back on this while trying to keep cool in the presence of the snakes at the critter house, I realized that the ashes of the parah adumah and the rituals associated with them were biblical “snake spray.” The ritual protected the Israelites from their fears. The power of the ashes transcended what was likely one of the community’s biggest fears—death. From a technical perspective, the Israelites did not understand death. They did not have the scientific information to process its causes or the medical advances to combat it. They weren’t sure what was happening with a dead body.
Death caused confusion by day and haunted dreams by night. The community needed a mechanism for dealing with this. And so purification ritual of the parah adumah was designed. It was not an arbitrary prescription. Elements of this ritual were seen elsewhere in purification rituals throughout the Ancient Nearest. While the ritual seems outlandish to us, it was familiar to our ancestors—and that familiarity brought with it an air of comfort. One of the reasons that snake spray worked for me was that I knew of bug spray—certainly if this remedy worked on bugs it was not so farfetched that it would work on snakes. So to for the Israelites, who found comfort in a ritual with elements of the familiar.
The ashes of the parah adumah did nothing tangible to make an individual “pure” but the process of ritual was invaluable in acknowledging the concern for encountering impurity and transforming their mindset (and that of the community) to again being pure.
Of course, I might not be right about this. Maybe the ritual of the parah adumah has nothing in common with “snake spray.” One of the values of having elements of our Torah that are not fully understood is that it invites us to explore the text in a way that makes it personal. If the Torah had given a clear reason for the specifics of the ritual surrounding the parah adumah it would limit our creative process of encountering the text.
By being forced to engage in the midrashic process of reading between the lines for understanding we are able to take a bizarre text and translate it in a personal and contemporary manner. That is a second message of the reading of this special maftir this morning. It is not only a reminder to enter into the holiday “pure.” It also reminds us to engage with our story with an open mind, exploring its meaning, making it our own.