Ritual Cleansing and the New Normal

​The beauty of reading the Torah on an annual cycle is that, while the words remain the same from year to year, we do not. Our reading each year should be deeper, informed by who we are now and the times in which we live. This year, the times certainly make for some interesting reading.

My husband goes grocery shopping approximately every two weeks, or when we run out of milk. He brings the groceries home from the store, places them all on the front step outside our door, and wipes everything down before we bring them inside. We wash our hands.​ Our offices are closed and we work from home. Our kids' daycare is closed and our toddler is blowing through every movie on Disney Plus (she likes Moana and Finding Nemo and does not like Toy Story). We video chat with our parents and attend zoom happy hours with our friends. We held a baby naming for our second daughter on zoom. We wash our hands some more.​ This is our new normal.​ This is the world in which we live.​

Three and a half months into the Coronavirus pandemic shut down in the US, we're reading parsha Chukkat​​ this week and for the first time the dry account of ritual purification grips me as I read it.​ The painstaking detail of selecting and slaughtering a perfect red cow, and the subsequent descriptions of the cleansing rituals required of all those involved in the process, is a slow and somewhat repetitive read.

"The kohen shall wash his garments and bathe his flesh in water, and then he may reenter the camp, and the kohen shall be unclean until evening. The one who burns it shall wash his clothes in water and cleanse his body in water, and he shall be unclean until evening. A ritually clean person shall gather the cow's ashes and place them outside the camp in a clean place, and it shall be as a keepsake for the congregation of the children of Israel for sprinkling water, for cleansing. The one who gathers the cow's ashes shall wash his clothes, and he shall be unclean until evening." Numbers 19:7-9

Why? Why do we go through this elaborate ritual for cow's ashes? Because the ashes are essential to purify people who have encountered death: "he who touches the corpse of any human being shall be impure for seven days," "when a person dies in a tent, whoever enters the tent and whoever is in the tent shall be impure seven days," "and in the open, anyone who touches a person who was killed or who died naturally, or human bone, or a grave, shall be impure seven days." Numbers 19:11-16

Parsha Chukkat is filled with death. Miriam and Aaron die, and Moses is sentenced to death. In a normal year, these deaths would be the focus of my attention. Leaving aside the details of sprinkling cow's ashes for purification, I would ponder these individual deaths and what they tell us about the ways we mourn family and the ways we mourn community leaders. But this is not a normal year. Instead, I wonder about the everyday Israelite who encounters death unexpectedly in a tent or in the open, and how their ritual of sprinkling cow's ashes and bathing is so familiar to my own cleansing routine of disinfecting groceries and washing hands.

As if to reinforce the comparison, parsha Chukkat also features a plague of deadly serpents, which kill many people. God sent the serpents to punish the Israelites for complaining (again) about leaving Egypt for the desert. In response to the serpents, the Israelites begged for mercy. "The people came to Moses and said, 'We sinned by speaking against God and against you. Intercede with God to take away the serpents from us!' And Moses interceded for the people." Numbers 21:7. God, as always, showed mercy, but God did not take away the serpents. The serpents didn't miraculously disappear with a change in the weather. Instead, God instructed Moses to create a copper serpent staff, which would heal anyone who looked at it. The serpents became part of their new normal.

​This year, I​ see us all in this text. I see us ​wearing face masks, wiping down groceries, washing our hands more frequently​ and more vigorously​, holding ourselves apart from each other, ​waving instead of shaking hands, giving air hugs from six feet apart, ​quarantining.​ We do this to protect ourselves and to protect each other. I do this so that when I take my baby to the doctor, I can answer "no" when the nurse at the door asks her screening questions: "Do you have any flu-like symptoms? Cough, fever, difficulty breathing? Have you tested positive for the Coronavirus? Have you been in contact with anyone who has tested positive for the Coronavirus?" We do this because our world is encountering death every day and, like the Israelites, we need to protect ourselves and our community.

As I write this, the number of US deaths from Covid-19 is near 130,000.​ I know people who have gotten sick and recovered. I know people who have lost loved ones. I'm sure you do too. Our new normal is alternatingly scary (will I or someone I love get sick today?) and monotonous (what day of the week is it?). I take comfort from parsha Chukkat in the fact that society has survived and adapted to pandemics and plagues before, and I have to believe we can do it again.