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Chukim

     The Red Cow must be so completely red that even two hairs of another color disqualify it. The two hairs reminds you of Ephriam and Judah who can’t seem to get together to make the sacrifice whole. The ashes of the Cow were divided into three parts. One part was stored for future use to mix with the ashes of the next Red Cows. A second part was divided among the twenty four divisions of Kohanim for use in purifying people. The third part was kept in an area next to the wall of the Courtyard for safekeeping. In verse 14 of chapter 19, it tells you about the laws of contamination for one dying in his tent. Basically, you don’t want to be in it or under it at the time! The roof over the corpse has the effect of “spreading” the contamination under the air space it covers. So, if a dead body is in one room of a house, anywhere in that house is contaminated. Even an open container is contaminated. You’ll notice in verse 16, if you even touch a grave you’re unclean for seven days. Yet in today’s world we have people going to visit their dead relatives’ graves sometimes on a weekly basis. You’ll never see in Torah the practices we hold so near and dear today when a person passes away. After all, we have to mortgage the farm so we can put our loved one in the most expensive, air tight, water proof, bug resistant casket we can, right? And how could you think of having them “displayed” without a three hundred dollar spray draped across the casket making up a total bill you’ll be making payments on until the cows come home, or you go home, whichever comes first. If you stop and think about it, wouldn’t it be better if we all just did as the patriarchs did and bury the dead the same day as they died?

    No three days of agonizing and viewing the body. No ten hour days at the funeral home until you feel if the grief doesn’t kill you, the exhaustion will. How hard we make it on ourselves by not following the dictates of the Torah! Ok, ok, I’ll get off my soapbox now. I know we’re all caught up in the mandates of our society and change is “hard.” In Chapter 20 we see Moshe messing up, yep, even the best of us do it. We see the rock incident that cost Moshe his ticket into the Promised Land. YHVH said, “speak”, Moshe said, “I’ll strike”, and YHVH said, take a hike! By using the definite article “the” in front of the word rock in verse 20:8, you see it was not any ordinary rock. The sages teach this was the rock the angel revealed to Hagar when her son Ishmael was dying of thirst (Gen. 21:19) and from which Moshe was commanded to draw water nearly 40 years earlier. We know today who that literal rock stood for, Yeshua the Messiah. He was only to be struck down once, not twice, as Moshe had portrayed in what he did. However, the Hebrew people who do not know Yeshua, do not have the foggiest clue about the symbolism of the rock. If you read some back commentary from some of the Rabbi’s on it, they have some real unusual reasoning on why and how the rock incident happened. They say Moshe “couldn’t find” the correct rock or it would have opened with him speaking to it. So he just decided to strike any old rock in the same manner he did the first time. It would be something like, what worked for me once will work for me again idea. Another one says Moshe should have spoken to one rock after another until he found the right one, but the people angered him so much he just struck the closest rock. It’s called too much study for the Rabbis, and not enough understanding (understanding=Yeshua). In Chapter 20 verses 22-29, we see the death of Aaron. It was on the first of Av in the fortieth year of Israel’s wandering in the Wilderness. Since it says on the first of the month of Av, we know it was on a new moon Sabbath when Aaron died. The month begins with the new moon. He was 123 years old. We often forget that Aaron didn’t get to go into the Promised Land either.

     He did get to see his son Elazar (name means servant) clothed in the vestments of the High Priest before he died. Afterwards Aaron died by what the sages call, a kiss by God. They believe this is the most exalted form of death, likening it to pulling a hair from milk, meaning the spirit leaves the body without resistance. Another Rabbi explains that to the extent that people sin in life and establish a bond between their soul and the pleasures of this world, it becomes difficult for them to part from physical life. For those who become totally enthralled in this life, the sages liken death unto pulling embedded thistles from sheep’s wool. Talking about hard here, some of those Rabbi’s should have lived in the South and tried pulling an embedded tick out of the inside of a dog’s earJ. We know that Aaron was mourned by everyone for he was a peacemaker. Even Moshe was not as universally mourned because Moshe had to make judgments and sometimes admonish people. So naturally that lessened the love that some felt for Moshe as opposed to Aaron. In Chapter 21 the people begin to mumble and complain again. You’ll notice in verse 6 that it says YHVH sent fiery serpents among them. It did not say that Satan sent them. If this incident happened today, I’m sure we’d have people rebuking Satan right and left. We are God’s people they would say, and therefore no harm should come to us, so you snake spirit I bind you in the name of Jesus to quit biting God’s people. You know it’s true! We’ve lost the concept of walking in cursing or blessing, if you’re born again or not. Therefore, you can increase your own sorrow like the Israelites did by mumbling and complaining. They were mumbling not only against Moshe, but even against God himself.

     So Moshe intervened once again for them, thus the brass serpent comes on the scene. It’s no coincidence that it was made of brass and brass stands for judgment. If they looked “up” at the serpent (obedience), they were healed. It’s also not a coincidence that the word for serpent in Hebrew, nachash, has the same letter value as the word Mashiach. In Hebrew if there’s a same letter value, the two words are related in some manner. We know one helped bring destruction to mankind (serpent) and one brought life to mankind (Yeshua). At the end of this parashah you’ll see in Chapter 21, verse 27, a reference to the poets, or some translations may read storytellers, or even one who speaks in proverbs. Actually these people are Balaam and his father Beor. Our old friend the prophet for “prophet” appears on the scene. Moab had been successfully resisting Sihon’s invasion until he hired Balaam and Beor to curse it (Rashi). They celebrated Sihon’s victory with a poem that declared that Heshbon, which had been the Moabite stronghold, had become Sihon’s capital. The Moab diety was called Chemosh. So in this parashah we see some things that YHVH told the people to do they could not understand. A lot of things they were told way back then not to do, we understand today the “why” aspect of it. For example, YHVH said not to eat pork. When someone said, don’t sweat the small stuff, the pig thought, I’ll go one better, I won’t sweat at all, and hence the problem lies. All the poisons are kept in its’ body for us to consume when we eat it. Yet there are still some things YHVH says to do and not to do that we haven’t figured out the why of it yet. For instance, do you know why He said to observe the new moon as a Sabbath? Why do you neither buy nor sell, nor work, on the first crescent of the moon? What does that have to do with anything? But you need to keep it because YHVH said to. Those are the Chukim, or the, “I can’t understand why I have to do this laws.” So we end up back at the same question, do you want blessing or cursing going on in your life? If blessing, then begin to keep even the commands you “don’t understand.”