Parshas Chukas: 5785

“This is the chok of the Torah… take for you a red-haired, unblemished cow….” (Bamidbar 19:2)

Parah Adumah is the ultimate chok, because it contains an internal contradiction. How can the same object make the administrator unpure, while purifying the recipient? One might easily conclude that Parah Adumah simply makes no sense. This, however, is undoubtably false. (Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, based on Daas Torah by Rav Yerucham Levovitz)

“But, why?”

This wasn’t a toddler’s whining, but old-lady-me trying to figure this out. I was standing with my sons, staring at the mysterious innards of my car engine. My sons are very mechanically inclined. They get it from their father. Me, I’m able to fill my car with gas, and that’s as much as I know about its inner workings.

But then the car’s AC broke. There are some necessities in life and some luxuries. To me, AC is a necessity. Like a pikuach nefesh necessity. But our local mechanic couldn’t fix this. (That’s because the car is so old he didn’t have the parts.) It meant going to a special mechanic in Yerushalayim.

Confession: I’ve never taken the car to a mechanic. Ever. I wouldn’t even understand what he’d tell me needs to be fixed. (We recently replaced the fuel ejector pump. Do you know what that is?)