Parashat Ki Tisa | Rabbi Shuli Passow | March 7, 2026

In 1950,

uh, just a few years after finishing his

service as a Jewish chaplain in the US

Army and participating in the liberation

of Bhinbald,

an Orthodox rabbi named Robert Marcus

suffered the unfathomable tragic loss of

his oldest child.

and his personal anguish was compounded

by the horrors that he had witnessed at

Bhinvald in particularly the in

particularly the children that he had

seen there.

He was a man who was struggling to

navigate this profound loss and his

confrontation with evil on earth.

And in the depth of his pain, he turned

to what might we might consider to be an

unlikely source.

He wrote a letter to Albert Einstein.

Einstein, who was the greatest

scientific mind of the time,

studying the en uh en energy and matter

and existence.

And

Rabbi Marcus was not so much interested

in the physics per se.

But he wanted to know what Einstein

thought happened to the soul, to human

energy after death.

So he wrote,

"It is a law of science that matter can

never be destroyed.

Things are changed, but the essence does

not cease to be."

Shall we say that matter lives and the

spirit perishes?

Shall we believe that those who die

before the natural measure of their days

are forever hurled into the darkness of

oblivion?

Shall we believe that the millions who

have died the death of martyrs for truth

have utterly perished?

Without immortality,

the world is a moral chaos.

And I inquire in a spirit of

desperation. Is there in your view no

comfort? no consolation for what has

happened.

Am I to believe that my beautiful

darling child has been forever wedded

into dust? That there was nothing within

him which has defied the grave and

transcended the power of death.

That's where he ended his letter. And

Einstein wrote a beautiful short three-s

sentence response

that in no way provided any answers to

these questions.

In fact, he essentially told Rabbi

Marcus that the answers he was seeking

are far beyond the realm of science,

beyond rational thinking, beyond

scientific knowing and knowledge. And

for that reason,

they are the subject of religion and

faith.

I want to turn now to think a little bit

about our special Torah reading for this

morning. We'll put that story of

Einstein and Rabbi Marcus aside for the

moment. We're going to read today a

special maftier. Today is Shabbat Parah.

We'll bring the second Torah over here

for the mair aliyah and we will read

chapter 19 of the book of numbers and

the beginning

tells us

this is the

law of the Torah that God commanded.

And what is it?

The red hepher.

Some of you may be thinking, I never

heard of this one. The red heer. Parah

aduma.

What is the red hepher? It is perhaps

the strangest

the strangest mitzvah that we have.

You can take a look if you like on page

880.

This ritual

involves

taking a red heer, a perfect female cow

that has not one hair of any other

color.

It is not blemished. It has no

blemishes, not a scratch.

It has never been worked. Never felt the

yoke upon its neck.

and it's taken outside of the camp by

the priest

and it's slaughtered outside of the camp

which is not where slaughtering usually

happens. Sacrifices happen inside the

camp in the temple or the Mishkan at the

altar. It's slaughtered outside of the

camp. Its blood will be sprinkled

and it is burned. It is burned entirely.

Its hide flesh and blood, its dung

included. And the priest shall take

cedarwood, hissip, and a and crimson

stuff, a a red thread, and throw them

into the fire consuming the cow. So all

of this stuff gets burned together

completely until it forms ashes. And

then those ashes are taken and they are

stored. They are stored outside of the

camp for what? for a future purification

ritual that happens when someone has

contracted tuma when someone has become

ritually impure by contacting a dead

body.

So this is a very very strange ritual

and it is also paradoxical

because everyone who is involved in the

process of the slaughtering and the

burning and the ashes, everyone who's

involved in that process becomes impure

themselves

through creating this substance that

allows for someone else to become pure.

So it's strange. It's paradoxical.

This ritual is so incomprehensible.

A ritual that creates purity but in the

process creates impurity that according

to a midrash in Coheld Rabba even King

Solomon the wisest man of all did not

understand it. Midash says that King

Solomon declared, "I succeeded in

understanding the whole Torah, but when

I reached this chapter about the red

hepher, I searched and probed and

questioned. I expected to become wise,

but it remained beyond my grasp."

The wisest man in the world, it remained

beyond his grasp.

So the ritual itself is very strange and

also strange is the appearance the use

of this uh ritual the appearance of this

ritual in a midash that imagines the

children of Israel after they have

crossed the Red Sea but before they get

to Sinai before they receive the entire

Torah at Revelation

that they receive two mitzvot from God

as a little like a little trailer to the

movie, right? A little a little little

taste, a little forbice, little ambush

that they get a couple of laws to

introduce them to this idea of Torah

that they will will receive in its

entirety

just a little while down the road. So,

what were the laws that God gives the

people of Israel at this moment?

According to the midrash,

God gives them the laws of Shabbat

and Paraduma.

I mean, if I wanted to get someone

excited about Judaism and all of the

laws that it was going to encompass, I

think Paraduma would be at the very

bottom of my list to share with people.

So, what is going on here? Shabbat, we

can understand, especially after having

left slavery. This would be very

appealing. the idea of a day of rest

every week and also Shabbat will be

something that is part of their regular

lives. It comes every single week. So

it's introducing them to the rhythm of

Jewish life.

But paradum

it's totally incomprehensible and it's

also something that probably no one will

experience because it is so rare to find

a perfect red heer.

We are told that there have only been

nine instances

of a perfect red hepher existing in the

world. So this was not a mitzvah that

these people most of these people would

ever encounter.

So what is the religious message?

What is the religious message that the

midash is trying to convey to us?

I said uh when I read the opening line

that is a

it is a law of the Torahim.

It's a category of mitzvot that have no

apparent rationale

laws that define rational understanding.

There are lots of other keeping kosher

is one of them. People try to explain

and understand what it is but ultimately

from a religious perspective it is a law

a series of laws that has no rational

explanation. The other main category of

mitzvot is mishbatim

laws that make sense. Laws like do not

kill uh set up court systems uh do honor

your mother and father. Right? These are

all things that make sense. And paradum

is considered to be the ultimate hook of

all the it is the one that makes the

least sense. The commandment we will

never ever understand. The Torah does

not give a reason for it. Doesn't

explain how this ritual is going to

work, how the ashes are going to work in

the purification process. It's totally

totally

incomprehensible.

And the rabbis were very self-conscious

about having this

part of our system, part of our legal

tradition, part of our religious ritual

tradition, having this law that was so

strange. And they imagine

that the nations of the world will taunt

the Jewish people for having the mitzvah

of the red hepher of paradum and really

for having all for having a whole

category of law that are things you do

just without any explanation without any

understanding of why.

And the rabbis say

that we might start to believe the

taunts

that we hear from the nations of the

earth. And we might start to think that

these these

are ma toou that they are meaningless

acts that they are acts of nothingness.

And if we think that, if we begin to

think that, the midrash says, the rabbis

say, remember

ani adoni, I am God who gave you these

commandments. I decreed these statutes

and you have no right to question them.

Many times that we are given in the

Torah, we are told ani adonai. We see

that phrase that affirmation of God as

our God who is giving these

commandments.

So this may not sit so well with you,

right? Sounds a little bit like a parent

saying, "Do it because I said so." And

most of us who have tried that know that

it doesn't go over so well.

But this is what the rabbis tell us that

when we have doubts about these mitzvot,

we need to remember they came from God

and that is why we should do them.

So what does that mean?

What does that mean?

It means that these laws are an exercise

in faith in faith.

They are an exercise in doing something

just because our relationship with God

said that we should. And that becomes

the ability to have faith in a world

where there are many many things that we

do not fully understand.

The rabbis are saying life in our lives

there are things that are far beyond

reason and reason and rational

understanding are actually the wrong

lenses to bring to understand certain

parts of life.

What we need in those moments

is faith.

So let's go back to the midash that

imagines the children of Israel standing

there in between liberation and Sinai

and receiving these two laws this little

taste of Torah and at this stage this

early stage of the nation's development

of their religious development by

teaching the concept of

through the law of the paradum

God was introducing mystery

into their world. God was introducing

them to the need for faith.

Accepting mystery, accepting a world

without answers, the unknowable is a

very uncomfortable posture for human

beings. We are by nature curious,

inquisitive. Just think of a child who's

always asking why, why, why, why. This

is our human instinct.

Soim and the paradum

are an exercise to help us build faith

and to help us build humility

because we accept that there are things

that we do not know in the world that

there is something just beyond our

comprehension and that behind that there

is an ultimate purpose that we may not

ever see.

And I think there are a lot of things in

the world and in our lives that we

simply don't understand. Especially

right now, many of us wake up in the

morning and we hear the news and we

think, "What the heck is going on?"

Though we're probably not saying heck,

most of us,

what is going on? How could we ever

understand some of the things that we

are seeing in our world?

So by introducing

this notion of law

that is there for the purpose of

strengthening our relationship with God,

strengthening our faith, giving us a

lens through which to see the world.

We become better able to walk through

the world of mystery

by doing things that we don't really

understand.

we become better able to live in a world

that we don't really understand.

Otherwise,

we're in despair.

And I want to be very clear.

Embracing mystery, saying that there is

some ultimate purpose that we cannot

see.

This is not saying, "All right, it's all

God's plan. everything is is where what

it should be. I don't have to do

anything about it. I shouldn't feel any

pain about it. No, that is not what it

means. It does not absolve us of the

responsibility to act. It does not

negate the feelings of pain or anger or

confusion that we have when we

experience these incomprehensible

moments in our lives and in the world.

But it gives us a lens through which to

understand

that lets us move as I said without

falling into despair.

And I think this is what Einstein was

trying to convey

to Rabbi Marcus.

He concluded his letter by saying that

in the realm of religion,

we can quote reach the attainable

measure of peace of mind.

We can reach the attainable measure of

peace of mind.

That looking at the world through

mystery, through the lens of mystery and

unknowing

can give us some degree of peace of

mind.

And I want to share with you something

that Einstein wrote 20 years before in

an essay called what I believe.

This essay concluded with an explanation

of what he meant when he called himself

a religious person.

The most beautiful emotion we can

experience is the mysterious.

It is the fundamental emotion that

stands at the cradle of all true art and

science.

He to whom this emotion is a stranger

who can no longer wonder and stand

wrapped in awe is as good as dead a

snuffed out candle.

To sense that behind anything that can

be experienced there is something that

our minds cannot grasp whose beauty and

sublimity subliminity

reaches us only indirectly.

This is religiousness

and this I think is ultimately at the

heart of the para aduma

that part of our religion

is cultivating the ability to accept

things we don't understand.

And this is all something that we need

today. I believe very deeply in our

resilience toolbox.

So I hope that when we read this maftier

aliyah of the para aduma today rather

than looking at it with a critical

quisit inquisitive eye what is this? We

can see it for what I believe it is,

an agitation to do things we don't

understand,

knowing that they will help us live in a

world that we do not always understand

with faith and with humility.

Shabbat shalom.