Parsha Chukat —Through a Chaplain’s Eyes

Introduction to Meditation before Mishebeirach

Meditation before Mishebeirach

Meditation before Kaddish Yatom

I feel that Parsha Chukat, this Shabbat’s parsha, could use a chaplain. Perhaps HaShem put me in the right place at the right time.

The parsha is all facts, few feelings. The first fact is HaShem telling us this is going to be all about Chukat or Statute. Laws are impersonal, no feelings. Here, the first Impossible Dream is to find an unblemished red cow or heifer. How would you feel if you felt that G-d gave you an impossible task?  Your reaction would likely be a feeling, perhaps sadness, perhaps anger, perhaps disappointment, perhaps even reducing your faith in a G-d who is supposed to be rooted in rechem, compassion.

The second set of facts is all about how to cleanse yourself back into purity after coming into contact with a deceased red heifer or with a deceased person, perhaps symbolically interchangeable, as then are both held in high esteem.

Again, these are all facts, like the rechitza and the tahara, the ritualistic double cleansing by the Chevra Kadisha, of the deceased. That ceremony of the Chevra Kadisha today is filled with prayers of respect, apology and emotion. BUT, in this parsha, the purification instructions are all facts.

End-of-life dynamics are highly emotionally charged. Yet, in this parsha, both Miriam and Aaron die, Moses’ own family dies, and there is no mention of emotion. How do you think Moses felt?  Did he wail?  Was Moses stunned into silence?  We do not know. At least a few parshiyot back, when Aaron sees two of his four sons die right in front of him, we read, “And Aaron was silent” … and we learn that Moses trips over his own words, instinctively reaching for the wrong words first.

Finally, this is one of the few parshiyot where the Israelites express anger, both to Moses and to G-d, because, on some levels, they are seen as almost the same. Listen to these three sentences of anger and complaint, one after the other, in this week’s parsha: 

1)  “The people quarreled with Moses and they said, ‘If only we had died with the death of our brothers before the Lord.’”

2) “ Why have you brought the congregation of the Lord to this desert so that we and our livestock should die there?” and

3) “Why have you taken us out of Egypt to bring us to this evil place; it is not a place for seeds, or for fig trees, grapevines, or pomegranate trees, and there is no water to drink.”[The manna was not good enough.]

How do Aaron and Moses respond to this set of emotions from their people?  They do not respond to their people, at least not directly. They move away from their emotion-laden people and attempt to transfer the emotions directly to G-d. We read:

Moses and Aaron moved away from the assembly to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, and they fell on their faces. [Then] the glory of the Lord appeared to them.

 The psychologist Abraham Maslow is the one most often credited with the teaching, “If all you have is a hammer, you make all your problems look like nails.” My occupational hazard is the tendency to look at challenges through a chaplain’s eyes first.

One of the most common questions posed to chaplains is, “I don’t know what to say.” What to say when you don’t know what to say.

We have three guidelines for those questions, as learners love lists:

1.Say nothing and let the one with emotions speak first. The role model for this guideline is the set of so-called friends who sat down next to Job.

2.Try to become aware of what not to say. Why?  Criticism lasts longer than praise. This is explained elegantly in a recent article published online by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The article explains the academic theory of “Negativity Bias,” as to why criticism lasts longer with us than praise. Criticism sticks to our kishkes.

If you want to read that theory in a more Jewish-based text, I recommend Rabbi Telushkin’s book, Words that Hurt, Words that Heal.

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3. Try to develop a repertoire of touching writings others have developed for the moments of intense emotions, the moments of fresh bereavement, and the moments of deep and touching memory, or learn how to shape these words “on the fly.”

Or turn to a chaplain. That is what we do.

Shabbat Shalom.