Story Section:
True Life
Rabbi Tuvia Bolton
Judaism isn’t just a religion. Religion deals primarily with the soul and afterlife while Judaism deals with these things plus improving all existence; spiritual, emotional and physical.
And this is done by something no other religion has: Mitzvot = Commandments. True, other beliefs have rituals, signs and symbols; but none even claim to have commandments given directly by the Creator, as the Jews claim happened at Sinai.
In fact, there are three types of commandments: Logical ones like not killing etc. Religious ones like eating Matzo on Passover etc. and totally illogical ones called “Chukim”.
This week's Torah portion begins with and is named after the last type: the complicated and completely illogical commandment of the Red Cow.
According to this commandment a Jew who became ‘impure’ by contact with a dead body can never enter the Temple unless he/she is purified by being ‘sprinkled’ with specially prepared ashes of a totally red (slaughtered and burnt) cow.
The law that dead bodies create impurity and the ashes of a Red Cow negate it ... opposes intelligence. It’s only done because G-d commanded it.
To understand this, m,,,, here is a story I heard from Rabbi Dryfus, who was born in France and became the Shilach of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in the Israeli city of Natanya, that happened in New York some twenty plus years ago.
