What can ritual do? Everything. Just ask the book of Numbers.
By RACHEL SABATH BEIT-HALACHMISyracuse mikveh 311(photo credit: Michael Freund)
What can ritual do? Everything. Just ask the book of Numbers. According to its verses, ritual can purify the impure, turn an impure person into one ready for marital relations, determine whether a woman is guilty of adultery, and even make the presence of death somehow vanish. Most of the time, it depends on water – the right kind, in the right amount, and at the right time.Water purification rituals are still essential in the most primal areas of our Jewish human existence. Without ritual immersions in water, it wouldn’t be possible to eat, have marital sex or prepare a dead body for burial, since we need such cleansing to uphold the observances of kashrut, marital sexual relations, and the honoring of the deceased. Water brings us closer to God while we wrestle with the most complex issues of what it means to be alive.Just sprinkle some water or blood here or there – according to this week’s Torah portion, Hukkat (Numbers 19-22) – and that which was once impure becomes pure. That person who was necessarily sent outside the camp is allowed back in. Even that person or object touched by death can become pure again: “He who touches the corpse of any human being shall be unclean for seven days” (Numbers 19:11) – but thereafter? “And you shall wash your clothes on the seventh day, and you shall be clean” (Numbers 31:24).Ritual washing – usually performed today in a mikve (“ritual bath”) or through washing one’s hands – is a powerful management not only of real public health concerns, but also of the fear of death. Being in the presence of death is not death itself, but it may feel that way to us, and so God commands that we ritually purify ourselves before reentering the larger community of humanity.ACCORDING TO the most famous anthropologists of ritual, from Clifford Gertz (1926-2006) to Mary Douglas (1921-2007), ritual orders a chaotic world that would otherwise be intolerable. But for those of us who take ancient ritual seriously as part of a system of faith, it also serves to help us order time, perform ethical acts, and ensure that we live a life that is in keeping with what God demands of us. We need ritual in order to fulfill our human – and Jewish – calling.In one of her most famous books, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966) – listed as one of the 100 most influential works of non-fiction – Douglas studies the differences among the sacred, the clean and the unclean in different societies and times. While she makes startling conclusions about why the ancient Israelites understood some animals to be unclean and others to be clean, it isn’t until a much later book, In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers (1993), that she focuses on the role of water in desert and Temple rituals of purification.Water was a serious matter in the Israelites’ journey through the desert. But water plays a larger role than that of literally or ritually purifying the unclean. Water is life itself. The Mishna says the well that accompanies the Israelites through the desert is there in the merit of Miriam, as it disappears once she dies. Without water, the Israelites become thirsty and demanding. God tells Moses and Aharon to strike a rock once so it will bring forth water, but Moses strikes it twice – and God punishes him for this lack of faith, telling him that he will not be permitted to enter the Promised Land (Numbers 20:3-13).God’s connection to humanity through water is a powerful trope throughout the Bible. Use it to water your crops and to cleanse yourself from impurity, and it can give you life, even in the face of death. But misuse it, become too demanding or impatient with it, and God will withhold it, making life impossible.Because of Moses’s impatience, anger or perhaps disbelief (according to the midrash in Numbers Rabba 19), the biblical text refers to the waters that emerge from the rock after he strikes it twice as the “waters of contention” – waters that emerged in anger or disagreement.While they may quench the thirst of the Israelites, their children and their animals, the waters symbolize disobedience and serve ultimately to distance Moses from God.Ritual is a powerful tool of communication between us and God. While it can bring us nearer to God when we perform it in normative, traditional ways with proper intention, when we perform it without patience or proper understanding – regardless of the pressures on us to do otherwise – it can distance us from God. And when, like Moses, we engage in ritual while we are angry and impatient, refusing to hear and wait, that spirit of anger and impatience will likely cause our untimely death.It is when we take it seriously and focus spiritually on the higher goal the ritual enables us to reach, it can give us new spiritual life and cleanse us in the most profound ways. ■The writer is a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and teaches at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem. Her column appears monthly.
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