Law of the Land: Hukkat

I’m just coming out of two weeks of immersive classes on Zoom through my seminary.

This past week, we studied Jewish funerals and baby welcoming/covenanting.

We created rituals to honor these two important ends of life in ways perhaps never done before—for individuals and populations that past generations could have never imagined in our rapidly changing world.

While endings can be sad, do we fight and deny them, and only welcome the new with open arms and delight?

Can we honor both?

It felt very apropos to what is happening in our country and world today.

Front and center in my mind are the Jan. 6th Insurrection hearings, and all the new Supreme Court rulings on abortion, climate, guns.

How they will change our lives.

How many more people will die.

Whether our Democracy is dying.

Whether our Democracy was ever really alive, or was it just an illusion.

These decisions have been like an unstoppable waterfall over the past weeks.

Are these waters causing death, or cleansing? Or both?

Speaking of water, over the past month, the water coming out of my tap has been very smelly--a really dirty, sewage smell. I began to wonder if there was something dead and rotting in the tank.

The building finally got a plumber in this week to clean it. It was filthy. Who knows how long it had been since the last cleaning.

This week’s parsha, Hukkat, is named for the laws of ritual purification regarding those who come into contact with the dead.

Niddah is the word used to denote impurity.

It’s the same word used to describe a woman in the middle of her menstrual period.

The root meaning of niddah (Hebrew letters, nun-dalet-hey), implies distancing, pushing away, excluding; a menstruating woman is considered impure and must be distanced from the camp.

But menstruation is about fluid cleansing her body of that which has died, so the cycle can begin again and new possibilities can be born. 

Humans are not good at accepting this cycle of life. We fight it. We’re afraid of it. We push it away. We keep it at a distance.

But death has to happen; it is what feeds new life as the old literally becomes compost to nourish the new.

Maybe that’s what’s happening in our country right now.

It’s been a long time since the American Republic began.

Since the Revolution, our democracy has expanded towards greater inclusivity, while recent trends have taken us in the opposite direction, towards greater exclusivity.

The old is wreaking havoc before it goes out, fighting its death to the very end.

Here is my prayer for the week:

While we honor that which may have started out as an improvement to the old, may new waters wash away that which is rotten.

And may the dying nourish new life and possibilities that come forth from it. 


And please say Amen.