Parashat Hukat -- June 27, 2015

This week's parashah opens with concerns regarding the power of life: first the Red Heifer that ritually purifies a person defiled by touching a corpse, and then the laws of coming in contact with the dead.
Once upon a time I thought such laws primitive. Who worries with ritual impurity from coming near or touching a corpse. Such primitive ideas! Such superstition!
But these ideas flow directly from the ineffable power of life, the mystery of the difference between life and death, the profundity of the sacred within all living beings, particularly humans. Anyone who has been present at the death of a person has experienced internally the polar opposites that occur in just a few moments: the presence and absence of life.
Our ancestors revered the difference, and embedded the respect for life in ritual. We often refer to such things as superstition. Yet, see how the absence of sensitivity to life's inexpressible sanctity has surrounded us with death. Pope John Paul II referred to the U.S. as a culture of death: supporting abortions freely obtained, our obsession with guns, blaming the poor for their poverty. Perhaps the Biblical world had it right: life and death both reveal a power that sanctifies or curses life.
This week we have seen, perhaps accidentally, the triumph of the power of life. After the obscene murders in Charleston, Americans coalesced to revere life, arm in arm, voices indistinguishable in song to overcome the fear, sadness and darkness. The Supreme Court first spread health care to the masses by allowing the ACA to move forward and enabling millions of Americans to continue to obtain affordable health care. The following day the Supreme Court declared that the love between same sex couples mirrors the love between opposite sex couples and is therefore deserving of the rights granted by government to those couples who choose marriage.
In each affirmation of life: coming together after murder, enabling healing care and overcoming the prejudices against same sex marriage, we witness and further the power of life over death. We witnessed the blind joy; the exultation not at victory but at liberation; the triumph of goodness over evil. "Therefore choose life," the Torah demands, "in order that you and your children may live."
Choosing life means rejecting death and promoting that which increases life. Perhaps our ancestors needed the impurity of death in order to reject the embrace of death, to choose life, in each and every circumstance.
Perhaps Americans face this same series of choices. Will we embrace death or life? The political culture of lies, the gun culture promoting fear and death, the denial of affordable health care to the poor, rejects the ineffable beauty of the divine our ancestors found in the purity laws and the entrancing power inherent in both death and life.
Perhaps the greatest repudiation of God in modern life is not atheism, but the embrace of death over life. This week's parashah leads us in the right direction, and this week's events, emerging from the death trap of the previous week, demonstrates that forces of life can surely prevail if we are willing to work to enhance life. "Therefore choose life, that you and your children may live."