Sermon: Why are we reading about red cows?

Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 22 March 2025

It’s essentially luck of the draw what Torah reading a child ends up with for their bnei mitzvah. The internet has reduced, if not entirely eliminated, that element of chance, making planning your child’s bneimitzvah so much easier. It’s enabled what I like to call ‘Jewish Family Planning.’ You see, www.hebcal.com – hebcal: Hebrew Calendar -means you can now find out what the Torah reading will be on any Shabbat in the future. So you look at the online Jewish calendar for 13 years ahead and decide on the sidra you would like your child to read. You then work back 13 years and nine months or so and hope that conception will obligingly take place.

So in the old days, a child could be lucky and get a meaty, narrative passage with lots of opportunity for thought and discussion; or they could be less lucky and end up with the sort of passage which Charlie will be reading this morning. It’s about the Parah Adumah, the red heifer. In ancient times, contact with a corpse rendered you spiritually impure. The ritual associated with the red heifer was the way you became spiritually purified. You’ll hear more about that from Charlie when they introduce their Torah reading.

It’s a difficult passage to relate to and there are synagogues, certainly in the Progressive Jewish world, where this passage is not read. In a few verses from the book of Numbers (Numbers 19: 1-10) we read about an arcane ritual which for many, would seem to confirm some old stereotypes about Judaism and Jewish practice. What Charlie is reading is just one of a number of such passages all of which pose the question: what do we do with them, about them?

One approach says “there’s nothing here for me” and rejects virtually any relationship with the text.” Sadly, many seem to choose that option at what seems the worst possible moment. For it’s often done around the age of 13 – hardly a time when intellectual faculties, knowledge and experience don’t have a solid enough foundation on which to construct any coherent position or philosophy. Far from closing oneself off to any path, this should, surely, be a time of keeping oneself open to possibilities. In the interest of full disclosure, I can speak with authority about this because I was probably one of those people.

I’m also equally doubtful about somebody who says, at that sort of age, “this is the truth, this is what we must follow.” Not the best time in life to make any serious judgments or decisions which might be binding on the future.

For that approach argues, “This is God’s word, transmitted to us by Moses”; it portrays him as God’s secretary, faithfully taking down God’s dictation. But what do we do with those sections which make God appear to be acting unjustly? Stoning blasphemers to death; forcing an adulterous wife to undergo trial by ordeal; commanding the Israelites to wipe out this or that people when they enter the Promised land? In brief, what do we do with those parts of the Torah which seem ethically abhorrent to us or which seem to contradict the current state of human knowledge?

Many years ago, when I was running the youth group at West London Synagogue, I arranged for some Lubavitch chasidim to come and talk to the group. You can see how long ago it must have been for Chasidim to agree to step foot in a Reform synagogue…. Somebody asked, “what about carbon 14 testing and fossils proving that the earth is not just several thousand years old? Carbon14 testing may prove to be less reliable as newer, better dating methods emerge.” This is, after all, how scientific knowledge advances and it’s a not-unreasonable argument. But then they added: “but what’s to stop God putting fossils into the ground at the moment of creation?” to which I asked, “but why would a supposedly-benevolent God play games, as it were, with human beings, to sort of bamboozle us?” To which they replied, “to test the strength of our belief.”

These are the sort of logical binds that it’s easy to get into if you are committed to a unified and divine authorship of the Bible, which is beyond questioning.

And it also means, does it not, that you must ascribe the same weight and importance to a statement like “love your neighbour as yourself” to the one in Deuteronomy about not mixing wool and linen in your clothing?

For once you start saying “this is more important than that,” you have stepped outside the framework of divine authorship of the Bible. The response of the traditionalist would probably be like those chasidim, namely: “The text is perfect. Therefore if you’ve got a problem with understanding it, then the fault must be yours – either you are lacking in knowledge or you are wilfully refusing to see the truth.”

Another approach is to see the text as humanly written but divinely inspired. The Bible then becomes the record of a progressive revelation of God to human beings, a record of the ongoing relationship between God and humanity. A record written by human beings over a period of several centuries. So there will be historical inaccuracies and inconsistencies, repetition, different versions of the same episode and so on. Once we see the Bible in that sort of way it’s less surprising to find sections like “stone the blasphemer to death.” It just reflects where society is at that moment in history. Executions, for example, were a public spectacle until the 19thC.

Were we to write the Bible today we would no doubt express ourselves in terms of the culture, philosophy and values of contemporary life. Yet even the nicest of people sometimes come out with some pretty nasty remarks. If we were to say, for example, “I’ll only read literature which doesn’t have any anti-Semitic remarks in it” we’d end up with an extremely short reading list. For the fact is that writers capable of nasty, racist remarks are also capable of producing literature which transcends both time and culture, expressing some eternal truths valid for all times and places; and, through which, we feel which we can almost hear the voice of an Absolute addressing us.

The ‘progressive’ view, if we can call it that, finds this approach really quite liberating. It means we don’t have to accept as literal truth something that strikes us, if not as palpable nonsense, at least as something really hard to swallow; nor do we have to put our moral and ethical sensibilities on hold; nor deny some part of human knowledge.

The difficulty with that approach is that it is less definite. It can see “this” and “this,” recognising untidy contradictions. It doesn’t speak with certainty because the search for God, for truth, for meaning is, by its very nature, a tentative questing and exploration, dealing with greys, not blacks and whites. All of which doesn’t lend itself to definitude and certainty. It means we have to confront the complexities of human reality and human questions. We cannot dismiss them by telling the questioner that there’s something wrong with them or that their question is not valid.

As one of my teachers put it, “Progressives are seldom charismatic. We prefer to persuade rather than seduce or bully and we have fewer absolutes and certainties to sell.”

There is, therefore, a continuum. At one end would be the view which says “this is God’s word, our task is simply to follow it.” At the other end, the approach which says “it’s all a load of rubbish, reject it!” And in between lie a range of positions each of which tries to find some sensible and honest equilibrium between the demands of tradition and those of modernity without in a sense selling out or abdicating on personal responsibility for our religious lives.