King Solomon—the man the Bible calls the wisest who ever lived—admitted there was one commandment in the Torah he simply could not understand. He wrote in Ecclesiastes that he had “set my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly” (Ecclesiastes 1:17), but one law defeated him.
According to the Sages, this refers to law the red heifer.
This Shabbat, Jews around the world read Parshat Parah, the special Torah portion describing the ritual of the red heifer—a completely red cow, without blemish, that was slaughtered and burned, its ashes mixed with water and then sprinkled on anyone who had become ritually impure through contact with the dead. This ritual is considered the quintessential chok, a law that can’t be explained through logic or reason. Even Solomon couldn’t understand it.
And yet there is a very specific reason we read this passage now, in these weeks between the holidays of Purim and Passover.
Jewish law requires us to begin studying the laws of Passover thirty days before the holiday begins—and thirty days before Passover is Purim. The countdown has started. But in Temple times, before you could bring the Passover offering, you had to be ritually pure. And if you had been in proximity to a human corpse, you required the purification described in Parshat Parah. That purification took seven days. Which meant if you were impure and waited too long, you simply missed Passover. Parshat Parah is therefore read on the Shabbat after Purim as a public alarm: if you need purification, start now.
Today, we have no Temple. We have no ashes of the red heifer. According to Jewish law, we are all ritually impure, every one of us. And so we read Parshat Parah not as operational instruction but as active memory—a statement that we have not forgotten these laws, that we are preparing for the day when they will again be operative. The reading is an act of faith.
But the Torah portion is not the whole story of this Shabbat. This week’s haftarah (the reading from the prophets) comes from Ezekiel 36:16–38, and it opens a different path to purification entirely. One that is available to us right now.
Ezekiel is not speaking about ritual impurity when he addresses the Jewish people in this prophecy. He is speaking about something far more serious. The idolatry, the violence, the moral corruption that had overtaken Jewish society. The people have defiled the land not through contact with the dead, but through the choices they made while very much alive.
If the impurity Ezekiel describes is caused by moral failure, then purification must come through its opposite. Rabbi Norman Lamm, speaking on Shabbat Parah in 1969, put it plainly: we purify ourselves through chesed (acts of loving kindness)—through feeding the hungry, clothing those without, offering friendship to the lonely, comforting the bereaved. These acts don’t merely improve the world. They sanctify God’s name. They undo, in some measure, the defilement Ezekiel mourns.
The red heifer’s ashes are not available to us. The Temple is not standing. But the work of purification is not suspended. As we spend the next few weeks preparing ourselves and our homes for Passover, we would do well to remember that the thirty-day countdown is not only about chametz (unleavened bread which is forbidden on Passover). Ezekiel has already told us what purification looks like when the Temple is gone: feed someone who is hungry. Comfort someone who is grieving. Show up for someone who is alone. These acts sanctify God’s name before the world—and that, the prophet makes clear, is what ultimately brings Israel home.
The Exodus isn’t background to the Bible. It’s the heartbeat. Every covenant, every prophet, every psalm of redemption references and builds from that one foundational night. When you understand how the Jewish people have relived this story for three millennia — not just remembered it, but relived it — you read Scripture with new eyes. And you get to know the people you pray for as they know themselves. That’s why you need to read Passover from the Inside: A Jewish Guide for Christian Readers.
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