Without fail, at times of stress, my baby gets hysterical. She smells it in the air. And it isn’t that we ignore her because we are busy because even if she is played with and fed, it is the change in energy around her that throws her into a tizzy. Not only that, but even when there is a lull in the action, it doesn’t help because the stress was there and is liable to return at any second. So nearly every Friday, where the time is short and stress high, the Sabbath is welcomed with stirring cries.
This is a clear demonstration as to how our environment impacts us, even when the change in the air is intangible. And I don’t believe that as we grow older it stops impacting us. Rather, we are able to control our reaction to the impact, or numb ourselves to the impact, which is then stowed away in our subconscious. With this foundation, we can understand perhaps the strangest idea in the Torah, purity and impurity.
There are various ways to become impure, but the most serious impurity comes from a dead body. Even if a person is in the same room with a dead body and doesn’t touch it, he becomes impure and require a purification process. So what is the problem with a dead body? What does it represent and how does it impact our lives?[1] The body of a person hides his soulful reality. The way to stop hiding this reality is to use the body as a messenger for the soul, rather than a messenger for itself. A problem arises when we die. The soul goes back to its source and the body is left behind and it no longer has any chance to express soulfulness. All it has is its physicality and it is now purposeless. When someone then breathes the ‘air’ of purposelessness, this leaves a subtle imprint that there is purposelessness in the world, and it stains our subconscious. And because of the extent that our subconscious shapes our actions, the Torah goes to great lengths to ensure that any infringement is remedied.
So what is the fix? The fix is to realize that even a dead body has a smidgen of purpose. It is the contrast of death that makes us appreciate life. An evil person is referred to as dead in this world. But, his function is to help us appreciate what it means to be righteous, really alive! Therefore, we take the ashes of a dead cow, the red heifer, and put it into water, that wonderful life-giving substance; it is death, ashes, invigorating life, water. By doing so, we recalibrate our subconscious that the death we encountered was not a sign of purposelessness, but that it too can help us achieve holiness.
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