By Rabbi Avi Heller

When looking at the calendar this week, Nadav laughed and said, ?Abba, it?s Cow Shabbat!? Indeed, it is. This week in synagogue we read a postscript called Parashat Para, which deals with the ritual of the red heifer, the para aduma. As the Torah indicates (Numbers 19), the ashes of a completely red cow were mixed with water and sprinkled over someone who was going through the purification process after contact with the dead. This was particularly necessary during this time of the year because only one who had been purified before Passover could partake in a seder with the Paschal lamb.
If the above paragraph doesn?t make 100% sense to you, don?t worry at all. The red heifer ritual is obscure and difficult to understand. In ?yeshivish? or ?frumspeak?, the Hebrew-English-Yiddish-Aramaic pidgin popular among segments of the Orthodox community, any paradox or esoteric topic is referred to as a ?para aduma.?
My concern today isn?t making sense out of death, red cows and sprinkling, but about a specific symbolism. When the Talmud (Moed Katan 28a) notes that the red heifer causes atonement, Tosafot quickly note that it atones for the sin of the golden calf. Hence, the red cow atones for the golden calf.
In the Midrash, this correlation is given deeper meaning:
?Why are all the [communal] sacrifices male and this one is female? Said R. Aybu: it is a parable to a serving-woman?s son who dirtied the palace of the king. Said the king ?Let the mother come and clean up the poop.? So said the Holy One Blessed be He, ?Let the heifer come and atone for the act of the golden calf.? (Bemidbar Rabba 19:8)
There are a number of peculiarities about this analogy. Red is not quite gold. The golden calf was not a real calf, just an image of one. Shouldn?t the Jews be responsible for atoning for the golden calf incident, not the putative mother cow? It seems sort of odd that one (blameless) real cow should be sacrificed (and sprinkled) because of an artificial calf that had been created by the Jewish people.
Kli Yakar (R. Ephraim Lunshitz) explains the midrash in a novel and profound way. This midrash is really trying to say some thing about the efficacy of repentance and atonement. And what it is trying to say is that ? in order to atone ? you have to address root causes.
A person might think that in order to atone for the golden calf, we should focus on the golden calf. The people should express regret for having built it, suffer whatever punishment and guilt they deserve and promise never to build a golden calf again. Even better, the next time that the opportunity to build a golden calf would come along, they should be reminded to resist their idolatrous instincts and just say no.
However, all of this addresses the symptom more than the root cause. The calf is the consequence not the cause. In order to get back to the root of the problem, do not focus on the calf, but where it came from: its mother. I do not mean this as parenting advice (though we parents are of course responsible for our little calves) nor as biology. I mean it conceptually. The calf has a mother, an earlier cause, a reason for its existence. To clean up the calf?s mess, we need to go back and address where it came from. Otherwise, as many times as we destroy the calf, the mother will simply birth a new one.
Let?s give some examples, in increasing order of difficulty:
1) You have toxic mold in your house, but are not aware of it. All you know is that you,
your kids and your pest keep getting sick. No matter how much echinacea you take and how many doctor?s visits you make, your family can?t seem to get well. Until you discover the root problem for your illness, you cannot get well. This would be just as true if the reason you were getting sick is that you weren?t eating well or that you weren?t getting enough sleep etc. You will just keep getting sick until you go back to the root.

2) A girl is engaging in promiscuous behavior, fooling around serially with different boys. When confronted about it, she expresses regret and says that?s not really who she is. For a week or two, she controls herself, but then she slips back into her old behavior. There?s a reason for this. Will-power alone (?I will not do that again?) will not work, reasoning by ones friends (?You?re so much better than those boys, they don?t deserve you?) will not work. The only way to deal with it is by focusing on the underlying problem, whatever it is (low self-esteem? Immaturity? Rebellion against authority?)

3) Intermarriage. A college student ? to their parent?s horror ? consistently only dates non-Jews. They have always wanted him/her to marry a nice Jewish boy/girl and have a nice Jewish family and ? unless something changes ? that?s looking increasingly unlikely. They might try guilt, threaten not to come to a future wedding or to sit shiva, have everyone they know try to set them up with Jewish dates, pay for them to go abroad to Israel etc. But none of this addresses the underlying root cause.

On some level, a Jew who dates non-Jews does it because it makes sense to them to do it.
The people they date are nice, intelligent, moral, attractive. Moreover, they believe that they can still participate in their Judaism in the limited ways that they want to even with a non-Jewish spouse. It?s a limited time commitment (Yom Kippur, Chanuka, one seder), the synagogue and their families are ok with it, so what?s the big deal? The root cause of intermarriage is that the level of participation required of most American Jews to participate in Judaism is not a strong enough commitment to require that their spouse be included in it. They do not know enough about it or do enough of it for it to matter whether or not their spouse is Jewish. They might still prefer to find a Jewish spouse, but if they don?t, everything will work out fine.
Personally, I would never have married a non-Jewish girl simply because Judaism is too important a part of my life for me not to have shared it with my spouse. I participate in my Judaism every day intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. Having a non-Jewish wife who would have agreed that we could send the kids to Sunday school would not have been sufficient. My Jewishness is of singular importance to my identity as a person and not because I am a rabbi. This is the root of everything for me.
If the Jewish people felt that they could turn aside from the God of Israel and begin to worship an idol, there is a root problem, a mother of all root causes, having to do with faith, trust and belief in God. Just because the Golden Calf is gone to the great idol graveyard in the sky doesn?t mean that the Jews are safe from idolatry. Hence, the Torah begins to discuss the para aduma. May we discover our own golden calves and find the root causes behind them so that we as individuals and as members of the Jewish people can make Judaism and Torah stronger and stronger, from strength to strength.