Sermon by Rabbi Andrea 20th June / 5th Tammuz 5786

The Red Heifer and the Historian’s Clues.

This week, as we read Parashat Chukkat, I find myself thinking of the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, who died only a few days ago at the age of eighty-seven.

He was one of the greatest historians of his generation. I still remember the summer of 1988, when, during the breaks in a summer job delivering telephone directories, I carried one of his books with me. There I was, waiting for the next bundle of telephone directories to be delivered, and in the meantime reading Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath. That book helped convince me to study history at university.

Not a historian in the sense in which many people imagine history: he did not deal with lists of battles, dynasties, treaties and conquests. He tried instead, and often succeeded, to reconstruct the cultural worlds of our past. 

For example, he explored the lives of peasants in sixteenth and seventeenth century Friuli, in north-eastern Italy. We know their beliefs mainly because the Inquisition recorded them, and eventually misunderstood them. 

They were called Benandanti, “good walkers”: men and women who, in dreamlike or ecstatic states, believed that their spirits went out at night to protect the fertility of the fields. Ginzburg showed how the inquisitors gradually forced this unfamiliar world into the familiar categories of witchcraft and heresy. For years I kept on my desk a collection of Ginzburg’s essays, Clues. In those essays, Ginzburg argued that historians do not work like philosophers constructing abstract systems. 

Historians are more like detectives or doctors. They follow clues, symptoms, traces and anomalies. Small details can reveal more than grand theories. Together with historians such as Giovanni Levi, a relative of the famous Primo Levi, Ginzburg founded and practised microhistory, showing how a village, a family, a trial record or a forgotten individual could sometimes reveal more about a society than kings, governments and armies.

Take, for example, one of the most memorable works, Anastasia, by my teacher Raul Merzario. At the centre of the story lies a question that might seem surprisingly modern: who controls reproduction, sexuality and family life?  Merzario reconstructed the life of a woman from a small Alpine community, followed the traces of relationships and pregnancies, and in the end showed how practices of birth control were far more common than official Catholic moral teaching would have admitted. This is a classic work of microhistory.

Unfortunately, my work “I Live at My Brothers’ Expense: The Inquisition Trial of Jacob di Gabriel Pontasso, a Jewish Bandit in Seventeenth-Century Modena” was never published, but I assure you it was very interesting. Or at least Professor Merzario thought it was. See how it works? Rather than beginning with a theory about women, family or power, you begin with a person. Rather than imposing a narrative upon the evidence, the micro-historian follows the clues wherever they lead.

But enough of my memories. Let us return to this week’s parashah.

I want to show how the micro historical approach, and the work of Carlo Ginzburg, can help us read Parashat Chukkat. The first clue is Miriam.

In the wilderness generation, the central figures are usually Moses and Aaron. They speak, lead, intercede and confront Pharaoh. They carry the burden of public leadership. Yet Parashat Chukkat contains a small but extraordinary narrative detail.

וַתָּמָת שָׁם מִרְיָם וַתִּקָּבֵר שָׁם׃ “Miriam died there and was buried there” [Numbers 20:1]. This tells us that Miriam died and was buried at Kadesh.

The very next verse, וְלֹא הָיָה מַיִם לָעֵדָה׃ [Numbers 20:2], informs us that “there was no water for the congregation.”

The Rabbis immediately noticed the juxtaposition. They teach that Israel in the wilderness received the well of Miriam as a gift. When Miriam died, the well disappeared. [Ta’anit 9a].

This is exactly the kind of clue that Ginzburg taught us to notice.

The Torah does not give Miriam lengthy speeches, nor does it place her at the centre of the official narrative. For most of the journey of the Israelites through the wilderness, the story appears to belong to Moses and Aaron. Yet at the moment of her death, we discover that Miriam had been sustaining the people all along. The clue is small; the revelation is immense.

See how the micro historical reading changes our understanding of history? Rather than discussing theories of patriarchy, we are invited to look carefully at the text itself. We are asked to notice Miriam, the woman who dies, and the well that disappears with her. From that small detail an entire world emerges.

We learn that the wandering of the Israelites in the wilderness is the story of a hidden, sustaining, feminine presence without which the community cannot survive.

Also, a previous assumption begins to look less convincing.

Judaism is often portrayed as the archetypal patriarchal religion, a tradition dominated by male authority and male voices.

Yet the passage about Miriam’s death suggests a more complicated picture. At the very moment when the Torah seems most focused on Moses and Aaron, it quietly reveals that the survival of the entire community depended upon Miriam. Microhistory teaches us to be suspicious of ideological narratives because reality is often more complex.

The Torah must be read in the same way.

Another important point is the Parah Adumah, the Red Heifer, at the beginning of Numbers 19 in our parashah. The Torah introduces it with the words זֹאת חֻקַּת הַתּוֹרָה, zot chukkat ha-Torah — “This is the statute of the Torah.” [Numbers 19:2] A חֹק, chok, is a commandment whose meaning is not immediately available to reason.

It is not meaningless. It has reasons that are hidden from us. The Red Heifer is perhaps the most famous example. Its ashes are mixed with water and used to purify someone who has become ritually impure through contact with death. And yet those involved in preparing the ashes themselves become impure [Numbers 19:7–10]. This is a truly unsettling paradox. Or, as the Rabbis say, a mystery.

Modern culture often assumes that enough intelligence, enough science, enough analysis and enough moral certainty can eventually explain everything.

The Torah disagrees.

The existence of a chok at the centre of Jewish life suggests that some dimensions of reality resist complete rationalisation. There are parts of life that must be approached with humility, ritual, discipline and reverence, not merely with explanation. Here Carlo Ginzburg comes again to our aid.

When he studied rituals and beliefs, he did not ask whether they were rational according to modern standards. Of course, the belief in night battles to propitiate fertility is not rational according to our standards. Nor is the belief that the ashes of a red heifer, mixed with hyssop and living water, provide purification to those who have been in touch with a dead body. But rationality is not the point. The point is what those rituals revealed about the people who practised them, and about their culture.

So, what does the ritual of the Parah Adumah reveal about Jewish civilisation, about our culture?

It reveals a civilisation that distrusts fantasies of absolute purity. The person who handles the ashes of the Parah Adumah, and with them purifies those who are impure, himself becomes impure in the process. This is the important point: complete purity does not exist. That is to say, complete innocence does not exist. And today this is profoundly countercultural.

In our day and age we often seek moral purity more than moral responsibility. Public debate, especially online, is full of people eager to divide the world into the contaminated and the uncontaminated, the guilty and the innocent, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressor and the victim, and on and on. And Jews, if you notice, are almost always placed among the powerful.

This becomes especially visible in progressive circles.

Think of the rhetoric of urgent moral clarity about Gaza, oppression and complicity.

Of course, there is real suffering in Gaza, and real suffering must never be dismissed.

But when moral clarity becomes a system that allows only one story, one innocence and one direction of history, then we have reached the point at which we need to learn the lesson of the Parah Adumah. Politics must not become a lesson in purity.

Think of those who speak of equality, justice and shared humanity, but ask only one people,  the Jewish people, to surrender its collective self-determination.

When compassion for one people requires the erasure of another, when solidarity becomes a licence not to see complexity, then we enter very dangerous territory: the fantasy of purity.

The Red Heifer refuses that fantasy.

The Torah is not interested in purity. It is rather interested in the difficult work of restoring people to life. But that is for another sermon. The great moment of microhistory, at least as a movement, eventually came to an end. That is academic life for you. One crop comes, another crop goes.

Ginzburg himself continued his intellectual journey in other directions, toward questions of rhetoric, proof and the very nature of historical truth.

But the deepest lesson of microhistory remained alive in all of it: distrust any narrative that becomes too grand, too smooth, too certain of itself. Unfortunately, grand narratives are still around us. They are consoling, and they make people feel that they are on the right side of history. They tell us that history is moving inevitably toward a particular political future.

They tell us, for example, that Zionism is becoming less and less legitimate, that the idea of Jewish self-determination is another face of colonialism and therefore must disappear, because the Middle East must be purified of colonialism. They tell us that Israel is destined to disappear, and that, in obedience to an abstract idea of justice, Jews should be deprived of a place to take refuge.

Read through the lens of microhistory, and with the help of Carlo Ginzburg, this parashah teaches a different lesson. History is not made only by vast theories. It is made by people, by clues, by stubborn acts of transmission.

The survival of the Jewish people has never depended on possessing the grandest narrative.

It has depended on preserving countless small narratives: a family around a Shabbat table, a child learning Hebrew, a community gathering to pray, a people refusing to forget.

Like Ginzburg’s forgotten millers and peasants, we continue to tell our story even when larger powers insist that our story should disappear.

This week’s Torah portion teaches the same lesson.

Look carefully at the clues. Look for Miriam behind the well. Look for wisdom hidden inside mystery. Look for responsibility where others demand purity. And never underestimate the power of a story that refuses to be erased.

 Shabbat Shalom.

FURTHER READING

I refer especially to the following works by Carlo Ginzburg: The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983/1984); Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); and Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990; New York: Pantheon Books, 1991).

Other notable works by Ginzburg include The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice, trans. Antony Shugaar (London/New York: Verso, 1999); and Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

On microhistory as a method, see Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 93–113;.

Raul Merzario’s Anastasia ovvero la malizia degli uomini (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985) has unfortunately never been translated into English. Equally enjoyable, in my opinion, is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324, trans. Barbara Bray (London: Scolar Press, 1978).

On Jewish anti-Zionism, see Dave Rich, The Left’s Jewish Problem (London: Biteback, 2016); David Hirsh, Contemporary Left Antisemitism (London/New York: Routledge, 2018); and Shany Mor, “Peter Beinart’s Grotesque Utopia,” Fathom, October 2020.

On purity politics, see John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (New York: Portfolio, 2021); Noah Rothman, The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun (New York: Broadside Books, 2022); and Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time (New York: Penguin Press, 2023).

For a specifically Israeli critique of one-state proposals, see Einat Wilf, The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020).