This week’s parsha is dedicated to the heroic soldiers, security forces and first responders of the IDF, defenders of the Jewish people and the land of Israel, and the United States Armed Forces, defenders of liberty and justice for all. May Hashem protect them and bring them all home speedily and safely.

Few mitzvot are as mysterious as the one described in this week’s Torah reading of the para aduma, the Red Heifer, the ritual meant to purify those who came into contact with death, the most severe of impurities. Yet beneath its inscrutable surface lies one of the Torah’s most urgent ideas: that even after contact with death, there can be purification; even after defilement, we can become whole. At a moment when the Jewish people are once again sovereign in their land – yet grappling with war and the profound questions of existence that accompany it – the haftara for this Shabbat asks those very questions on a national scale.

In Yechezkel’s vision (chapter 36), that national reckoning begins with a stark accusation: “The House of Israel dwelled upon their soil and defiled it with their ways and their deeds,” God charges Israel (v. 17). Israel sinned through their depraved actions, the concrete way they lived and treated one another in the land they had been given. The consequence was exile.

But exile brought its own terrible complications. As the scattered Jewish people were humiliated among the nations, their degradation seemed to call into question God’s own........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)