C

hukat is about mortality. In it we 
read of the death of two of Israel’s 
three great leaders in the wilderness, 
Miriam and Aaron, and the sentence of 
death decreed against Moses, the greatest of 
them all. These were devastating losses.
To counter that sense of loss 
and bereavement, the Torah 
employs one of Judaism’s 
great principles: The Holy 
One, blessed be He, creates 
the remedy before the disease. 
Before any of the deaths are 
mentioned we read about the 
strange ritual of the red heifer, 
which purified people who had been in con-
tact with death — the archetypal source of 
impurity. That ritual, often deemed incom-
prehensible, is in fact deeply symbolic.
It involves taking the most striking 
emblem of life — a heifer that is pure red, 
the color of blood which is the source of life, 
and that has never been made to endure the 
burden of a yoke — and reducing it to ash. 
That is mortality, the fate of all that lives. We 
are, said Abraham, “mere dust and ashes” 
(Gen. 18:27). “Dust you are,
” said God to 
Adam, “and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 
3:19). But the dust is dissolved into “living 
water,
” and from water comes new life. 
Water is constantly changing. We never step 

into the same river twice, said Heraclitus. 
Yet the river maintains its course between 
the banks. The water changes but the river 
remains. So, we, as physical beings, may one 
day be reduced to dust. But there are two 
consolations.
The first is we are not just physical beings. 
God made the first human “from the dust 
of the earth,
” but He breathed into him the 
breath of life. We may be mortal, but there is 
within us something that is immortal. 
The second is that, even down here on 
Earth, something of us lives on, as it did for 
Aaron in the form of his sons who carry the 
name of the priesthood to this day, as it did 
for Moses in the form of his disciples who 
studied and lived by his words as they do 
to this day, and as it did for Miriam in the 
lives of all those women who, by their cour-
age, taught men the true meaning of faith. 
For good or bad, our lives have an impact 
on other lives, and the ripples of our deeds 
spread ever outward across space and time. 
So we may be mortal, but that does not 
reduce our life to insignificance for we are 
part of something larger than ourselves, 
characters in a story that began early in the 
history of civilization and that will last as 
long as humankind.
 It is in this context that we should under-
stand one of the most troubling episodes in 

the Torah, Moses’ angry outburst when the 
people called for water, for which he and 
Aaron were condemned to die in the wilder-
ness without ever crossing into the Promised 
Land. I have written about this passage 
many times elsewhere, and I do not want 
to focus on the details here. I want simply 
to note why the story of Moses hitting the 
rock appears here, in parshat Chukat, whose 
overarching theme is our existence as phys-
ical beings in a physical world, with its two 
potentially tragic consequences.
First, we are an unstable mix of reason 
and passion, reflection and emotion, so that 
sometimes grief and exhaustion can lead 
even the greatest to make mistakes, as it did 
in the case of Moses and Aaron after the 
death of their sister. Second, we are physical, 
therefore mortal. Therefore, for all of us, 
there are rivers we will not cross, promised 
lands we will not enter, futures we helped 
shape but will not live to see.
The Torah is sketching out the contours 
of a truly remarkable idea. Despite these 
two facets of our humanity — that we make 
mistakes and that we die — human existence 
is not tragic. 
Moses and Aaron made mistakes, but that 
did not stop them being among the greatest 
leaders who ever lived, whose impact is still 
palpable today in the prophetic and priestly 
dimensions of Jewish life. And the fact that 
Moses did not live to see his people cross the 
Jordan did not diminish his eternal legacy as 
the man who turned a nation of slaves into a 
free people, bringing them to the very brink 
of the Promised Land.
I wonder if any other culture, creed or 
civilization has done greater justice to the 
human condition than Judaism, with its 
insistence that we are human, not gods, and 
that we are, nonetheless, God’s partners in 
the work of creation and the fulfilment of the 
covenant.
Almost every other culture has blurred the 
line between God and human beings. In the 
ancient world, rulers were usually thought 
of as gods, demigods or chief intermediaries 
with the gods. Christianity and Islam know 
of infallible human beings, the son of God 
or the prophet of God. Modern atheists, by 
contrast, have tended to echo Nietzsche’s 
question that, to justify our dethronement of 
God, “Must we ourselves not become gods 
simply to appear worthy of it?”
In 1967, when I was just beginning my 

SPIRIT

A WORD OF TORAH

Rabbi Lord 
Jonathan 
Sacks

RABBISACKS.ORG

The Consolations 
of Mortality 

continued on page 44

JULY 7 • 2022 | 43

