Someone approached me to tell me how nice of a piece I had written about this week’s parsha, and I responded that I hadn’t written anything yet! But when they told me that they had thoroughly enjoyed my tie in of the snake on a pole and kiddush and running around trying to make money during the week, it was that that I realized that he had mistakenly read last year’s post on Chukas thinking that I had written it now.
It’s a good thing he reminded me, though, for I was about to write about the snake — I really like snakes (the photo above is of my pet snake, Motty Python, although it was my wife who named him).
Anyway, let’s talk about cows instead. I was never really excited about Chukas the way some other people are, in the sense that there’s often such a hullabaloo made about the oddity of the parah aduma (red cow) when, as we’ve discussed before, perhaps it’s a bit overblown. Then again, I suppose for the new student of Judaism, there’s something to be said about the seemingly nonsensical basis for this law. To me, though, it doesn’t really seem any more strange than most of the other strange things we as Jews do.
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