Parashat Chukat-Balak: Learning Where to Look

Although this Shabbat we read two parashiyot together, I would like to focus on the first of them: Chukat. 

Some portions of the Torah revolve around a single central theme. Chukat, however, seems to unfold through a succession of crises. It opens with the Parah Adumah, the mysterious Red Heifer; continues with Miriam's death, the disappearance of the well, the episode at the rock, Aaron's passing, and finally the plague of fiery serpents. At first glance, these appear to be unrelated stories.

Yet perhaps they all wrestle with the very same question:

How does a people remain spiritually oriented when the world no longer offers simple answers?

It is no coincidence that the parashah begins with the Parah Adumah, the quintessential chok—a commandment whose ultimate meaning eludes even our finest reasoning. Rather than trying to solve its mystery, our tradition preserves it, reminding us that not every truth can be mastered through intellect alone.

We live, however, in a culture convinced that everything can be explained. We search for causes, demand answers, and look for someone to blame whenever tragedy strikes. Yet anyone who has experienced profound loss knows the limits of that illusion. Some wounds cannot be healed by explanations. Some questions remain unanswered.

Maturity lies not in understanding everything, but in learning how to live faithfully with what we cannot understand.

Immediately afterward, Miriam dies.

The Torah scarcely leaves us a moment to grieve before telling us that the people have no water.

Our Sages teach that the well which accompanied Israel throughout forty years in the wilderness existed solely in Miriam's merit. Only after she was gone did the people realize how deeply their lives had depended upon her quiet, faithful presence.

Perhaps that is one of the great tragedies of the human condition: we often recognize the sources that sustain us only after they are gone.

There are people who hold the world together without ever standing at center stage. Those who teach, nurture, comfort, listen, encourage, and quietly build communities. While they are with us, we easily take them for granted. Only in their absence do we discover the emptiness they leave behind.

But the rabbinic tradition adds one remarkable detail.

According to the Tosefta, Miriam's well did not produce water through force. It responded to song. The tribal leaders would gather around it and sing, and through those songs the water would flow. Blessing emerged through words.

After Miriam's death, everything changes.

God tells Moses to speak to the rock. Instead, he strikes it.

Water still comes forth. But something essential has been lost.

Perhaps the Torah is describing more than Moses' personal mistake. Perhaps it is placing before us two radically different ways of engaging the world.

One trusts in words. The other trusts in force.

As long as Miriam lives, water flows through song. After her death, blows replace words.

It is difficult not to recognize which of these models seems increasingly to shape our own age.

We live in a world where war has once again become an acceptable language of politics; where antisemitism no longer hides on the fringes but increasingly finds social—and even political—legitimacy; where authoritarian movements promise order in exchange for freedom, offering easy answers to painfully complex realities. Public discourse itself often seems to have traded thoughtful argument for shouting matches and slogans.

Little by little, we risk losing faith in the creative power of words.

Yet Chukat still has one more lesson to teach.

Following another rebellion, God sends venomous serpents among the people. When the Israelites repent, Moses receives an astonishing command: fashion a bronze serpent and raise it upon a pole. Whoever looks upon it will live.

The Mishnah then asks one of the most profound questions in all of rabbinic literature:

"Can a serpent kill? Can a serpent give life?"

Whenever the Israelites lifted their eyes upward and directed their hearts toward their Father in Heaven, they were healed. When they did not, they perished.

The serpent was never magical. It was an education in where to direct one's gaze.

It taught the people to lift their eyes. To stop staring only at the wound. To remember that suffering must never become the whole horizon.

Centuries later, something deeply human happened.

The very serpent that had once helped people look beyond themselves became an idol. It was called Nechushtan—from nechoshet, "bronze"—and people began offering incense before it. King Hezekiah eventually destroyed it.

Not because making it had been wrong. But because the people had forgotten its purpose. They were no longer looking through it. They were looking AT it.

That is one of the enduring temptations of every society.

To mistake the means for the end. To absolutize what was only ever meant to guide us forward. Every form of idolatry begins the moment a means takes the place of the ultimate end.

We, too, have our own Nechushtans.

Fears that come to organize our entire lives. Identities that no longer open us to others but imprison us within ourselves. Certainties so absolute that they leave no room to listen. Even worthy causes that, once they consume the whole horizon, prevent us from seeing the human being standing before us.

The Torah does not ask us to ignore evil or pretend that hatred, war, and authoritarianism are not on the rise. It asks something far more demanding: Not to allow them to determine where we direct our gaze.

A society begins to lose its freedom long before it is conquered. It loses it when fear replaces hope.

When force replaces dialogue.

When wounds replace vision.

When that which was meant to lift our eyes instead keeps them fixed upon itself.

This might be, after all, the hidden unity of Parashat Chukat.

The Red Heifer reminds us that not everything can be understood.

Miriam teaches us that life's deepest sources are often its quietest ones.

The rock warns us of what happens when force replaces speech.

And the bronze serpent teaches us that the difference between a symbol and an idol depends entirely on the direction of our gaze.

The real question was never whether there were serpents in the wilderness. There always were.

The real question is where we choose to look as we make our way through the wilderness.

Perhaps that is one of the deepest meanings of holiness itself:

To preserve the capacity to look beyond our fears, beyond our certainties, beyond our wounds—to keep our eyes fixed on that which makes us more fully human and, precisely because of that, truly free.

Shabbat Shalom.

Rabbi Gustavo Geier