Give these men and women the strength and courage to persevere on their journeys. Grant them healing and comfort. Strengthen them and surround them with love and support.

As you remembered Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Hannah, and you have heard the voices of the righteous men and women when they beseeched you, please listen to our beseeching to help the men and women of our community. Receive with Your mercy and desire our prayer. Fulfill our wishes for the good, and so may it be Your will, and let us say Amen.

It’s fitting that this prayer is said just a few weeks before we read the Torah portion Vayera, in which we see Abraham and Sarah, who are childless and “already old, well on in years, and Sarah no longer had female periods.” They are told by a group of strangers that next year, they will have a son. In response to this news Sarah “laughed to herself, saying, ‘Now that I am worn out, shall I have my heart’s desire? My husband is old!’”

The Bible is filled with stories of Jewish women battling infertility, and about the pain they experience along the way. In the first chapter of the Book of Samuel, Hannah is taunted by her sister-wife Peninah because she cannot conceive. In Genesis (in the Torah portion Parashat Vayetzei) Rachel feels tortured because her sister Leah can conceive, while she cannot. The command to “be fertile and become many” was the first given to man in the first Torah portion, Bereshit. When that proves impossible, it is not only a personal pain, but can be a religious one as well.

In Vayera, we see how timeless the struggle with infertility truly is. And the pain is so deep that it can cause a woman to laugh in the face of messengers of God.

The Torah, and Judaism in general, contains a blueprint for raising Jewish children. It instructs us what we should teach our children and gives us the why and the how. But it also contains reminders to be mindful of those who yearn to become parents, and nuggets of hope for those still trying to conceive. Upon scoffing at the idea of having a child, Sarah (and the rest of us) are reminded, “Is anything too difficult for God?”

In Vayera, after giving birth to her son Isaac, Sarah said “God has given me laughter.” And just as we are reminded of the pain and the hope of the struggle to conceive, which is experienced by one in eight American couples, we are also reminded of the joy of becoming parents, especially after such a long wait.

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Why all the fuss? The red heifer is, as the Torah portion Chukat tells us in its opening passages, a strange key element of the purification process. The ashes of a perfectly red cow would be used to purify someone who came into contact with the dead and then sought to enter the holy places. Why, asks Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s former chief rabbi, is this passage buried halfway through the action-packed Book of Numbers instead of a Torah portion that concentrates on such legal minutiae? His answer is in the Torah portion’s name. Chukat comes from chok, meaning “statute.” It is a category of Jewish laws that seem to have no explanation. They are simply directives.

The red heifer, Rabbi Sacks says, is often held up as the perfect example of a chok. When the first-century Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai’s students asked him to explain the reason for this law, he responded: “By your life, the dead body does not defile and the waters of the red heifer do not purify. Rather, God says: I have ordained a decree, I have issued a statute, and you have no permission to transgress My decree.”

Meaning? Well, posits Rabbi Sacks, Rabbi Yochanan was likely:

making a sharp distinction — made in our time by philosopher John Rawls — between two kinds of rules: regulatory and constitutive. Regulatory rules, as their name implies, regulate something that exists independently of the rules. There were employers and employees before there was employment law. A practice exists and then come laws to ensure fairness, justice, and so on. In Judaism, mishpatim, social legislation, is of this kind. Constitutive laws create a practice. The laws of chess create the game called chess. Without the laws there is no game. Rabban Yochanan was saying that the laws of purity are like this. They are not like medicine because impurity is not like disease. Disease existed long before there were healers, doctors, diagnoses, and cures. But purity and impurity did not exist before the laws were given.

The next question seems obvious: Why did we need laws to create this system of purity and impurity in the first place? Rabbi Sacks offers an answer: “The Torah sought to embed within Jewish consciousness an idea that may seem obvious now but in its time was nothing less than revolutionary: Death defiles. God is to be found in life. Do not associate death with sanctity. To the contrary, contact with death debars you from contact with God.”

Judaism is, at its very core, dependent upon a culture of life. Indeed, the good deeds we are commanded to do, and which improve the world for our fellow man, cannot be done by the dead. Yet this raises an additional question that goes unanswered here: Why go so far as to create an impurity around a dead body? It’s not as though if you’re not dissuaded from touching a dead body you’ll automatically revere death and thus pursue it.

I think one answer can be found elsewhere in the portion. In the following chapter in Chukat, we read:

The Lord said to Moses, “Make yourself a serpent and put it on a pole, and let whoever is bitten look at it and live.”
Moses made a copper snake and put it on a pole, and whenever a snake bit a man, he would gaze upon the copper snake and live.

What’s the context? In the preceding passages, we’re told that the People of Israel complained about their provisions in the desert and questioned God’s decision to redeem them from slavery in Egypt. In response, Hashem (God) sent a plague of venomous snakes. The cure, if bitten, was to look up on the copper snake Moses made.

Why would that work? Why would gazing upon a fake snake heal the physical wounds from the bite of a real snake? The answer, according to the 20th-century American ultra-Orthodox rabbi, Rav Avigdor Miller, is that the snake represents the yetzer harah —the evil inclination. The yetzer harah, like the snake, is so threatening because it blends in with its surroundings and is thus elusive. You don’t usually see it coming until it strikes. The sin of the Israelites, in complaining about God’s grace after being given so many miracles, was a classic example of the yetzer harah at work. It was a very human failing, to complain when tired or hungry or bored, etc.

Looking at the snake, Rav Miller held, brought out into the open what was previously lurking beneath the surface. In this way, it restored their faith and helped them gain leverage over their own yetzer harah.

Such mindfulness is the way to guard against temptation that we cannot see, just as taking something physical — a purification ceremony involving the ashes of a red heifer — is the way to guard against coming too close to the idea and the draw and, yes, even the romance of death: what the French call l’appel du vide, the call of the void.

May we remember that the call of the void must be resisted, and the only sure safeguard against it is to never come close enough to the void in the first place to hear its call.

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