This has been a remarkable day for President Obama. First, he was called on to respond to the decision by the Supreme Court declaring that the right to marry the man or woman of your choice, regardless of your own gender, is guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. Immediately afterward, he had to fly to Charleston, South Carolina to eulogize Senator and Reverend Clementa Pinckney, killed last week with eight of his parishioners in an attack of racist terror.

As I try to imagine the emotions that went through his heart, and as I try to come to grips with the ones that went through mine, I find myself turning to the Torah portion for this week. It contains a mystery that, in its strangeness, may help us think about today.

In Parashat Hukat, we are told of the ritual of the red heifer. The ritual is complicated, and I’d advise you to spend some time with it yourself: Numbers 19:1-22. Essentially, the people were to find an unblemished red cow and bring it to the priests. They were to slaughter it and, among other things, collect its ashes. There was a certain degree of ritual impurity associated with dead bodies. The ashes would be mixed in water and would have the effect of removing this ritual impurity. All this may seem complicated and superstitious to us, and yet we can at least grasp how the process works. The ashes of the red heifer cured ritual impurity.

But it wasn’t that simple. The person who handled the ashes was himself rendered ritually impure. As our Torah commentary puts it, this is the “most difficult of all the aspects of the rite”: handling the ashes made you impure, while the ashes themselves made you pure.

A story is told that the great Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai was once confronted by a skeptic and asked to explain this seeming contradiction. He gave a rational explanation. Then, so the story goes, he admitted to his students that his answer was flawed. “But,” he continued, “this is what God has decreed, and you cannot transgress it.”

This is what our commentary makes of this mystery:

The puzzlement over the contradiction has persisted through the ages, and we may well speculate that this rite of ancient origin reflects the inherent – and hence persistent – contradiction between life and death. They are linked and eternally in tension, and whoever touches them touches both purity and impurity at the same time.

Life and death “are linked and eternally in tension, and whoever touches them touches both purity and impurity at the same time.”

Nine days ago, a young white man walked into a Bible study being held in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a Bible study not that unlike our weekly Torah study here at the Temple. He sat for an hour during the study, and then he took out a gun and shot eight people. He said he was doing it because of their race. Later, posts were found by the killer using racist and anti-Semitic language and imagery. He seems to have intended to terrorize African Americans and to encourage whites to fight them. This was death fueled by the most impure of motives.

The leader of that study group was the pastor of Emanuel Church, Clementa Pinckney. In addition to being a minister, he was a state senator. I want to share some memories of him as reported in the New York Times today:

Many cite his disarming humility. Despite his rapid rise, searing intellect and oratorical gifts, he never conveyed superiority or belittled opponents, they said. He managed to empathize with those who disagreed with him, while also firmly presenting his own views.

A towering presence at over six feet tall, he spoke extemporaneously in a resonant baritone, but seldom raised the volume. If he had a failing, several colleagues said, it was that he could be too gentle with adversaries who deserved harsher treatment.

“The most irritating thing about Senator Pinckney,” said State Representative William K. Bowers, a Democrat from his district, “is that when you had a debate he would just come over and pat you on the back and say, ‘Maybe tomorrow you’ll be thinking right.’ He was full of love and full of respect.”

Clementa Pinckney embodied the purity of life. But from his impure death and that of the others, purity has emerged. In his eloquent eulogy today, President Obama recalled the Christian hymn “Amazing Grace” and its opening lines:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I’m found;
Was blind, but now I see.

And then the President said, “Out of this tragedy, God has visited grace upon us by allowing us to see where we’ve been blind.”

This country has come together in some important ways in the last nine days. It may have started with the killer’s arraignment. One after another family member of those who were gunned down showed that they had learned the lessons that Rev. Pinckney had taught, as they proclaimed forgiveness for the man who had taken their loved ones. But wherever it started, it has moved quickly.

Around the time that I was in college, I worked in Washington for a member of the House and a member of the Senate. I spent a lot of time in the Capitol, and I looked at all the statues in the building. Jefferson Davis was there, and Robert E. Lee, and Wade Hampton, one of the greatest slave owners of his era. They were big and imposing and there to stay. Only now, maybe they aren’t.

The Confederate flag is starting to come down, as it has come off the actual and online shelves of Walmart and Target. The Republican governor of South Carolina has called for its removal from the state capitol grounds. The Republican governor of Alabama ordered it removed from the grounds of that state’s capitol, where it had flown when Dr. King had reminded us that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Confederate mementoes are in jeopardy, including those statues in the US Capitol. The fight isn’t over, and symbols aren’t everything, but we have started to move quickly, thanks perhaps to “the grace to see where we’ve been blind.” This is the purity that has come with those deaths.

The only thing that I’ve seen that compares with the speed of the changes in opinion on displaying the Confederate flag is the speed of the change in this nation’s views on same sex marriage. It wasn’t that long ago that gay lives were lived in the shadows, that their love was considered impure. Forty-six years ago this Sunday, the Stonewall Riots occurred in New York City, the event that many consider the birth of the modern gay rights movement. That is in the living memory of some of us in this room.

Lives were lived in the shadows, and worse. Seventeen years ago, a gay man named Matthew Shepard was beaten, tortured, and killed by two men. Evidence at the trial suggested that the killers were driven to this by hatred of gays. This death was impure.

James Obergefell met John Arthur two decades ago. They fell in love and started a life together in Ohio. In 2011, Arthur was diagnosed with ALS. They decided that before Arthur died, they were going to commit their lives to each other publicly and legally. They traveled to Maryland, where same sex marriage was legal. Because it was difficult for Arthur to move, they were married inside a medical transport plane parked on the tarmac at Baltimore Washington International airport. Three months later, Arthur died.

The information I have just given you, and much of the language that expresses it, comes from the opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States issued today in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges. Justice Anthony Kennedy explained Obergefell’s reason for bringing his case:

Ohio law does not permit Obergefell to be listed as the surviving spouse on Arthur’s death certificate. By statute, they must remain strangers even in death, a state-imposed separation Obergefell deems “hurtful for the rest of time.”

The state of Ohio sought, in its bureaucratic way, to make of the pure love of James Obergefell and John Arthur an impure death. Today, it failed.

Justice Kennedy said this: “There is dignity in the bond between two men or two women who seek to marry and in their autonomy to make such a profound choice.” There is dignity, and there is purity.

Purity and impurity, awareness of life and remembrance of death, these course through us as blood goes to and from the heart. I want to share with you some words from the man who occupied this pulpit before I did, Rabbi David Widzer. This is what he wrote today:

The human heart has two sides: one takes in blood depleted of oxygen, the other pumps out oxygen-rich blood.

Our hearts today are filled in part with the oxygen of equality and dignity. Today marriage is marriage and love is love for all Americans.

Our hearts today are filled in part with the airless ache of acts of hatred, lives laid to rest in Charleston, lives cut short by terror overseas.

May our hearts be large enough to hold them both, the pain caused by hatred and the joyfulness of justice. Ultimately, it is oxygen that sustains the human body. Ultimately, may it be love and justice that surge through our souls and sustain us all.

We cannot fathom the mystery of the red cow, or of the human heart, or of life and death, or of purity and impurity. But we can seek love and justice and we can continue to struggle for that for which Clementa Pinckney lived and for which James Obergefell lived. They spoke up when it was so easy not to. President Obama cautioned us not to “allow ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again.” We must add our voices, so that every day can have the power of most this amazing day. “This is what God has decreed, and you cannot transgress it.

Kein y’hi ratzon, be this God’s will.

Rabbi Thomas M. Alpert
Temple Etz Chaim, Franklin, Massachusetts
June 26, 2015; 10 Tammuz 5775
Parashat Hukat