Parashat Chukat: The Red Heifer and the Rationale for Mitzot

(8) A gentile asked Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, "These rituals you do, they seem like witchcraft! You bring a heifer, burn it, crush it up, and take its ashes. [If] one of you is impure by the dead [the highest type impurity], 2 or 3 drops are sprinkled on him, and you declare him pure?!" He said to him, "Has a restless spirit ever entered you?" He said to him, "No!" "Have you ever seen a man where a restless spirit entered him?" He said to him, "Yes!" [Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai] said to him, "And what did you do for him?" He said to him, "We brought roots and made them smoke beneath him, and poured water and it fled." He said to him, "Your ears should hear what leaves your mouth! The same thing is true for this spirit, the spirit of impurity, as it is written, (Zachariah 13:2) "Even the prophets and the spirit of impurity will I remove from the land." They sprinkle upon him purifying waters, and it [the spirit of impurity] flees." After he left, our rabbi's students said, "You pushed him off with a reed. What will you say to us?" He said to them, "By your lives, a dead person doesn't make things impure, and the water doesn't make things pure. Rather, God said, 'I have engraved a rule, I have decreed a decree (chukah chakakti, gezeira gazarti), and you have no permission to transgress what I decreed, as it says "This is a chok (rule) of the Torah."

Mishna: If one [in prayer] says, "Your mercy reaches to the bird's nest", "Your name should be remembered for the good things," or "We acknowledge, We acknowledge ", he is silenced.

Gemara: ... "Your mercy reaches to the bird's nest" - Why [is it forbidden to say]? Two amaraim argued in the West, one Rabbi Yossi Bar Avin, the other Rabbi Yossi bar Zvida. One said, "Because it places jealousy into the natural world [that God only has mercy for the bird]." The other one said, "Because he presents the measures taken by the Holy One, blessed be He, as springing from compassion, whereas they are but decrees."

One who says in his supplicatory prayers: "May He who showed mercy on a bird's nest prohibiting the taking of the mother together with the chicks, or the slaughter of an animal and its calf on the same day, also show mercy on us," or [makes other] similar statements should be silenced, because these mitzvot are God's decrees and not of mercy. Were they of mercy, He would not permit us to slaughter at all.

The commandment of the Red Heifer - That Israel is commanded to burn the red heifer, so that its ashes are prepared for those that need it, and to purify those defiled by contact with a dead body... Even though my heart was filled to write the connotations of the reasons for the commandment that are foremost through peshat, with this being successful in the work of educating my children and his youth friends to keep this mitzvah, my hands became weak, and I became afraid to open my mouth about it at all, even about peshat, for I saw that our rabbis, their memory be a blessing, spoke at length in the depths of its secrets and the vastness of its points, to the point that they said that King Solomon understood, with all his vast wisdom, all the reasons for the mitzvot, except for this one, as he said about it, (Ecclesiastes 7:23) "I said, I will understand, and it was distant from me."...