Death Cults vs. Israel: Why Judaism Chooses Life

Geoffrey Stern [0:35 – 1:06]: own descendants. But in the Torah, in this week’s Parasha, Miriam dies in the space of a single verse. And when Aaron dies, Moses strips him of his priestly garments, dresses his son in them, and moves on, foreshadowing his own death. No monument, no shrine, no eternal flame. Just dust, mourning, and a continuation of purpose. In the Book of Numbers, we read the strange rituals surrounding the red heifer. And these are not burial rites. These are exit strategies,

Geoffrey Stern [1:06 – 1:37]: rituals of purification that scream, “Death is not sacred. It is not a god. It’s a pollutant, something to be washed off.” And here’s the thing: this may be the most radical idea in the entire Hebrew Bible—that we don’t make heroes out of corpses, that power doesn’t persist in the grave, that the dead are not part of the community of the living. Baruch Levine, the great biblical scholar, calls this the Bible’s campaign against the cult of the dead. Ezekiel sees

Geoffrey Stern [1:37 – 2:08]: kings buried too close to God’s presence and demands their corpses be removed. Josiah digs up ancient bones and burns them just to purify the land. And yet, that primal urge to hold on, to glorify, to make death meaningful, never quite dies. Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite

Geoffrey Stern [2:08 – 2:38]: podcast platform and now on YouTube. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes. This week’s Parasha is Chukat. It is almost a cliché to say that Judaism rejects a cult of death and celebrates life. We explore the biblical and ancient Near Eastern sources for this concept, for this radical approach to mortality and man’s search for the heroic. We ask, what does it

Geoffrey Stern [2:38 – 3:08]: mean to truly reject death? And what happens when a religion insists that life—not sacrifice, not martyrdom, not memory—but life is what matters most? So join us for Not in Your Life, Rabbi. You’re in England. They have big pageantry when a king dies. A few weeks ago, the Pope was buried in a catacomb underneath the temple, so to speak. I think this week’s Parasha is kind of fascinating. A lot of times we look

Geoffrey Stern [3:08 – 3:25]: at the mixed bundle and we say there’s no connection. But at the beginning, we’re going to see it talks about the Parah Adumah and this concept of impurity, Tumah, related to death. And then, as I said before, we have Miriam, Aaron, and the foreshadowing of Moses’s death. I don’t think you can ignore the connection.

Adam Mintz [3:26 – 3:45]: No, for sure you can’t. And obviously, this is the end of the 40 years in the desert. This is the transition. One generation is dying, and the next generation is coming to life. So this is the right topic for this week. This is the—We move to the 40th year in the desert, and this is the beginning of the story of that transition.

Geoffrey Stern [3:46 – 5:06]: So we’re gonna start at the beginning where it does talk about this red heifer, which we’ve explored in the past, but ultimately into this question of impurity caused by death. Numbers 19, it says another party who is pure. In the Hebrew it says v’osaph Ish Tahor, not a Levite, but just another person. You have this kind of contradistinction between pure people who create the ashes and the impure who benefit from them. So another party who is pure shall gather up the ashes of the cow and deposit them outside the camp in a pure place to be kept for water of lustration. For the Israelite community, it is for purgation. So again, it’s an individual, it doesn’t say it’s a Levite, and it’s outside of the Temple grounds. The one who gathers, again, very generic. The ashes of the cow shall also wash those clothes and be impure until evening. This shall be a permanent law for the Israelite and for the strangers who reside among them. I know, Rabbi, many people see the word ger and they think of Project Ruth and they think of conversions. But I think you can agree with me. A ger is like a toshav—it’s someone with a green card living amongst you.

Adam Mintz [5:06 – 5:13]: The idea of convert does not appear in the Torah. In the Torah, it means a stranger, someone on the margins. Absolutely right.

Geoffrey Stern [5:13 – 6:49]: So it’s kind of fascinating. And we’re going to see this come out in this Baruch Levine, who we’re going to focus on for his interpretation. So clearly, when it says ger, it means just a resident alien. And so here we have no. No reference to a Levite. It’s just a person who’s pure. We have it outside of the Temple grounds, and we have this available to anybody living in Israel, which kind of focuses me on the humanity of death and the humanity of how we deal with death. It is a universal issue of mankind. How do you deal with your mortality? And I just find that kind of fascinating. So then it goes on and it says, another party who is pure shall take the hyssop and dip it in the water. In 19 it says the pure person. It’s so funny how it refers to. You would really think it would say the Levite, whoever, but it says, the pure person shall sprinkle the impure person on the third day. And this shall be a law for all time. And then, of course, we have this fascinating irony that we’ve dealt with in the past of how the pure person becomes impure and the impure become as pure. But I want to go to the commentary of the Baruch Levine, that he wrote a commentary on Leviticus, which is chock full of sacrifices, and he wrote a commentary on Numbers. And he literally was an expert. I read a little bit about his bio. He was at NYU, he established the Judaic Studies Dept..

Adam Mintz [6:49 – 6:51]: He was my professor.

Geoffrey Stern [6:51 – 9:24]: Unbelievable. So confirm to me that he really— I mean, when we look at his commentary today, sometimes you and I will say, that’s a nice drash. And then sometimes we’ll say, that’s peshat. I don’t think that Levine would be associated with Drash. He really looked at the philology of the ancient Near East, the context that these verses were written in. And he looked at other practices very similar to Cassuto, who we dealt with in another episode or two. And what I found in his commentary on this section, there is a surfeit of exclamation points. He’s getting excited, so let’s just dive right in. He says in the second section of Numbers 19 that we just read, no specific role is projected for priests. It is required only that a pure person, Ish tahor, perform the rite of lustration. The implication of this shift will be discussed in the comment below. Quite possibly the lustration rite prescribed in the later section of this chapter had a popular rather than a priestly origin. So what he’s saying is this is something that was really organic in a sense, and very important. And then he goes on to talk about the ger. And again, he says, the ger is clearly the alien resident within the Israelite settlement. And true, this is just how people living in the Israelite nation dealt with these issues. And he says two questions are raised by the inclusion of the alien in the requirement of purification. One, was the corpse of a non-Israelite also a source of impurity? That is a question that gets asked even up till today. And would a non-Israelite be contaminated by contact with a corpse in the same way as an Israelite?

So again, I take this to mean that what we are doing is every religion in the world. Rabbi, I’m going to quote a little bit later a book called “The Denial of Death” by Ernest Becker. And you can make a case that one of the prime, I guess, objectives of every religion is to explain mortality and to provide the adherents of that religion some way to navigate our mortality. And we’ll see, maybe, how do we make an impact upon life? And I think as we look at these verses, guess what? Here we are. This is where our Torah is doing it.

Adam Mintz [9:24 – 9:55]: Yeah. I mean, you know, you say that Levine is interested in this and then denial of death. I mean, the topic of death is a topic that has been that’s fascinated people for 3,500 years. And of course, the reason for that is because of the unknown. It’s really a question of how does the Torah deal with the unknown? And that’s why it’s so fascinating. And that’s why Levine is so fascinating. He’s trying to get, you know, get underneath, get to the truth of what does the Torah think about this unknown.

Geoffrey Stern [9:55 – 10:26]: Yes. And he jumps forward to Numbers 31 because he says in Numbers 31, we have the first real use case of these laws. And it says there, you shall then stay outside the camp seven days. Everyone amongst you or among your captives who has slain a person or touched a corpse shall purify himself on the third day. So now we’re talking about battle. We’re talking about soldiers returning from the battlefield, and they have to go through this. And it literally repeats over all of the laws that we just learned.

Geoffrey Stern [10:26 – 10:56]: Levine says the laws of Numbers 31 require Israelite warriors who had killed human beings in battle to remain outside the encampment for seven days. Inevitably, the provisions of Numbers 31 represent a direct application of the laws of the present chapter. Numbers 19 provides a unique instance in priestly legislation of riddance rites entirely separate from the sanctuary and its sacrificial altar.

Geoffrey Stern [10:56 – 11:27]: So here’s what he’s saying. We are looking at a kind of a closed battery of rules. Consider the following of its features. The slaughter of the red cow took place outside the encampment. The cow was totally incinerated in a single procedure. The ashes yielded by the incinerated cow were to be stored in a pure place outside the encampment, not within the sanctuary as was customary for consecrated subjects.

Geoffrey Stern [11:27 – 11:58]: He goes on and on to say two things: that, number one, this was totally isolated from all of the temple rituals that we’ve been studying about. You can really look at it on its own. And he goes, the operative magical principle of the rites of Numbers 19 is sympathetic: death rids the community of death! And this is where this scholarly academic puts an exclamation point.

Geoffrey Stern [11:58 – 12:28]: What he’s saying is that the ashes represent the annihilation and are therefore effective when applied to persons and objects defiled with contact to the dead. He is saying that the Torah’s approach, and I’m going to let him speak a little bit further, where he argues that it’s unique, is to not make death transcendent. He put an end to death. The mixture of ashes and living water had a primary practical basis in liquid form. This mixture could be applied in persons and objects. The operative cult of principle is substitution.

Geoffrey Stern [12:28 – 12:59]: So he’s getting a little worked up here. He’s very excited by this. And as I started thinking about it, Rabbi, there’s one other thing that was mentioned above. It didn’t say the mishkan (tabernacle), it said the mikdash (temple). And I’m sure later scholars will say, ah, this is a later text. The way I take it to mean, the reason it didn’t refer to the tabernacle and instead related to the temple is because the Torah was literally distancing our acts of mourning and dealing with the dead from others who use their temple.

Geoffrey Stern [12:59 – 13:29]: I made a reference before, when the Pope died, they buried him in their temple. That to a Jew would be anathema. We could never imagine burying somebody in our Beit Knesset or in our sanctuary. There might be a cemetery next door. But it’s this separation, I think, that he points to that comes literally from this. And what he’s arguing is these rituals were made not to aggrandize death and to give people this kind of…

Geoffrey Stern [13:29 – 13:57]: Think of it, when we think of death and the ceremonies that one associates with death, it’s almost a ritual rite of accompanying the dead to the netherworld, making sure the dead remember it. If you think about it, it doesn’t exist in Judaism.

Adam Mintz [13:58 – 14:45]: Yeah, well, that’s really good. And I would add to that, you know, Min Hamikdash lo ye say the reason they talk about mikdash about the temple rather than about the tabernacle is because the word temple has the word mikdash, which is kodesh. And that’s what Levine points out. This whole thing is about how you deal with the holiness. Right. That someone who’s in contact with the dead is not allowed to come into holiness. And how are they allowed to reenter holiness? They reenter holiness by coming in contact with the ashes of the dead heifer. So the death cancels out the death, and then they can be holy again. So it makes your point and Professor Levine’s point even stronger.

Geoffrey Stern [14:45 – 16:35]: Yeah. And I think what I always believed, and when I started researching this week, I said, you know what? I always thought we left Egypt. Egypt was all about pyramids. It was all about the afterlife. And the Torah was a rejection of that. The truth is that a scholar like Baruch Levine, he’s less interested in Egypt because Egyptology had less of an effect on what was going on in Canaan. But what he’s saying is pretty much the same thing. And so he is struck by the fact that the kohanim, the priests, have no role in this whole death ritual.

So not only is the ritual itself made to minimize the importance of death, he says it’s a ritual made to stamp it out. The second it happens, you want to get rid of it. It’s amazing if you think about it. We’re so used to it that we pass over these laws and we don’t understand the impact of them. But clearly these laws are saying schmutz happens. Get rid of it. We don’t want to talk about death. Let’s move on. And then add to that that the priest is not involved. He says Rabbinic Judaism endorsed the same dispensation and said that a priest, normal priest, can only defile themselves. And this is up until today for their own family. And a high priest has no exemptions at all. He could not go to a funeral. I mean, that is a profound statement that we’re all aware of, but I think the message gets lost sometimes.

You know, he says that Leviticus was aimed at eliminating a funerary role for the priesthood. And you think of funerary, Rabbi, we have funerals today, no question about it. But there’s no basis in the Torah. The Torah is only interested in getting rid of death. It’s crazy if you think about it.

Adam Mintz [16:35 – 16:59]: Well, you know, the one, you know, the book of Leviticus doesn’t have any stories, any narratives. The one narrative that it has is the death of Nadab and Avihu, the sons of Aaron. So that also is they’re challenged by death. Right. How does Aaron deal with the death of his sons when he has to serve in the temple? They want to distance themselves from death.

Geoffrey Stern [16:59 – 18:23]: Yeah. And what he calls it is the cult of the dead. And he says by their very nature, cults of the dead exhibit two kinds of complementary objectives. First, they are aimed at affording the dead what they seek, namely an agreeable afterlife. And I know there are discussions that we’ve had at other times and are ongoing in academia today. Does Judaism believe in an olam haba? Does it believe in an afterlife? We’re not even getting there. We’re talking about the rituals that were used at death.

Speaker A: And there’s no question there is nothing that we read today that is creating rituals to enable people to pass into the afterlife. The second, he says, is that death cults are cults of the dead to seek to ensure that the powerful dead will not forget the living and will act benevolently rather than malevolently toward them, especially toward their descendants. Rabbi, we have laws against trying to bring up the dead, trying to get the dead to be involved with our lives. It really is, as I said in the beginning, that Judaism is all about choosing life, “becharta bachayim.”

But here we’re looking at the laws, and it’s striking what is not being done. And of course, you need a scholar of Baruch Levine’s size to really give us the confidence to say, this is not d’rash. This is peshat.

Adam Mintz [18:24 – 18:35]: Right. That’s the interesting thing that he says. This is really what it’s talking about. That’s the tension in the Torah, how you deal with death. Okay, good. Now we’ll see what Yechezkel has to say.

Geoffrey Stern [18:35 – 20:29]: So he brings a few proof texts to show that this was such a key element in Judaism. We are all very aware of how later generations stumbled and they worshipped Baal and so forth. In Ezekiel, he talks about kings must not again defile my holy name by their apostasy and by corpses of their kings at their death. What Levine is arguing from verses such as this is that when we fell back and when kings and prophets came to bring us back to our sources, one of the things they were fighting were funeral rites for kings that were occurring.

That was not Israelite, that was not part of our mission. And the other thing that happened was the temple was combined with where the kings were buried. You literally had what I was talking about before, when the Pope was buried. When Israel fell behind in their theology, they were burying kings right next to the temple. He brings other sources where in Kings 2, there was a reversal of a customary practice to establish a new category of impurity associated with death. This was part of our fight to stop Israel from falling back into the default culture of the world they lived in, where kings, powerful people, and maybe just everybody were seen as important in the afterlife for our life. What he’s arguing is that what is unique about the Israelite perspective that we’re seeing today is that literally these rituals we have are made to put death into the box, so to speak, to get rid of it.

Adam Mintz [20:29 – 20:35]: Yeah, that is fantastic. Okay, great. Let’s see what he says now. Now we go back to our verse about Miriam.

Geoffrey Stern [20:36 – 21:25]: Yeah. So you cannot ignore the fact that right after all of these laws, what do we get? We get in Numbers 20 that the Israelites arrived in a body in the wilderness of Tzin on the first new moon. The people stayed at Kadesh. So far, you’d think it’s a typical verse from Bamidbar, from Numbers, counting a stop on the road. And then it says, Miriam died there and was buried there. And that’s it, Rabbi. Of course, if you look at the women’s commentary, they will say, typical example of the male chauvinism of our scripture. And we have to agree with them. But nonetheless, it is very striking in the shortness it gives to the death of a prophetess, Miriam.

Adam Mintz [21:25 – 21:56]: Yeah, well, that, you know, and it’s even better. It comes literally out of nowhere. The previous chapter, chapter 19, talks about the red heifer and then we go back to the narrative. There’s no introduction. The next verses talk about what leads to Moses and Aaron’s death, and that is the hitting of the rock. But Miriam just seems to die. It’s almost as if that’s the end of this generation. One dies and the next dies. That means the generation is finished. Finish. And we move on to the next generation.

Geoffrey Stern [21:56 – 23:34]: And then we go to 20:11. It says, and Moses, of course, what they do is they say, after Miriam died, she brought the well and the people lost access to water, so they all complained. Famously, Moses raised his hand and struck the rock twice with his rod. Out came copious water and the community and their beasts drank. But God said to Moses and Aaron, because you did not trust me enough to affirm my sanctity in the sight of the Israelite people, therefore, you shall not lead this congregation into the land that I have given them. Here, just 11 verses after Miriam dies, we get the death sentence on both Moses and Aaron.

I would like to argue that this gives truly another nuance. It’s not simply a death sentence It’s the “you shall not lead this congregation,” this sense of mission that no one completes their mission. I would argue that we have to focus, at least this year, on the outcome and not the reason for it. Whatever the reason that Miriam died when she died, that is between her and God and the writer of the Torah. The same goes for Aaron and Moses. But what’s important is that they had a death sentence and they were not going to be there to complete the story. It’s almost as if there are directions to leave stage right Basically, the story continues. You’re not going to be part of it.

Adam Mintz [23:34 – 23:57]: Right? I mean, that, that’s. That I think is important. And there’s a lot of material spent explaining why they died. And what you’re saying is it doesn’t matter why they died in this context, it matters that they died. And that’s the transition. That’s the beginning of the next series of chapters and stories in the Torah. Good, I like that.

Geoffrey Stern [23:57 – 25:30]: So it continues in 23. It says, At Mount Hor, on the boundary of the land of Edom, God said to Moses and Aaron, let Aaron be gathered to his kin. He is not to enter the land that I have assigned to the Israelite people because you disobeyed my command about the waters of Meribah. Take Aaron and his son Eleazar and bring them up to Mount Hor. Strip Aaron of his vestments and put them on his son Eleazar. There Aaron shall be gathered unto the dead. Moses did as God commanded. They ascended Mount Hor in the sight of the whole community. Moses stripped Aaron of his vestments and put them on his son Eleazar. Aaron died there on the summit of the mountain. When Moses and Eleazar came down from the mountain, the whole community knew that Aaron had breathed his last. All the house of Israel bewailed Aaron for 30 days. And then the story continues.

It is truly amazing, again, if you look at it through the lens that we’re looking at, how quickly the transition occurs. It’s in the most trivial fashion. Take off your clothes, pass leadership onto your son, go up the hill, be gathered to your people, mourn, and move on. It’s very striking if you think of it as Baruch Levine would, by looking at the pageantry of what would happen in a similar situation at the death of a high priest or the death of a king in ancient Near Eastern societies or anywhere.

Adam Mintz [25:31 – 25:44]: Yeah. I mean, that idea of transition. Right. The fact that he goes up, strip Aaron of his vestments and put them on his son Eleazar. You know, the truth of the matter is, Geoffrey, you started by talking about the pope.

Geoffrey Stern [25:44 – 25:44]: Pope.

Adam Mintz [25:44 – 26:32]: The Catholics know that, too. Immediately after the funeral, they gather all the cardinals together and choose a new pope. Having a period with no leader is problematic. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, there’s a famous picture of Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office on the plane back to Washington. That was extremely important, that there should be not a moment where there’s no leader.

Now, in the case of the United States, it’s that we’re susceptible; we’re not powerful if there’s no leader. But anyway, that goes back to the Torah. The minute that he takes off, he dies. He takes off his clothing. Eleazar needs to have the clothing on immediately. There can’t be any period in the middle where there’s no leader.

Geoffrey Stern [26:33 – 27:03]: I mean, I think from a pragmatic point of view, you’re absolutely correct. What is the phrase? The second the king dies, “The king is dead, long live the king!”. So from a transition point of view, I agree with you 100%. And it’s interesting to know that here the theology of Judaism corresponds to what is very pragmatic as well, that you do have to transition power immediately. But nonetheless, I will stick to my argument to say that from

Geoffrey Stern [27:03 – 27:33]: a theological, ritual way, this is still extremely striking. How death is almost, like I said before, put back in the shoebox and you move on. And Levine said before that the rabbinic tradition really kind of mimicked, and I would say emphasized, this concept. I could not think of a more profound way than in Pirkei Avot 2:16, where it says Rabbi Tarfon used

Geoffrey Stern [27:33 – 28:04]: to say, it is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it. If you have studied much Torah, you shall be given much reward. Faithful is your employer to pay you the reward of your labors. This iconic phrase was this very fine line that I think these rituals were able to do with not aggrandizing death

Geoffrey Stern [28:04 – 28:34]: and not belittling life. In other words, the approach that we’re seeing here today, it’s not trivializing death, but what it’s saying is it’s not yours to finish. And I think that’s what God was saying to Aaron and Moses. He didn’t say, you’re going to die. He says, you’re not going to finish the mission. You’re not going to lead them. And I think what becomes then eternalized is the mission. What becomes eternalized is the endeavor,

Geoffrey Stern [28:34 – 29:05]: the experiment, the model of what we’re building, the society that goes on. But I think it is so striking that death itself is almost, you can’t but say, minimized. And I think the sense of heroism keeps on. It came up when I was reading “Denial of Death” because part and parcel of wanting to be immortalized, our desire to be

Geoffrey Stern [29:05 – 29:36]: able to transcend the end of our life is this sense of being able to heroically persevere. And I think we saw that a little bit when Levine quoted the verses in Numbers 30. And he says, the first use case that we have is after a battle. After a battle, you’re the hero, you’ve won, and you have to wash yourself from this. You’re almost taken back to your

Geoffrey Stern [29:36 – 30:07]: source. There’s no room for triumphalism because none of us gets to finish the mission. In “Denial of Death,” he writes, the idea of death, the fear of it haunts the human animal like nothing else. It is a mainspring of human activity. Activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death. To overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man. Anthropological and historical research, also begun

Geoffrey Stern [30:07 – 30:38]: in the 19th century, put together a picture of the heroic since primitive in ancient times. The hero was the man who could go into the spirit world, the world of the dead, and return alive. And he talks about how obviously in Christianity you had that clearly in Jesus. But here we’re looking in the same few chapters that we’re dealing with. How do you deal with death? We look at our potential heroes. And I think it is so striking how the heroes are

Geoffrey Stern [30:38 – 31:09]: dealt with. There is no such thing as watching Aaron or Miriam go into the spirit world. And there is certainly no sense of them coming back or even having power in the next world over our life. They are truly divorced from it. And I think that is striking. And I think this is a singular case where the peshat, the academic and historical analysis of the texts, really

Geoffrey Stern [31:09 – 31:23]: flushes out something that has become very Jewish. This love of life that we Jewish people seem to have drunk in our mother’s milk. But it comes from these sources. It’s fascinating to me.

Adam Mintz [31:24 – 31:34]: Absolutely fascinating. You should live by the laws, right? You don’t die by the laws. We’re people of living. You can’t serve God if you’re dead.

Geoffrey Stern [31:35 – 31:49]: Yes. So we wish everybody a Shabbat Shalom full of life. When you raise that Kiddush cup on Friday night, you are making Kiddush. But you are also saying L’chaim. So L’chaim to everyone. See you all next week.