The Hands That Undid Seven Days

About This Talk

Chapter 2 explains that the extreme purity apparatus around the red heifer exists because the offering is valid when brought by a priest who immersed that day, and the Sages feared that so light a requirement would be treated with disdain, so they isolated the burning priest for seven days in a chamber where every vessel was stone, sprinkled him on six of those days though the law requires only two, timed his isolation to begin on Wednesday so the exempt fourth day would fall on the Sabbath, and had the water carried by children born and raised over hollow stone so that no grave in the depths of the earth could ever have reached them. Chapter 3 describes the burning itself on the Mount of Olives, reached by a ramp built as an arch upon two arches to keep the ground empty beneath it, where the elders deliberately render the priest impure, send him to immerse, and let him burn the heifer that same day; the blood is caught in the left palm and sprinkled seven times toward the Holy of Holies with the right finger, the cedar and hyssop and crimson wool are held up and named three times each so that nobody can claim the wrong species was used, and the ashes are divided into three portions, of which one is hidden away in the chayl, nine heifers having been burnt from Moses until the second destruction. Chapter 4 turns to what disqualifies, and almost none of it is impurity: intention that is not for the heifer, blood received in a vessel rather than on the finger, a sprinkling with the left hand, a miscounted dip, a burning not facing the Sanctuary, an olive of hair that flew off the pyre and was not put back, and above all the performance of any other work from the moment of slaughter until the heifer is ash, which is why an eighth sprinkling by another priest is harmless and the same sprinkling by the priest who is burning it is fatal.