The Law That Feels Absurd
Parshat Chukat begins with the paradox of the parah aduma (red heifer), whose ashes purify the impure and defile the pure. It is the quintessential chok; a mitzvah beyond explanation (Midrash Tanchuma, Chukat 8). Even Shlomo HaMelech, the wisest of men, could not make sense of it.
And it feels absurd. Not in a mystical or mysterious way, but absurd in the way that grief is absurd. It is a wanting of something sacred, doing everything right, yet being denied and turned inside out. A chok doesn’t just resist logic. It resists consolation.
Like Parah Adumah, infertility is a chok. It doesn’t make sense. It simply is. And like the chok, it isolates. It marks you. It renders you spiritually inexplicable in a world that sanctifies motherhood as a badge of merit, and turns you into an unintentional outcast.
Striking the Rock: When Prayer Breaks
G-d tells Moshe to speak to the rock. Instead, he strikes it. And G-d says, “Because you did not trust Me…” (Numbers 20:12). Our sages wrestle with why. For Rambam, it was a failure of leadership and a missed opportunity for a Kiddush Hashem. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, zt”l, offers something deeper: Moshe was grieving. Miriam had just died. Her well was gone. The people were panicking. And Moshe, who had led so long and held so much…finally broke.
I know that Moshe.
I didn’t just pray, I screamed. I sobbed until my chest ached. I begged to Hashem with everything I had. I lit Shabbat candles with trembling hands, whispering private prayers into the flame. I recited Psalms with extra kavanah. I made deals with Hashem like Chana did in Sefer Shmuel. I saw specialists. I did the work. I tried every mitzvah and segulah I could think of, or ones others offered in hopes of tipping the scales.
And then one day, I stopped.
Not everything. I still lit the candles and went through the motions of being an observant yid. But the intimate conversation that once accompanied them; the quiet pleadings, the dreams I tucked into those precious moments, faded. I couldn’t bring myself to open the siddur. I couldn’t learn. I didn’t want to be around my community. I couldn’t even whisper, “I need You.” All that remained was the ache in my chest and the unbearable stillness of a G-d I loved but couldn’t feel.
It wasn’t that I stopped believing. I just didn’t know how to speak into a silence that didn’t answer. And during that season, even the warmth of friends, family, and faith couldn’t penetrate the ache.
In the middle of my silence, I returned to someone I first met in college, Albert Camus. A 20th century French Algerian philosopher with no ties to the Torah, Camus shouldn’t have become part of this story. Yet, he did. He defined the absurd as “the confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” But unlike despair, absurdity isn’t failure; it’s a condition. A space to live inside, even when it doesn’t answer you back. Camus didn’t offer theology – he offered survival. Not instead of faith, but beside it. When the words of my faith sat dry in my throat, Camus reminded me I wasn’t lost; I was simply in the breach.
Camus wasn’t a guide, but rather a companion. He didn’t promise healing. He simply named the absurd. The ache for meaning in a world that refuses to explain itself. And somehow, that helped me stay.
The words of Kohelet joined him. “Hevel havalim, hakol hevel” or “Futility of futilities, all is futile” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). Yet Kohelet also whispered: “There is nothing better than to rejoice in one’s portion” (3:22). That joy, though fleeting, became an act of resistance for me.
The Sefat Emet taught that a chok is the Torah of the broken heart. It isn’t meant to be understood by the mind; it must be lived by the soul. The paradox of death and purification, silence and sanctity. It wasn’t only in the parah adumah. The chok was inside me.
None of this gave me clarity. None of it answered the question I couldn’t stop asking. But it allowed me to remain in the question. And eventually, that opened a way back to Hashem, with a heart still beating in the dark.
Digging What Didn’t Pour: A Stepmother’s Well
Later in the parsha, the Israelites dig a well. “Then Israel sang this song: ‘Spring up, O well – sing to it!’” (Numbers 21:17). This water doesn’t burst forth from a rock. It doesn’t arrive through miracles. It comes through effort. Through presence. Through choosing be part of a community and to keep going, even when the dream has dried up.
When my husband and I began our life together, it was a second marriage for us both. And there were already children in the picture. He came with them, and I stepped into their unfolding story. I was already a stepmother, though I didn’t yet know how to name it. Alongside that, we hoped to build more. Something new. Something ours. We carried that hope gently. Sometimes desperately. Through doctor’s offices and whispered prayers, through tears and through each Shabbat, chag, and simcha. Eventually, we were told what we didn’t want to hear. There was no dramatic ending but rather a slow, irreversible closing.
By the time we realized it was too late, something inside me broke. Not my faith. Not my capacity to love. But the shape I thought that love would take.
Still, Hashem asked me to love.
Being a stepmom is complicated. There’s no bracha for becoming one. No ritual to mark the moment your heart opens in this new and undefined way. Just quiet acts of devotion: showing up at school events, driving carpool, helping with homework, remembering favorite meals, listening. Being one more adult in their world who loves them fiercely – even imperfectly – and who chooses, again and again, to stay.
It’s also learning how to love from a distance. To carry that love quietly, even when there’s no response. To keep the light on. To leave the key under the mat. Even when the house is silent and your heart is broken.
The Shulchan Aruch (Yoreh De’ah 240:24) teaches that honoring stepparents is a mitzvah. But there’s no halacha for how to be one. No roadmap for the kind of love that walks beside instead of ahead. That holds space without demanding it. That gives without being named.
It’s not tidy. It’s not always seen. It’s love with splinters.
But it’s real.
And maybe that, too, is a kind of well.
Miriam’s well didn’t thunder. It didn’t split seas or shake mountains. It flowed quietly, following her through the wilderness. It was steady, sustaining, often unnoticed. Only when it vanished did the people understand what she had been carrying all along. The Talmud teaches that this miraculous well flowed in her merit, and when she died, it disappeared (Ta’anit 9a; Rashi on Numbers 20:2).
I think about that sometimes. What it means to love in ways that are not always visible, yet deeply sustaining. To offer water without any flourish. To be a source, even when no one calls you one. Even when you’re not sure they know. Or care. Still, you give. You stay. You sustain and the well still flows.
The Final Chok
I didn’t get the storybook ending: the houseful of children that were mine from birth, the prayers answered in the ways I once imagined. That chapter closed, and the silence that followed still aches.
It’s a story that makes people uncomfortable at the Shabbat kiddush table. I can’t join the casual rhythms of parenting talk the same way. I’m not part of that sisterhood – not entirely.
And yet, I became a mother. Not through blood or ritual, but through presence. Through showing up when it was hard and when it was holy. Through quiet constancy in moments big and small. Through learning when to reach out and when to step back. Through holding space, even when I’m not sure it’s wanted. Through a love that asks for nothing, carries everything, and lives even without a name.
Maybe being a stepmom is my chok. A path that defies neat halachic categories but still carves out something sacred. It doesn’t always feel certain. It rarely feels understood. But it is real. And it loves. And it is absurd.
And maybe it is that absurdity that makes it enough. Perhaps more than enough.
Song in the Desert
I stood at the rock and struck, not in defiance, but in grief. The silence that followed wasn’t abandonment of Hashem. It was the presence of another voice.
As the Piaseczno Rebbe, zt”l, taught: when the Temple fell and prophecy ceased, the Shechinah entered the broken heart. In my grief, I became a dwelling place. A Mishkan not of gold or cedar, but of longing, ache, and offering. A house built from the things that didn’t arrive.
Like the chok of the parah adumah, where the pure becomes impure and the impure becomes pure, my sorrow did not disqualify me. It changed me. It didn’t unravel my worth, it remade it.
Rebbe Nachman from Breslov, zt”l, taught: “A person must search until they find in themselves even the smallest point of good, and from that point, they can begin to sing.”
So I kept searching and eventually, I found my voice. Not the lullabies I once imagined, but something else. A song nonetheless.
And that, too, is holy.
Perhaps this is the essence of the chok, for us to carry love that defies definition, to keep digging where no water pours, to sing even when the words feel like ashes.
If so, then may all of us who live in the in-betweens, whose stories don’t quite fit the mold, be counted too. Not just as witnesses of the journey; but as singers of the song.
