By Rabbi Erica Steelman
This week’s Torah portion is Chukat-Balak: Numbers 19:1 — 25:9
NOVA’s documentary “Bird Brain” offers a striking example of the benefits of teamwork. A group of birds figures out how to access food that no single bird could reach on its own. One bird steps onto a raised lever, opening the lid of a food container so others can eat. When that bird steps down, another takes its place. This process repeats until, eventually, each bird gets fed.
Like these birds, humans have developed ways to cooperate so that individuals and communities can survive, and at our best, thrive. Yet we often engage in destructive fighting and oppositional posturing instead of working together to benefit each person and the larger whole: our communities, our societies, and the world we share. The result is that we end up hurt, fragmented, and often worse off.
This week’s Torah portion, Chukat, offers a model — perhaps unexpected for us living in 2026 — of what people need to live in community, to live together across difference: shared systems that require mutual participation, responsibility and the recognition that no one stands entirely apart from the whole.
On the surface, it may seem odd to turn to an ancient purification ritual for guidance in the 21st century. Nevertheless, this is precisely what I am suggesting.
The second verse of Chukat, Numbers 19:2, begins with God saying: “Zot Chukat HatTorah” — “This is the statute of the Torah.” What follows are detailed instructions for a ritual often referred to by its main ingredient, the ashes of a Parah Adumah, a red cow, or in some translations, a red heifer.
The Parah Adumah ritual purifies those who become ritually impure through contact with a human corpse. In this context, impurity is not a moral failing but rather a ritual state that comes with being mortal. Human life inevitably includes moments of ritual impurity, and these rituals provide a way for individuals and the community to navigate change and social cohesion.
The system and its laws apply to everyone; no one is exempt. Even the priests take part not as people standing above and apart from the system, but as individuals who themselves can and do become ritually impure. And the system depends, to some degree, on everyone’s participation: gathering and preparing the required materials, conducting the rituals, and taking responsibility for one’s own ritual state, which affects not only the individual but the whole community. No single person can do it alone.
Perhaps the most essential component, and the one we most need today, is commitment: a commitment to remain in relationship, to stay connected to the other parts of the whole, and to recognize that our actions and inactions affect others, and that those effects ripple through the whole, shaping others’ response and eventually affect us in return.
This is an unconditional commitment to being part of an “us,” a “we” — not uncritical loyalty to whatever a group may do, but covenantal responsibility, accountability and care.
It echoes the covenantal moment and force of “Na’aseh v’Nishmah” (Exodus 24:7); “we will do” comes before “we will hear and obey.”
The covenant is not conditioned on everyone always agreeing. It is a commitment to become an Am, a people: one whole composed of tribes, families, individuals. It is a system that holds multiple truths at once: we are diverse and we are interconnected.
Let’s work together, not because we always agree with each other, but because our lives and fates are interconnected. We may not have bird brains, but surely, we can learn as those birds did: survival depends on showing up, participating and choosing the “we.”
Rabbi Erica Steelman is a rabbi, chaplain, consultant and educator. She also serves as a vice president for the Board of Rabbis of Greater Philadelphia.