Parshat Chukat: When You Don’t Understand… Trust Anyway

This week’s parsha, Chukat, begins with a contradiction: a mitzvah we cannot explain.

The red heifer—parah adumah—purifies the impure and simultaneously makes the person preparing it impure. Even King Solomon, the wisest of all, said:

“I thought I could become wise, but it is beyond me.” (Kohelet 7:23)

In the Torah, this is called a chok—a law that defies logic. And yet, it is binding, holy, and healing.

As a therapist, I see how much we resist this. We want to understand pain before we allow ourselves to heal. We think, “If I just knew why this happened, I could move on.”

But the truth is:

Knowing why doesn’t guarantee healing.

And when clients don’t have any kind of faith or framework for meaning, they often hit what I call the existential wall. They want logic and fairness—but life doesn’t always offer it. And when it doesn’t, they feel utterly alone.

Here, Hebrew offers us something beautiful.

The word for why is lamah. 

But when you separate the letters—ל מה—it becomes: To what?

Instead of asking, “Why did this happen to me?” Judaism asks:

“To what can I bring this?” “What now?” “What part am I meant to play in a story that’s still unfolding?”

My grandmother embodied this. She was widowed young, and lost her only child—my father—when he was just 28. I asked her once how she kept going.

She said simply: “God didn’t deal me such a great hand… but I know He knows what He’s doing.”

That was her emunah. Quiet, deep, and real.

Rabbi Sacks said:

“Faith is not certainty. It’s the courage to live with uncertainty.”

And the Lubavitcher Rebbe taught that we don’t follow chukim because we understand them—we follow them because we trust the One who gave them.

Recently, we hosted a young Israeli couple. The husband is an IDF commander. On October 7, he left early, telling his wife he’d probably be back that night. But she didn’t hear from him for three days. It took that long to neutralize the kibbutzim.

He said:

“None of us had the full picture. We just did our job. We trusted each other. We moved forward.”

That is faith in motion. That is lamah becoming le’mah.

This week, may we let go of needing to understand everything—and instead, step into trust.

You don’t have to know the whole story. You just have to show up for your next line.

(P.S. As I wrote and spoke about in last week’s ParshaRX, the next several weeks are a period of time in the Jewish calendar where we have constricted consciousness. We are working on letting go of any resentments we might be holding onto. May this willingness we have to let them go be a merit for the rebuilding of the Holy Temple!)