Have you ever done a trust fall?
It’s when you stand straight up with your eyes closed. Then while still in standing position you lean back slowly until you fall backwards. Then you trust that your friend(s) just behind you catch you before you plummet to the earth.
If you’ve never tried it, you should know that it’s pretty nerve wracking. It’s psychologically difficult to throw yourself into free fall with no way to arrest your own motion. Even when you know your friend well and he guarantees that he wouldn’t let you crack your skull on the pavement below.
But why do people do this at all? There are countless summer camps around the world who do trust falls as an integral part of their programs. Why?
This week’s Torah portion starts off with a strange mitzvah. Perhaps the strangest of all mitzvos. You take an entirely red cow (why not black and white?) Then you kill it and burn it (why don’t we eat some like most other offerings?) Then you put the ashes in water and sprinkle them on people to remove any contamination they have from coming in contact with the dead (how does spraying dead cow on someone purify them from touching dead people?) And then the cohen who performed the procedure becomes impure (wait, why does a purifying solution contaminate it’s users?)
If you are confused by this mitzvah, you are not alone. In fact, the Midrash tells us that King Solomon, the wisest man that ever lived, understood every mitzvah in the Torah except this one.
Why would G-d give us such a mitzvah? Why make us perform a whole complex procedure that doesn’t seem to make any sense?
Where did a “trust fall” get it’s name? It’s not just that you have to trust your friend before you fall backwards in the first place. It’s that when you are flying helplessly through the air and someone catches you. You form a special bond of trust with that person that is hard to describe.
The only way to get that bond is to first let yourself fall.
When I was first becoming religious, a rabbi told me that I should take on one mitzvah that was easy, one that was harder, and one that made no sense to me at all. That last mitzvah is your trust fall with G-d. Your eyes are closed, your feet are off the ground, you have no idea where this is going, but you trust that G-d wouldn’t have you jump if He wasn’t going to catch you.
Not every mitzvah is as incomprehensible as the “Red Heifer,” but we are also not as wise as Solomon, so there are potentially many mitzvos that we don’t understand. That’s a good thing, because it gives us the opportunity to do more trust falls with G-d. And after that fall, we will also have formed a special bond, and not just with another participant at our summer camp.
