Both the ceremonies removing ritual impurity from the
• Lepor: The slanderer
• Contact with dead:
require a procedure involving
• Cedars: [Rashi: High society people]
• Hyssop: [Rashi: low society people]
• Wool: [Rashi: Wool = lamb = ordinary people who use ...]
• Dyed worm-blood Red: [Rashi: ... wormy low life laborers]
The symbolic meaning of these items - indicated in the accompanying Rashi comments above - and the applicability of this symbolic interpretation to removal of ritual impurity, seems to be the following:

To remove the impurity of slander one must expose oneself to the full spectrum of personality types - the low/worm life to high society; those that use lower social structures and those that don't. This allows one to become aware how each personality type has a set of skills and a place in life. Each is needed for the achievmnt of communal goals. Without these people society would not function. Similarly for the removal of the ritual impurity due to death one must be aware of the equality of death on all personality types; such an awareness facilitates seeing death as independent of personality type - indeed since all people die we cannot perceive death as due to any particular life style or actions. That is, no particular social status facilitates avoidance, or a propensity to, death.

Advanced Rashi: There is more that can be said on the above but as usual we suffice with the bear minimum. Note especially that Rashi advanced two explanations. It is our custom in this email group to assume that Rashi's second interpretation is the correct one and that the first explanation was rejected. In fact the first explanation was only a numerical association of the three of the three objects - cedar, hyssop, worm-blood-dyed wool - and the three thousand that died because of the sin of the golden calf. Such an association while sometimes justified in symbolic interpretations must be rejected in favor of an intrinsic interpretation such as we have given above.