Dvar Torah on Parshat Tazria

Parshat Tazria, which begins with the laws of the ritual impurity of a woman after giving birth, and goes on to discuss the ritual impurities connected to the skin disease tsara'at, presents us with some interesting problems. The very notion of a ritual dimension to natural bodily functions, or to disease, is somewhat problematic for us today. We tend to see things scientifically, medically. Modern medicine and technology have made childbirth, and disease, a lot less spooky and mysterious than they once were. As daunting as they sometimes still are, we feel much more in control of these bodily functions, and malfunctions, than people did in the past. The human body is being conquered: we can control it, replace a growing number of its parts when we need to, heal a growing number of diseases, and there is much less mystery about how our body works or, when we are ill, fails to work. The Torah's insitence on ritualizing these perfectly natural bodily functions, on having the mother of a new baby count days of impurity and purity - seven followed by thirty-three if the baby is a boy, fourteen and sixty-six if she's a girl, and then bringing sacrifices to the temple; the exclusion of the person with tsara'at from the community (possibly, but probably not, a kind of medical quarantine, which would make more practical sense), the possibility of finding this disease in clothing, or in building stones, feels quite strange to the rational, practical, scientific, modern mind.

I don't have a solution to this dissonance. I don't know exactly how to make these laws - along with the related  laws pertaining to a menstruant woman - comfortable for the modern mind. Of course, there are many wonderful and powerful ideas contained in these laws: the notion that a woman comes to her husband renewed, like a bride, after childbirth or, on a more regular basis, every month after visiting the mikveh (ritual bath) following her period of menstruation; the opportunity that the forty or eighty day period gives a woman after bearing a boy or girl to slowly transition back to regular society, and the way she ends this transition period with a visit to the Temple and the bringing of a sacrifice; the connection of tsara'at to the sins of slander and tale bearing, along with other anti-social behavior. These are all very rich and powerful ideas, full of value and meaning for those who learn and practice them. But there still is a basic difference between the way the Torah seems to look at the body and its functions and the way most of us do today. The Torah sees the body as full of meaning, pregnant with symbolic information, whereas to us the body is a functioning machine, one which, more and more, we feel we have the right and ability to tamper with, fix, change, adjust, as we see fit.

The modern approach to our bodies has caused tremendous changes in the way we relate to some of the most basic elements of our lives. Because of modern medicine and contraception, the impact, the very meaning, of sexual intimacy has changed; we are able to think of sexuality in a way that divorces it from procreation. This is not completely new: the Torah tells us that Lemech had two wives, and the Rabbis explain that one, Ada, was for procreation, and the other Tsila, was solely for sexual pleasure (Genesis 4, 19, Rashi),  but today, thanks to modern contraception,  we are, for better or for worse,  much more able to live like Lemech, if we choose to. The on-going campaign in the media and in many social circles to achieve greater social acceptance for transgendered individuals can be seen as an attempt to further erase the importance of the basic biological realities we are born into, and give us the right to decide if we want to be male or female. The popularity of cosmetic plastic surgery (along with other, healthier things, like public sanitation, better diet, the understanding of the importance of exercise, and medical advances), has changed what it means to age - 60 is the new forty, and grandparents are far from being, by definition, old. In such an atmosphere, our bodies seem more and more like our cars: they can be fixed, changed, tuned-up, traded-in if we don't like them. We control them more than they control us.

The Torah's perspective reflects a greater respect for natural physical realities and functions. Being male or female, engaging in sexual intimacy, birth and death, have deeper meanings, beyond the simply phsical. They impact us in ways we can not fully understand, or control. One of the difficult details of Parshat Tazria, the fact that the new mother waits forty days after the birth of a boy and eighty days after the birth of a girl before coming to the Temple and offering her sacrifices, is a good example of the complicated and deep way the Torah views our physical reality. In the Talmud, Tractate Niddah, page  30b, Rabbi Yishmael offers an explanation for the discrepancy. He says that the longer waiting period for the birth of a girl is due to the fact that it takes longer, in the womb, for a female to be formed than a male: forty-one days for a boy, eighty-one for a girl. There is a dissenting opinion, but I would like to focus on Rabbi Yishmael's. His idea would seem to derive from the sense that the female anatomy is more complicated than the male's, her reproductive system more complex, therefore needing more time to be formed in the womb. It is this difference which is expressed by the longer waiting period the mother of a girl needs to go through before being able to go to the Temple. The Rabbis disagree - there is an interesting debate about autopsies performed on Cleopatra's maidservants which did or did not shed some light on this subject - but, whether right or wrong, Rabbi Yishmael's understanding of the reason behind the length of the waiting periods reflects a connection between the reality of pregnancy and birth and the ritual connected to it. The physical experience of pregnancy and birth needs to be reflected in a ritual, a religious experience, which frames the physical as worthy of precise recognition and reflection. The mother is asked to recognize the difference between a baby boy and a baby girl, and to express that ritually. We are not meant to minimize the importance of the, on the one hand  quite normal and natural, but also wonderous and earth-shattering, experience of bringing a child into the world. We are not meant to flatten-out the experience to a simple physical, practical reality which we must deal with as efficiently as possible. Rather, we must respect it for the miracle it is, for its importance as a central element of what life is all about.

The Torah, with these rituals surrounding sex, birth, gender, disease, and death, demands of us to take these things seriously. We must reflect on and react to the fact of gender. We must reflect on, not just manage, disease. We are called upon, by the Torah, to be moved and influenced by the physical experiences our bodies give us, to recognize and reflect upon the basic mystery surrounding them, the profound nature of life and death, and not simply use technology to control them in ways that are comfortable or convenient for us. The realtive mastery over our physical selves which modern technology has given us should not make us insensitive to the still profoundly important and mysterious nature of these functions and events. This issue goes beyond the medical to the economic. One of the ways we flatten out and trivialise the experience of raising children is by out-sourcing it, because we can afford to and because we all need to work all the time so that we can afford to. The modern world, again, has placed what it sees as the practical - career, financial success - before the more basic, real, and profound, traditional needs of a society - to really raise our children. The Torah's emphasis on the profound and mysterious nature of procreation is a corrective to this more selfish, utilitarian approach.

The modern world is about efficiency, utility, practicality - it wants to defeat the impractical, inconvenient demands the body sometimes makes on us. The Torah's laws concerning our body and its functions, the basic realities of conception, birth, life, and death,  remind us that there are more things in heaven and earth - right here in our bodies, in fact - than are dreamt of in our technologically-driven, convenience-worshipping, utilitarian, philosophy, and they must be given their due. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix