Spin-a-Verse for Tazria-Metzora

Summary

In the Torah portion Tazria, God instructs Moses about the purification rituals for mothers following childbirth. God then describes to Moses and Aaron the procedures for identifying and responding to those infected with leprosy. In Metzora, God describes the purification ritual for people and homes afflicted with skin diseases; God also instructs Moses and Aaron regarding the laws of the emission of bodily fluids.

Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature, at 178-9:

The Leviticus writer has a bad name as a formalist, intent on minute observance of ritual, also as excessively preoccupied with sex and disease. Here it may be remarked that religions which ritualize sex are usually more in favour of it than against. To suppose that the numerous sexual regulations of Leviticus exhibit a narrowly puritancial attitude to sex would be like expecting a culture with numerous food rules to condemn good food. It is where sex is recognized as a potent elemental force, at once the source of desire, fulfilment, and danger, that religion seeks to appropriate sex and to bind it with rules. Compared with other religious teachers the Leviticus writer is not unusually high-minded, obsessed with cleanliness or sex-denying. Toilet practices, discharge of fluids, and physical impurities do not interest him as such. True to God's compassionate concern with fertility his strong interest is in reproduction. He has used a strict principle of selection to focus exclusively on three topics: on a woman's discharge of blood, menstruating or post-parturient; on leprosy; on male and female genital discharges. These are the only medical topics in the book.

Two takes from Rachel Adler at different moments in her life

“Tumah is the result of our confrontation with the fact of our own mortality. It is the going down into darkness. Taharah is the result of our reaffirmation of our own immortality. It is the re-entry into light. Tumah is evil or frightening only when there is no further life. Otherwise, tumah is simply part of the human cycle. To be tameh is not wrong or bad. Often it is necessary and sometimes it is mandatory”. (Adler, Rachel 1976 “Tumah and Taharah: Ends and Beginnings”pp.63-71 in Elizabeth Koltun (ed) The Jewish Woman, New Perspectives Schocken Books, New York; p. 64)

“Twenty years later, as a feminist Reform theologian I continue to be faced with an essay I wrote, an essay that continues to be quoted, cited, and reproduced, promulgating opinions and prescribing actions that I now cannot in good conscience endorse. […]

The only rationale the sources did not offer was the rationale that motivates all sincere piety, the one held out to men: that observing the commandments would make one holier and bring one closer to God. [...]

When Jewish women who were not Orthodox appropriated my reframing of immersion in the mikveh to mark occurrences for which no ritual expression had existed, they taught me an important lesson about the possibility of salvage. They began using the mikveh to purify themselves of events that had threatened their lives or left them feeling wounded or bereft or sullied as sexual beings: ovarian tumors, hysterectomies, mastectomies, miscarriages, incest, rape. In waters whose meaning they had transformed and made their own, they blessed God for renewed life. The makers have imbued these rituals with a different understanding of what purity means”. (Adler, Rachel 1976 “Tumah and Taharah: Ends and Beginnings”)

(Adler, Rachel 1993 “In Your Blood, Live: Revisions of a Theology of Purity “ pp.38-41 in Tikkun Vol. 8, no.1; pp. 38-9)

Beth Alpert Nakhai, Another View, The Torah: A Women's Commentary, Tamara Cohn Eskenazi & Andrea L. Weiss (eds) at 650. "Regardless of whether a woman bears a son or a daughter, the rituals of purification are the same. Why, then must a woman spend twice as long in a state of impurity following the birth of a girl than following the birth of a boy? Traditional interpreters have assumed that this is because the birth of a girl creates a kind of double impurity, possibly because newborn girls contain the latent capacity for menstruation and reproduction. But another point is also important here: in ancient Israel, baby girls arguably faced lives filled with more risks than did baby boys. Israel was a society in which economic value accrued primarily to sons. They remained part of their fathers' households even when they married, inherited their families' ancestral lands, and cared for their aging parents. In contrast, there is evidence to suggest that girls were sometimes thought of as expendable. In times of need, famine, and war, baby girls might suffer hunger and neglect, or even be abandoned and left to die.

The priestly authors seem to be concerned about this situation and try to avert such tragedies by ensuring that baby girls stay in their mothers' protective care for an extended period of time. This not only allows mother and dauther to bond tightly, but also ensures that the child is nursed and cared for. Thus, this troubling passage can be understood not as discrimination against women but as a way to promote God's loving community---and to guarantee that women and men, both created in the divine image, are nurtured and protected."