TAZRIAH & METZORAH
Tazriah (Chapters 12 and 13) and Metzorah (Chapters 14 and 15) are two parshiot that are often combined to one but are two separate parshiot in 5784 However, they cover the exact same territory and so I will treat them together. They are both focused purity and pollution.
Tazriah covers the pollution of a woman who gives birth to a child in a very short Chapter 12 (only 8 verses). For reasons that the text does not explain, if a woman gives birth to a girl, she is polluted for twice the length of time than if she gives birth to a boy. She cures the pollution by serving her time and then having a priest make both an olah offering and a Chattat offering, a burnt or elevation offering and a sin offering (as a reminder, sin offerings cover unintentional offenses.) Chapter 13 then begins the long discussion of tzara’at. I shall follow Milgrom and call this “scale disease.” It is often mistranslated as leprosy, but it simply is not that disease. The priests’ job is to diagnose whether some kind of skin eruption counts as scale disease or not and then to assess whether the person is healed or not. The priest is in no way a doctor who does any kind of healing. His job isn’t to fix the problem, it’s to decide if something is tzara’at or not. Fascinatingly, in Chapter 13 cloth can have scale disease (v. 47-59), as can houses in Chapter 14 (14:34-52). A person who has scale disease has to stay isolated out of camp until the lesion is resolved. This leads me to all sorts of questions about how enforceable this ever was. I have had psoriasis since I was age 5, would I have been excluded from camp all my life?
Chapter 14, the first chapter of Metzorah discusses the purification rite that happens outside of camp once the person who had a scale disease is healed. I discuss this further below. Chapter 15 covers the pollution caused by a small group of genital discharges, both male and female. As might be expected, male discharges are less polluting than female discharges.
Here are four themes I want to discuss:
How might we understand the differing standards for male and female pollution?
What are we to make of the fact that people, clothing and houses can all get scale disease?
The purification ritual in Chapter 14 and how we might purify ourselves today.
Why need both an olah and a sin or guilt offering in order to become pure?
There are different standards for males and females in terms of pollution. A woman who gives birth to a baby boy is polluted for 7 days and then has a thirty three day period where she is in the “blood of purity” and can’t touch holy things (12:2-4). But if she gives birth to a baby girl, then it is two weeks of being polluted followed by sixty six days in the “blood of purity” where she can’t touch anything holy (12:5) Then in chapter 15 about male and female genital discharges, a discharge from the penis is only polluting until the evening, but a female period is for seven days (tellingly, the text doesn’t discuss any other possible female discharge)
I think there are at least three plausible approaches to dealing with these texts. One approach is just to condemn the evident sexism and be done with it. After all, today, there are no sacrifices from which we are banned and there’s no camp to go outside from. The problem with this approach is that we learn nothing from the text.
A second approach is to find some kind of creative interpretation that doesn’t pay much attention to the text. Friedman quotes Danny Siegel, an early Jewish renewal Rabbi and a classmate of his from the Conservative Seminary, that parshat Metzora is about bringing people who are infirm back into the community. Siegel points towards things like ramps for handicapped people as a derivative practice from this text. But are people who are tameh infirm? A menstruating woman isn’t infirm. This approach highlights a misunderstanding of the difference between ritual pollution and physical or moral impurity. The woman who has given birth is ritually polluted and her ritual pollution can be cured following the prescriptions we’re given. Someone who can’t walk is physically impaired, not ritually polluted and they can’t be cured by the kinds of measures described in Leviticus; spending time outside of camp or making certain offerings just isn’t going to help. Further, Siegal's approach doesn't address the different standards for males and females. The different standard is precisely what is at stake in the text.
Here's a third approach to the text. Our ancestors and most indigenous people believed that there is a difference between male and female energy that tended to correspond to anatomy. What exactly counted as male or female energy has a cultural context as well, and there have always been males who had more female energy, women who had more male energy and some variants of intersex and transgender people.
We might say that the text is asking how to negotiate gender differences in the context of ritual pollution and purity. Now, I think the answers in this text are dreadful. Why? because they are based on the assumption that female energy is more ritually polluting.than male energy. I suspect that female energy is more ritually polluting because female energy is closer to the cycle of birth and death and this cycle is something that our male ancestors wanted to deny and flee.
Thus our ancestors attempted to control female energy by keeping it away from anything holy. Ugh. It's also not just our ancestors. Menstruating women, for instance, aren’t allowed in sweat lodges in Native American practice with which I am familiar. Indian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism believe are based on the core idea of escaping the cycle of birth and death through moksha, liberation because the cycle of birth and death is a cycle of suffering, samsara.
Modern pagan belief, in contrast, believes in a cycle of birth and death and rebirth. The cycle of birth and death is not a tragedy or something to avoid but is as inherent in human life as breathing is. I’m following Starhawk here, but this doesn’t originate with her. I also don’t think this view of the cycle of birth and death is unique to modern paganism; indeed Starhawk believes that it originates in the Goddess religions that preceded patriarchy.
How we negotiate male and female energy is highly pertinent in our communal and personal lives. When do we thrust ourselves forward and when are we focused on being receptive is just as relevant to the boardroom as it is to the bedroom. I think our general goal should be some kind of balance in the energies; too much of either, however we precisely define them, seems to me to be a path to cut ourselves off from the path to wholeness.
I also don’t believe that there was a time when there were beings who weren’t gendered or that there are any beings who aren’t gendered in some way. There’s a common view that reads the first creation story as humans starting out as not gendered (Genesis 1:26-7). That’s not how I would read this because the second half of 1:27 says “God created them male and female.” There’s also a view that the divine is beyond gender. This is commonplace and is one of the many places that I don’t believe in traditional Jewish theology. Lastly, I don’t think that going beyond gender is something that is desirable or possible, contrary to many. Sure, there’s no excuse for any kind of discrimination based on gender and the expressions of gender are infinite, but that doesn’t mean that gender isn’t an irreducible category of being.
How would you assess your balance of male and female energies? How would you assess our communal balance?
What are we to make of the fact that people, clothing and houses can all get tzara’at, scale disease? This was by far my biggest surprise in rereading this text. It was important in this system to know the ritually pure or polluted status of people because this determined if they could offer sacrifices. But given that clothing and houses don’t offer sacrifices, I would not have thought the categories of ritual pollution and purity could possibly have applied to them. Yet they do. The discussion of clothing having tzara’at is Chapter 13:47-59, a lot of verses. The discussion for houses is 14:34-52, also a lot of verses. The discussions are complete with instructions on what the priest should look for to determine if the scale disease is healed or is chronic.
What do humans, clothes and houses have in common that the category of tzara’at can be applied to all of them? I believe that the answer lies in the animism of our ancestors. Animism, and I have written more on this in the blog under “Philosophical Reflections” on the website, is the perspective that everything is alive and thus shares a similar ontological value. The differences between beings, the differences amongst a human, a squirrel, a rock, a house or clothing come from the fact that we have different bodies with different abilities and longevity, but we share the fact of beinghood. This common beinghood is why humans, clothes and houses can all suffer from tzara’at, scale disease.
Animism, as I’ve written, stands in stark contrast with a scientific worldview that regards most things as inert matter upon which humans are free to act. An animistic world view inherently demands much more respect for the more than human world and a far greater emphasis on reciprocity and relationship. Our view of the more than human world is that we can and do feel free to use it for our own ends since it has no equivalent beinghood to humans. But our text here offers us a situation where houses and clothing, two human creations, have equivalent status to humans. That’s an animistic view.
The emphasis on tzara’at is at least somewhat puzzling. It sounds like it can be healed in a few weeks without some kind of medical intervention, so not like my psoriasis. It had to be common enough to capture the imagination of our ancestors, but uncommon enough that quarantining people was economically feasible, if this law was ever actually implemented.
Milgrom argues that tzara’at reminded our ancestors of death and corpses and that is why it was emphasized. The priests hated things that reminded them of death. This isn’t just Jewish priests, by the way. The caste system in India also works diligently to separate the priestly castes from coming into contact with death.
I would speculate that the avoidance of death and the search for something eternal and unchanging are related to each other. Further, I believe they are also related to the denigration of women and female energy. In our tradition, this takes the form of an eternal unchanging God who is often described as male and sometimes, as with Maimonides, beyond gender. in India this takes the form of liberation from a never ending cycle of suffering associated with birth and death and a celibate monkhood. Just as with our gender question from the previous section, there’s a core question of the desirability of the solutions championed by some of our ancestors that take us away from an animism that immerses us in the cycle of birth, death and rebirth.
Can you think of anything comparable to tzara’at, scale disease, personally or in our culture? What do you think about the linking of humans, clothing and houses given in the parsha? What’s your response to what I am suggesting about the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, the motivation to avoid death as ritually polluting and the view of the divine?
There is a purification ritual in chapter 14 after a priest has determined that someone is healed from their scale disease. (14:3-20) The ritual is designed to address ritual pollution and enable the person to return to the community of people who can offer sacrifices. The ritual has three parts, but the really different part of the ritual is the first part.
The priest takes two live birds, cedarwood and scarlet and hyssop. The priest slaughters one of the birds and lets the blood drip into living water (the same kind of water used for a mikvah, the ritual bath that is used for ritual purification) that is housed in a clay jar. Then the priest dips the live bird, the cedarwood, scarlet (I’m assuming this is some kind of yarn) and the hyssop into the clay container that has the diluted blood of the first bird and sprinkles the blood/water mix over the healed person seven times. The priest identifies the person as now tahor, ritually pure, and lets the living bird fly off. The living bird thus carries the pollution off, akin to the scapegoat that we will meet in Leviticus Chapter 16.
The purified and healed person now has to wash their clothes, shave off all their hair and bathe in water. The healed person can return to camp, but that still can’t offer a sacrifice and has to remain outside their tent for seven days. Then they again have to shave and bathe before offering the sacrifices/offerings that conclude the ritual and the return of the person to wholeness.
Purification rituals could address either ritual pollution or moral failings. Tashlich done at Rosh Hashanah is a purification ritual that addresses moral sins and gives them over to the water to be taken away. The mikveh is a purification ritual that can be used for both ritual pollution and moral cleansing. It is used for ritual purification in the case of menstruating women who must submerge in the mikveh after their period ends so they can become ritually pure and sexually available to their husbands for those who follow the laws of family purity. The mikveh is also used in conversion rituals and can be adapted for use for different life transitions. In that case, it might be for the purification of sins, but also might be construed as a symbolic rebirth to a new state of being. Mikveh, the use of living water, covers a lot of territory.
Purification rituals are common in indigenous religious practice. Now I wouldn’t want blood sprinkled all over me—raise your hand if you’d rather be smudged seven times? (smudging is a purification ritual). They aren’t so common in our world but imagine a purification ritual that offers us a ritualized way of saying goodbye to things with which we are done. Think about former partners, former jobs, friends, places you lived, clothing you wore, books you read, cars you owned, mistakes you made, things you wish you would have done differently. How do you let the energy of that go so it no longer sticks to you? How do you let it fly away? This is obviously more necessary when you have had some conflict and have mixed feelings, (this would be moral purification) but we just don’t have much ritualized methods for putting the past into the past and not dragging it with us—we don’t have any equivalent of the bird flying off with our pollution.
What could be an updated version of the bird flying off with our pollution? What kind of occasions would you want to use it for?
The offerings/sacrifices in these two parshiot are always doubled, an olah offering and a sin or guilt offering. Why both instead of just one? The text, as ever isn’t clear. Here are a few thoughts.
The need for the double offering testifies to the psychic importance of tzara’at. I’m not saying I understand why tzara’at is that important because I do not. But I understand that the ritual pollution caused by tzara’at was powerful and meaningful for our ancestors. Mary Douglas in her book Purity and Danger, speculates that societies that are insecure tend to have heightened concern with boundaries, including skin and various excretions such as scale disease. Certainly the ancient Israelite leadership did not feel secure as a minor country buffeted about by the imperial dreams of its stronger neighbors. I think we might see an echo of this in our politics around immigration where our own internal insecurities have been manifest in demands for stronger borders.
Here’s another possible interpretation. The Olah offering is in effect designed not to remedy anything but to basically say that the offerer wants to be in a right relationship the divine. The sin or guilt offerings are a kind of reparations for something unintentionally done—no one chooses to get scale disease. It’s this process where we knew things were out of whack and we basically say, here’s a present so we can establish right relationship and I am sorry for anything I might have done that might have caused my ritual pollution. I think that’s the logic.
Where do you feel insecure internally that is manifest in some external way? Where does your life feel out of alignment with the divine? Is there some kind of gift you could offer that would testify to your desire to be in alignment?
QUESTIONS
How would you assess your balance of male and female energies? How would you assess our communal balance?
Can you think of anything comparable to tzara’at, scale disease, personally or in our culture? What do you think about the linking of humans, clothing and houses given in the parsha? What’s your response to what I am suggesting about the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, the motivation to avoid death as ritually polluting and the view of the divine?
What could be an updated version of the bird flying off with our sins? What kind of occasions would you want to use it for?
Where do you feel insecure internally that is manifest in some external way? Where does your life feel out of alignment with the divine? Is there some kind of gift you could offer that would testify to your desire to be in alignment?
