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Drash
for Shabbat Tazria/HaChodesh The Torah includes one of the largest bodies of law in existence. But the Torah is not organized as we would, for example, organize secular case law, written more or less as the need arises. The Torah was written/organized by our forefathers - hopefully with some influence from our foremothers - as one huge presentation, rules for living as the new nation is brought into harmony with God. In Leviticus, we find a catalog of laws designed to safeguard the purity essential to maintaining a holy balance between one’s body, the sanctuary and the community. At first glance, this week’s parasha about ritual impurity and how to cure it, appears to be a somewhat arbitrary pairing of the miracle of childbirth and eruptions of the skin, fabric or leather. Maybe not. Ancient ritual impurity never meant filth or infection. Rather, it was more like a fact of life and a part of nature. The impurities in Tazria fall into this category but particularly deal with the nexus of life and death. How so? If the greatest source of impurity is a human corpse, and the scaly white skin disease described in Tazria makes one look like a corpse, impurity results. If life is embedded in blood, the loss of blood during and after childbirth can be equated with the loss of potential life. Life. Death. Impurity. Because we read Tazria on the occasion of a weekend celebrating WRJ and the wonderful women of our congregation, I would like to note that a woman’s regular life cycle and her ability to give birth automatically put her into the largest class of people requiring purification. Even after the destruction of the Second Temple, when many laws of purification disappeared, including these in Tazria, popular custom continued to provide justification to isolate women from the sacred throughout much of Jewish history, in many parts of the world. Fortunately for us, we live in a contemporary and enlightened Western society where we can celebrate a Bat Mitzvah, read from the Torah, become rabbis and cantors, and continue our personal spiritual fulfillment as Jewish wives, daughters, mothers and grandmothers. Shabbat Shalom.
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