Parshah Commentary

Parshat Tazria

This week’s parshah, Tazria, picks up from last week’s discussion of the regime of tahara and tumah, often translated as “purity” and “impurity.” These are loaded terms, especially when applied to people and our bodies, as they are in both this and next week’s Torah readings. Tazria focuses on two of the main experiences that can make a person impure—childbirth and a leprosy-like skin condition known as tzaraat—while the surrounding parshiyot consider other instances like contact with a dead body; touching certain “creepy-crawly” creatures; and assorted genital emissions, including menstruation and ejaculation.

In her book Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature, scholar Mira Balberg argues that while in the Bible, impurity is acquired and ritually dispelled in specific moments, the rabbis of the Mishnah, a second-century codification of law and practice, transformed the system of purity and impurity into an ongoing process. Purity becomes about attempting to control an inevitably porous body by paying constant attention to it. Because some bodies—those that bleed monthly and lactate—are even more inevitably permeable than others, they are harder to control under this system of management, and are thus regarded as less ideal subjects of the purity regime. (According to Balberg, the rabbis, influenced by Greek medical thought, also saw women as less capable of the mental discipline required to pursue purity, just as menstruating people are unable to control their bodies’ “leakiness.”)

But this wariness about “leakier” bodies obscures the reality that we all live in bodies that are, as Balberg puts it, “extremely fluid entit[ies] whose boundaries are constantly transformed.” In her essay “A Question of Boundaries,” the Jewish feminist theologian Rachel Adler writes that the “patriarchal man points at the other as the permeable one. He portrays himself as sealed and impenetrable.” This impenetrability, which is a delusion at best, should not be an ideal. Rather, we should understand our inexorable permeability as providing occasions for holiness. Rituals around menstruation (known as niddah), for example, can be viewed as the menstruating body generating an opportunity for mitzvot. For Adler, the absence of a firm dividing line between the body and the world around it is linked to another form of porousness: the self’s reliance on others. The places where the boundaries between us are flexible are the loci of divine revelation; it is the attention to these places, rather than to the maintenance of ourselves as self-sufficient and impermeable, that creates a holy subject. Just as a niddah practice can lead practitioners to deeper embodied connection with the Divine, appreciating our interdependence can strengthen our sacred connections to one another.

The idealization of the impermeable body has also often been applied to the “national body,” as part of the reactionary worldview that regards borders as sacrosanct. Indeed, today the notion of defending the Jewish national body—which has been used for decades to justify a Jewish-supremacist state—is being mobilized to perpetrate horrors in Gaza. In this context, there is deep power in the potential offered by embracing impurity over purity, messiness over order, multivocality over coherence, porousness over borders.

Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.