Parshah Commentary

The first parshah of this week’s double reading, Tazria-Metzora, outlines the laws surrounding childbirth, among other bodily emissions and irregularities. God tells the Israelites that one who has given birth enters a state of impurity and must wait a set period of time before bringing sacrifices that facilitate their cleansing. In these directives, the length of the birthing parent’s impurity depends on the baby’s assigned sex: For a male child, seven days of impurity are followed by 33 days of “blood purity” (a state of limbo during which one is no longer impure, but not yet permitted to participate in rituals that require purity), while a female child leads to impurity for 14 days and then blood purity for another 66. A parent is thus restricted from sacred activity for double the amount of time after birthing a female baby than a male—a disparity that many commentators have probed, since the Torah itself provides no explanation for the difference.

The Sifra, a third-century midrashic compilation on Vayikra, plays with these verses, testing the limits of the Torah’s binary options and implicitly questioning their inherent hierarchy. What about a case, the text wonders, when a child is born as a “tumtum” or “androgynous”—someone whose sex is not clearly determinable? In a more surprising line of inquiry, the Sifra challenges even the binary between human and non-human, asking about a case in which the parent births something with the appearance of a fish, grasshopper, creeping creature, or reptile. The Mishnah, the earliest anthology of Rabbinic legal teachings, takes up these questions and rules, like the Sifra, that a fetus must be clearly “of human form” in order for the parent to be obligated in the Torah’s relevant purity laws. But Rabbi Meir objects and deems any birth—even of an animal—sufficient to render the birthing parent impure. In his view, one is impure for 40 days for a male and 80 days for a female, regardless of form; if the sex is undetermined, he creates a new ruling that combines the directives for both males and females.

We might reasonably wonder why animal birth is a subject of discussion in the first place. After all, the sages surely encountered actual intersex people, but probably not a lizard born of human flesh. Whatever the concrete explanation, this line of inquiry enabled the Rabbis to subvert normative Biblical categories and test the firm lines between human and non-human existence. In the centuries that followed, the Talmud continued to develop this kind of inter-species imagination, asking dozens of questions about the mixing of species, such as the status of a human fetus found inside an animal or of a fetus “whose body is that of a goat and whose face is that of a human.” In their work on hybridity and reproduction, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species, Rafael Rachel Neis describes how in these texts, “species seemingly slip into—or at least out of—the uteruses of other species; even the human is caught up in this web of reproductive and species queerness.” They suggest that this example is but one of a “variety of (perhaps surprising) ideas about creatureliness—including even human creatureliness—and reproduction that do not quite uphold, and even challenge, the rather more hierarchical Priestly binaries embedded in Genesis and Leviticus.”

Ultimately, then, an exemplary moment of Biblical misogyny gives way to a web of inquiries that assert the reality of variance. As with other such moments in our tradition, trans people may find a source of resilience in this Rabbinic recognition of nonbinary existence. But, as the discourse that unfurls from these mentions of “tumtum” and “adrongynus” shows, the queerness of Jewish thought goes much further and deeper. The Rabbis agitated against binary frameworks in all facets of thought, treating gender as merely one sphere in which to trouble the apparent fixity of concepts. (In other words: All Torah is trans.) In this way, the text offers a framework for understanding trans life that goes far beyond mere acknowledgment or tolerance, seeing it instead as a path to reimagining the very terms of existence.

Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.