Parshah Commentary

Parshat Shemini

In her landmark 1966 book Purity and Danger, the British anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that purity rituals and symbols uphold existing narratives and the hierarchies they ordain. The establishment of people, creatures, or behaviors as “impure” is a manifestation of the human impulse to reject “any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications,” she writes. This week’s parshah, Shemini, presents a complex system of purity and impurity that exemplifies her point.

The parshah offers a long and detailed list of impure creatures that are to be avoided through either consumption or contact. In verse after verse, the Torah identifies types of animals or scenarios in which one might encounter an animal’s carcass and declares: “it is tameih [impure] for you.” All of these laws, the Torah explains, exist so that the Jewish people can distinguish between that which is tameih and that which is tahor (pure), which makes them holy and uniquely set apart for God. As the parshah explains, “you shall not make yourselves impure with [impure animals] and thus become impure. For I, Adonai, am your God: you shall sanctify yourselves and be holy, for I am holy. ” The parshah seemingly solidifies distinctions between pure and impure—and, consequently, between good and bad.

But the rabbis of the Talmud probe these ostensibly immutable categories and distinctions. If it is a desire for order that first brought these categorizations into the world, it is the pleasure of subversiveness and the rabbinic proclivity for gradience, expansiveness, and subversion that drives the rabbis to play with them. The Talmud, for example, praises Rabbi Meir because he could declare something impure to be pure and something pure to be impure, providing sound and convincing justifications for each ruling. We learn later in this passage that one of his students could, using his creativity and analytical reasoning, declare an animal explicitly described in the Torah as impure to be pure, citing 150 reasons that supported his argument. This analytically subversive ability later becomes a criterion for political leadership on the Sanhedrin, the highest court within the rabbinic frame. The medieval commentator the Meiri explains that such a requirement exists so that if a later generation encounters a difficulty with some aspect of Torah, they “will know how to renew, add, or remove that which was previously taught in order to create new essential teachings needed in this moment, all while finding support for their words from the Torah.” Rabbi Meir’s project and the lineage it establishes counters the Torah’s binary categorization of creatures as tameih and tahor, recognizing that purity and impurity are not static, but rather demand reinterpretation and readjudication.

Often, dominant narratives can become so deeply entrenched that they themselves are understood as tahor—unimpeachable and beyond reproach. But the rabbis’ ingenuity should inspire us to question stories we have inherited as fixed. Over the past years—and especially the past months—powerful organizing has done precisely this, troubling entrenched narratives about Jews, our safety, and our relationship to power and victimhood; what was once tahor now seems open to contestation. Despite the horror of this time, it is also a moment of profound possibility, as we glimpse the ways in which many of the schemas that appear to dominate our world can be upended.

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