Ah yes, laws about skin diseases, menstruation, irregular bleeding and discharge…lovely stuff!
Now that I have your attention, don’t forget that after Scrollers tomorrow we have our 2nd Saturday Shabbat service and pot-luck Kiddush lunch. We’ll be honoring Phyllis Ross, and our Torah readers are three Scrollers – Kevin Fox, David Tilles and Rita Christopher!
Okay - back to the preview. This week’s double Torah portion deals mostly with the issue of ritual purity and impurity. As we have already explored in our discussions on Leviticus, in order to be able to come close to God and offer a sacrifice through the priests at the Tabernacle, the individual had to be in a state of ritual purity. Things that would make a person impure were things like touching a dead body, having sex, giving birth, and having the skin disease called “tzara-at.”
As I have emphasized in previous sessions, being impure didn’t mean that you did anything bad or wrong or that you were somehow dirty. You became impure by doing things necessary for life, and often joyful. Being impure meant that you had been in contact with the intensity of life through birth, burial of the dead, or certain kinds of illness. In fact, the ways in which you became impure probably brought you into close contact with God as well. But in order to come close to God through the specific ritual of sacrifice, you had to go through a ritual that got rid of your impurity and made you ritually pure again.
This week’s Torah portions focus on various sources of impurity, how to manage the period of impurity, and how to return to a state of purity again. One of the potentially troubling ways a person becomes impure is through childbirth. The first parasha, Tazria, opens by stating that a woman who gives birth to a male child is impure for seven days and then must remain in a state of “blood purification” for 33 days. If she bears a female, these time periods of impurity double in length. As part of returning to a state of purity, the woman has to bring a chattat offering, usually understood as a sin offering, and a burnt offering.
Commentators spill a lot of ink explaining why it is that the woman who just gave birth must bring a “sin” offering and why the birth of a girl increases the period of impurity. We will study some of these texts together and explore whether we think the Torah is being sexist here, or if there may be a deeper spiritual message behind these rules, or if we think that the deeper spiritual reasons are merely apologetics so that we can more easily swallow these regulations.
Looking forward to studying with you tomorrow morning!
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