TAZRI’A-M’TZORA AND THE IMPERATIVE TO SET APART
With the double parashah, Tazri’a-M’tzora, the concerns of the Book of Leviticus turn to child-birth, bodily emissions, skin eruptions and house ‘plagues’. What has all this got to do with ‘holiness’ you may wonder? Well, the Hebrew concept of ‘holiness’, k’dushah, means to ‘separate’ or to ‘set apart’. There is a holy logic here, which connects Tazri’a-M’tzora to the other themes of Leviticus – to the list of sacrifices, the consecration of the Priesthood, the food laws, the sexual prohibitions, the ethical injunctions, the festival calendar, the sabbatical and Jubilee years – the imperative to create order, make separations and set apart. And so: offerings are set apart for God; the priests are set apart from the people; creatures that may be eaten are set apart from those that may not be eaten; the Israelites are set apart from the other peoples in every aspect of their behaviour from the most intimate realm to the domain of economic relationships; the sacred days are set apart from daily life; the seventh year is set apart from the six that precede it; and after seven cycles of seven, the fiftieth year is set apart as a year of release and freedom.
In Tazri’a-M’tzora the imperative to set apart translates into rules concerning child-birth, menstruation, seminal emissions, skin eruptions, tzara’at – translated as ‘leprosy’, and connected to the word m’tzora, translated as ‘leper’ – and a similar affliction as it affects houses, which is also called tzara’at: the discoloured blotches – the text describes them as ‘greenish’ and ‘reddish’ – which we might identify as mildew or wet-rot. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas observed in her book, Purity and Danger, what connects all these conditions is that they involve a breaking of boundaries and a disruption of order: the birth of a child involves a very tangible break out of the womb into the world; menstruation and seminal emissions both involve fluids breaking out of the body – fluids, which would otherwise be directed to the generation of new life; skin eruptions break out of the skin, just as mildew breaks out of the walls of a house – in both cases a boundary is broken. And so it is that the ritual solution to all of these disruptions involved a seven day period of separation and cleansing.
Significantly, when the rabbis developed the laws governing Jewish life following the destruction of the Temple in 70CE by the Romans, the only rules to survive from this ancient system were those relating to women, which were then made more stringent, and given a new rationale: taharat ha-mishpachah – the ‘purity of the family’. I will leave you to ponder for yourselves why the rabbis chose not to maintain the rules relating to men, which, according to the Torah, also involved a seven-day period of purification (Lev. 15:13)…
Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah