‘And they will call out “unclean, unclean!”’ [Lev. 13:45]
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in unpublished notes on James Frazer’s twelve-volume work The Golden Bough (1906-1915), writes: ‘we should distinguish between magical operations and those operations that rest on false, oversimplified notions of things and processes…what narrowness of spiritual life we find in Frazer! Hence the impossibility of grasping a life different from the English one of his time!’ (Wittgenstein, The Mythology in Our Language, 38). Later on, he notes: ‘what we have in the ancient rites is the use of a highly cultivated gestural language. And when I read Frazer, I keep wanting to say at every step: All these processes, these changes of meaning, are still present to us in our word language.’ (Wittgenstein, Mythology, 50). I have added italics for emphasis.
There is a state of tumah and there is a state of taharah. These are often translated as “impure” and “pure”, words which we must remember are only interpretations. In the Torah the people of Israel exist within one of these states, navigated by the kohenim [priests]. The rabbis themselves struggled with these concepts, precisely because there is no translation. There are degrees of tumah and laws for its transmission, outlined in Mishnah Tohorot. In Mishnah Sotah, Rabbi Aqiva extends tumah to a third degree and thus renders almost everyone in a state of tumah. But go and see how Rabbi Zeira expands niddah [menstruation] in Berakhot 31a, how the rabbis fence it with harchakot [separations] in Shabbat 13a. There is no Temple, so no opportunity for cleansing, but there is a miqve for dunking. We today also struggle with tumah and taharah, because the rabbis legalised their relevance and centered halachic relations between “men and women” around them. As such, the Laws of Purity directly implicate themselves into the most intimate parts of every person’s life.
Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert writes that the discourse around our Laws of Purity has solidified into ‘two extreme positions. Sometimes the ritualization of menstruation and its designation of menstrual purity with the concurrent requirement of purification are evaluated as an index of the sexism of traditional Jewish culture…[and] a more apologetic position emphasizes the positive aspect of the ritualization of women’s bodies and its affirmation of women’s physiology’ (Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 15). There is no doubt that the rabbinic construction of law is about power. Rabbi Rachel Adler’s addendum to her classic 1976 essay Tum’ah and Toharah describes the Torah concept of tumah ‘becom[ing] distorted into a method of controlling the fearsome power of sexual desire, of disciplining a mistrusted physical drive. The change was also related to an aesthetic horror of the female body’. (Adler, Tum’ah and Toharah, 126)
It is interesting that this double parsha Tzaria-Metzora, and the halacha which grew from it, is the one which causes such difficulty in the Progressive Jewish world. Go and learn the Pittsburgh Platform’s fourth point, back in 1885, and pay attention to the language used: ‘we hold that all such Mosaic and rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity, and dress originated in ages and under the influence of ideas entirely foreign to our present mental and spiritual state’. Under the influence of ideas and ages entirely foreign to us, this regulation-infection has apparently existed from the time of Moses and continued to infect through the rabbis. Listen to this also, from Rabbi Adler’s addendum to her essay: ‘this, then, is the madness and perversion which ensued when Jewish scholars, tainted by foreign asceticism – Essenic, Christian, or Moslem – wrenched tum’at niddah out of its context’. Languages of purity and danger, of inside and outside. Languages of violence.
It is ironic that the words slung against the rabbinic concepts of tumah are so embedded within its own semantic logic. This fact does not disqualify the relevance of their assertions. We are to assume that all of us are in a constant state of tumah (Shulḥan Aruch: Yoreh De’ah 322:4-5). The laws of tumah centre around the Temple, which no longer stands, and the priestly class, which no longer have a place. The rabbis maintain that, in some areas, tumah remains relevant because the Temple is not required. If one believes that the system’s structure has fundamentally changed, then their logic is not strong. The rabbis’ decision to maintain certain aspects is a choice, one which can be challenged. If it’s true that if the words in this parsha are ‘false, oversimplified notion[s] of things and processes’, then they can be discarded easily without affecting the whole. Yet I don’t think this is the case. I think the actions embedded here are indicative of a magical operation, with a language that has become lost through the ruptures of time and trauma.
Attempting to retrace this language is what the rabbis of the Mishnah did, what Rabbi Rachel Adler did. Rabbi Ayala Miron understands this: ‘Tzari’a is probably one of the most marginal, disregarded, and thus challenging Torah portions…[yet] Tzari’a pushes us to ask ourselves how tolerant we really are of variations from our picture of an “ideal” human body. How willing are we to examine, look into, consider, and understand these differences carefully?’ (Miron, Nagu’a, 141) ‘All societies live by fictions taken as real’, writes Michael Taussig in his 1991 book Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. ‘What distinguishes cultures of terror is that the epistemological, ontological, and otherwise philosophical problem of representation – reality and illusion, certainty and doubt-becomes infinitely more than a “merely” philosophical problem of epistemology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. It becomes a high-powered medium of domination.’. The language in our parsha, which represents a very real social reality, can easily become domination. For many people, it already is. Domination is not right. But to reject this parsha is to reject the ‘highly cultivated gestural language’ which articulates the lives of our ancestors. It is to become like Wittgenstein’s reading of Frazer, to accept a certain ‘narrowness of spiritual life’. We must not become narrow, for ‘all these processes, these changes of meaning, are still present to us in our word language.’ We must rediscover our own language, somehow.
Shamaya Mirviss-Carvajal, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.