Metzora (Archives)

Tum’a and Tohara, contd.

Parashat Metzora continues the theme of tum’a and tohara, usually translated as ritual purity and impurity. The salient feature of this parasha, following passages that round off the laws of “leprosy” began in last week’s portion, is the group of laws concerning various forms of impurity that issue from the body. Chapter 15 consists of laws of impurity issuing from sexually related discharges of both men and women, including discharges (presumably) originating in venereal diseases, menstruation, and even a brief period of impurity from ordinary sexual intercourse.

One of the explanations put forward in recent years (I think it was first articulated by Rachel Adler in The [First] Jewish Catalog in the early ‘70’s; perhaps it was also a spin-off of the work of such anthropologists as Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger, and of course Claude Lévi-Strauss) sees the central theme of tum’a as related to the human encounter with various manifestations of mortality, and the consciousness of the vulnerability and transience (what the Christian Scriptures call “corruptibility”) of ones own body. Thus, tuma’ is always ultimately connected with death and mortality: whether through birth or sexuality (the spilling of seed, containing the germ of life, but also the potentiality for new life to not be created); menstruation (in which the life-giving potentiality in a particular month has been missed); the deterioration and corruption of the body experienced in disease, such as tzara’at (“leprosy”) and zivah (presumably gonorrhea); and, ultimately, contact with death and dead bodies, called by our Rabbis avi avot hatum’a, the ultimate source of impurity, to which a special chapter is devoted further along in the Torah, in Numbers 19.

Purification from tum’a is in turn affected through water, the universal source of cleansing and purification; life-giving (in biblical thought, water is sometimes pictured as fructifying a field in much the same way as the male impregnates the female; e.g. in Isa 55:10); ever fresh and renewing (i.e., spring waters or mountain streams); as well as dissolving and washing away all in its path. When I first encountered these concepts in my youth, I was taught to think of tum’a largely as a formal, halakhic category. Tum’a was no more than the opposite or absence of tohara, that state of ritual purity required to enter the Temple precincts and to partake of certain priestly foods. This dialectical link between tum’a and the mikdash is neatly expressed in a verse towards the end of our portion—“You shall keep the people of Israel separate from their uncleanness, lest they die (!) in their uncleanness by defiling my tabernacle that is in their midst” (Lev 15:31). Today, on the face of it, there is no need for tohara—since in any event we neither eat kodashim (sacred things) nor (apart from a few crazies) enter the Temple Mount. Furthermore, in the absence of the ashes of the red heifer, we are all formally considered tame’ei met anyway.

Yet upon further reflection, it seems clear that tohara is a desirable religious condition, while tum’a is seen as a reprehensible state. Thus, the Haverim, the early Sages in the generations during and immediately following the destruction of the Temple, strove to conduct their ordinary, mundane life activities in a state of tohara. Similarly, many latter-day Hasidim immerse in the mikveh, the public ritual bath, every morning so as to achieve the maximum degree of purity before beginning their morning prayers.

I look at these phenomena with mixed feeling. On the one hand, Soloveitchik’s “halakhic man” would see this as an exaggerated, unnecessary preoccupation with things one is not obligated to do. A psychological perspective might add that this seems to reflect an inability to come to terms with ones corporeality. On the other hand, there is here a certain genuine striving for spirituality. As one grows older, one sees how much of ones life is consumed, either by bodily lusts and desires, on the one hand; or by the corruption, the inevitable deterioration and aging of the body, on the other. The desire to transcend all that, at least symbolically, is somehow understandable.

Moreover, upon closer reading it becomes apparent that there are places in the Bible where the word tamei is used in a moral sense as well, independent of its generating formal ritual impurity. Thus, in the case of the unfaithful wife (Num 5:11-31, at 13-14, 19-20, 27-29); in that of the woman who returns to her first husband after marriage to another man (Deut 24:1-4, at 4: “after she had been rendered impure,” a surprisingly strong term for what had been legitimate marital relations); and in the context of kashrut: these animals, birds, etc. are tamei lakhem, “impure to you” (Lev 11, passim). And there are no doubt other passages that escape my memory. Thus, the rules of tum’a and tohara seem to be part of the larger activity of “world construction,” which we noted earlier in the context of kashrut.

”Seven Days She Shall be in Her Impurity”

The one aspect of the laws of purity and impurity that is still in effect today is that pertaining to menstrual impurity, and the separation during that period between husband and wife, observed today by many traditionally observant and most Orthodox Jews. This observance has spawned an entire apologetic literature, beginning with the quaint, slightly quixotic Secret of the Jew of the 1920’s, to Maurice Lamm’s classic A Hedge of Roses, through literally dozens of books, pamphlets, etc. (providing a ripe mine for future doctoral dissertations, as Isaac Bashevis Singer once quipped about the future of a Yiddish literature without native readers). The most usually offered explanation is that the observance of periodical sexual separation assures the freshness and romance of the marriage, making life into a constant “honeymoon.” Rabbi Shmuely Boteah, the enfant terrible of Oxford, has even advocated selling the idea to non-Jews. A second line of explanation notes that the effect of the practice of “family purity” (as Hilkhot Niddah was rather sanitarily renamed by some unknown Victorian rabbi) is to maximalize Jewish fertility, through assuring that the couple will generally have intercourse as close to ovulation as possible (i.e., on the 12th day from beginning of menstruation, following the predominant custom today).

Partly because I enjoy the role of iconoclast, and partly because this approach presents real problems, I would like to speculate on an alternative explanation. The “romantic” line of apologia ignores one simple, stark fact. As the law appears here (15:19-24), it merely states that any man who lies with a woman during her impurity shall himself be considered impure for seven days. But the specific prohibition against sexual relations during menstruation appears in Chapter 18, alongside the rules against incest, adultery, and other highly serious sexual transgressions, all of which are collectively referred to as “abominations.” Further on, in 20:18, it specifically states that one who lies with a menstruant, “uncovering the fount of her blood… shall be cut off from his people”—i.e, shall is subject to the very serious sanction known as karet. This seems rather strong for a law whose aim is merely to obviate marital boredom. Moreover, it is interesting that this is the only sexual regulation relating to a bodily state, i.e., prohibiting relations between two people to whom they are ordinarily permitted. All this suggests that there was seen something horrible, unnatural, in the idea of menstrual sex.

Again, the answer is so simple as to be easily overlooked. Milton Himmelfarb observed years ago there is something in the Jewish sensibility (one might almost call it the Jewish “aesthetic”) that abhors blood, seeing both blood and a certain type of unfettered sexuality as antithetical to Judaism. “Inchastity is the piety of paganism… Bloodshed is likewise the piety of paganism… They did not need to read Ovid or Petronius or Tacitus or Juvenal to know how the pagans were about sex and about blood.” Alongside the proscription against sex with a menstruant, there is a very strongly written law—one might almost say, taboo—against eating the blood of an animal. The elaborate regulations surrounding the soaking and salting of meat in the kosher home are well-known. Alongside the great reverence for life, and for the blood that symbolizes it, there is a certain recoil from casual use of, or contact with, blood. One does not shed blood, one does not eat blood, and one does not, so to speak, have sex in blood.

An entirely different set of questions, upon which I can only touch in passing, deals with the issue of possible change in certain details of this observance. Our contemporary halakhic observance is based upon three or four separate seyagim, Rabbinic or customary “fences,” superimposed upon the original biblical law. Today’s separation of nearly two weeks is passed upon counting seven days from the end, rather than from the beginning, of menstruation. Due to certain exegetical difficulties in Mishnah Niddah 4.7 (and especially the difficult line of interpretation of the Rambam in Issurei Biah 6.6 ff., which proposes a strictly mathematical-conceptual model, that to my mind contravenes both common sense and experience), we apply the rules in vv. 25-30, rather than those in vv. 19-24, to every menstruant, even one who has her period with the regularity of a Swiss watch. This strict regimen is one that is extremely onerous to many couples, particularly in light of—how can we avoid it—contemporary attitudes towards sexuality. It is impossible to know how many young couples may be discouraged for this reason from adopting this basic Jewish observance. I thus ask, on a purely speculative basis, and not lema’aseh, whether there is not room for reversing some of these strict customs, and restoring the situation as it was before the series of strictures described by Rambam in I. B. 11.1-10.