By Zach Sagorin
This week’s parashah is Tazria. Tazria talks about various laws regarding purity and impurity for the Jewish people. Specifically discussing the rules regarding purity for a woman who has just given birth, that male infants must be circumsized on thier eighth birthday and tzaraat, which is a plague that also inflicts the clothing of the diseased person. A person carrying tzaraat was meant to leave the city in which the person lived until they are no longer diseased. In addition, any clothing that had been affected by the disease must be removed from the garment and if the disease returns to the garment the entire piece of clothing would need to be burned.
I personally find the rules regarding tzaraat fairly interesting from a bacterial point of view, but that doesn’t leave room for much social discussion without a decent background in microbiology. Disregarding that sentiment, I want to turn the direction of this discussion towards the blatantly sexist ruling of this week’s torah portion regarding female purity following childbirth. A woman who has given birth is considered impure and is meant to refrain from touching her husband for a period of time following the birth of her child. During biblical times blood was associated with disease and thought to be both impure and dangerous. Giving birth can involve a fair amount of blood as well as other bodily fluids, and was thus concluded impure. As a side note, I am going to focus only on the sexism and neglect the other social issues of the article, though they do exist.
I think it is rather unfortunate when our Torah presents these obviously sexist portions. I allocate so much of my value of social justice, tikun olam, and education to the Torah, and Jewish culture in general. So when reading a Torah portion so incongruent with these values, I find myself initially disappointed. Parashat Tazria tells us that a woman is impure after childbirth.
Impurity following childbirth is not impure to me. I want to believe that a woman’s ability to avoid contact with her husband after childbirth is an accommodation to a woman to offer her an opportunity to rest and recuperate following one of the most difficult and beautiful human events, the creation of human life itself. Tazria might instill sexist values on a surface level. But these values do not align with my own, my Jewish, or my human values.
Due to this contradiction, the Torah necessitates critical thinkers to progress our Jewish history to a place of gender equality that is inclusive and safe to all people. Torah portions like this are a reminder to myself, and should be a reminder to all Jewish people, of the importance of questioning your education. The Torah gives us many morals, but the morals are easy to digest and build a sense of frail pride in our Jewish identity when so many contradictions, like this Tazria for example, exist. What makes being Jewish challenging is the ability to critically analyze out Torah and our history. We must learn to challenge and work towards the betterment of the world because from this same Torah we are told not to mistreat the alien, because we were such in the land of Egypt. The Torah not only gives us a history, but trains us how to be better people. Are you willing to accept what is spoon-fed to you, or are you willing to contest these beliefs and represent the Jewish people that truly values shivyon erech ha’adam? A people is defined by its members and we can choose to accept the sexual discrimination of our book, or we can choose to find a deeper value founded in challenging ourselves and our culture to be better, stronger, and more moral.