Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah portion for this week is Parsha Tazria-Metzora, Leviticus 12:1-15:33.
Sometimes it's just as important to look at the arrangement of the Torah as it is to read the words themselves. Far too often those words are taken out of context merely to be used to justify a point of view. Such is the danger of faith. Taken piecemeal it can and will contradict the spirit in which it was first devised. Reading today's portion, it's difficult to see what exactly that spirit is without also seeing some intellectual speed bumps. A modern reader would likely hone in on the dual weights of ancient sexism and now-irrelevant rules, but that's not what we as 21st century students of Torah ought to take away from these passages.
Tazria-Metzora is concerned with two topics. Most of it is devoted to how the presence of leprosy ought to be handled. It describes, at length, the procedure for identifying the disease, diagnosing its severity and ultimately what to do with an individual stricken by it. Aside from the obvious extrapolations we can take away about the importance of health and the worth of educated medical professionals, there's little need today for the specifics. Leprosy has been all but rendered non-existent in the modern world. Even in the rare cases of the disease today it is easily curable and an estimated 95% of all human beings are immune to it anyway. In short, you probably don't need to worry about going to your rabbi every time you get a pimple.
The more interesting element of today's parsha is at the beginning when God describes the process of returning to purity when a woman has a child. The Torah is unambiguous about how it views childbirth and menstruation. It considers the former a necessary act of uncleanness and the latter it refers to as sickness. In essence, the perspective of the Torah runs counter to some of the core values of our modern culture. The difference, of course, is that we today have a firm understanding of these events, while ancient people did not.
Once again, this is an opportunity to approach the Torah as a flexible document. People perceived menstruation to be an illness in the ancient world because they didn't have the means to understand it for what it is. That in mind, this idea among so many others in this ancient document must be viewed through the filter of new, relevant information. In that sense, the Torah is not sexist, it is merely uninformed. I am reminded of the most famous work of the great Christian theologian Augustin, The Literal Interpretation of Genesis. In so many words, he stated that science and reason have their place and that place is in the understanding of the natural world. The Bible, by contrast, is not meant to be a scientific document, but a moral one. If study and reason has revealed a fact in the natural world that runs counter to the views of the Bible, it is important to accept the fact as fact and to admit that the Bible, while factually inaccurate, made the assertion that it made out of a moral concern only, not to inform.
So, what is the moral purpose of treating menstruation like an illness even though we today know for a fact that it is quite the opposite? At best we can see a large social concern for health and hygiene. Misplaced though that concern may be, the spirit of the law is to keep the women of the community of sound body. The modern lesson, then, should be that different individuals have different needs in their pursuit of wellness. Even modern doctors would agree that there are some medical issues that concern women but not men, and vice versa. No, we shouldn't treat perfectly healthy women as if they are ritually unclean. We should, however, take care of ourselves and others with due diligence.
*A small note on a similar topic in this parsha. Upon childbirth the Torah states that a woman is ritually unclean for only a week after having a boy but two weeks after having a girl. This is often mistaken for sexism. The only reason a woman would be considered ritually unclean for a mere week upon having a boy is because the boy must be circumcised eight days after birth. If the mother was considered unclean for two weeks, she wouldn't be allowed to attend her own son's brit milah.
Shabbat Shalom and have a nice weekend.
