Tazria

The Meaning of This Month – Shabbat Ha’Chodesh

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

Next Shabbat will be Shabbat Ha’Chodesh, the Sabbath of The Month, the renewing of the moon that Torah sees as the first “moonth” of the year. The rabbis who worked out the liturgical calendar wanted to choose a Haftarah  -- a prophetic passage -- to signal the coming of a week they called Pesach and Chag HaMatzot.

 They found a passage by the Prophet Ezekiel that celebrated not only the New Moon but also the Festival of its fullness – a week focused on food when we would make a shepherds’ Pesach  offering of a newborn lamb and eat  Matzot, the farmers’ celebratory meal of just-sprouted, barley that we quickly bake into Unleavened Bread. A time of livelihoods renewed.

 Notice that Ezekiel was following the pastoral-agrarian rhythm, not the explosive festival of liberation. This double festival celebrates the growth of spring and of the earliest human foods defined by controlling fire: roast lamb and baked, unflavored, unleavened bread.

 “Pesach” was originally the dance of a newborn lamb, stumbling and skipping as it first learned to walk. Then ”Pesach”  became the dance of shepherds celebrating the spring emergence of new lambs by imitating the lambs; then it named the sacred offering of such spring-born lambs to YHWH / Yahhh, the Breath of Life, and finally the skipping-over dance of the God Who skipped over the blood-smeared doors of the Israelites who celebrated their new birth through a doorway of blood—their own new womb.

 Having set the tone for the “first month,” Ezekiel wanders off into specifying rules for how the people will behave on New Moons and Festivals in a new Temple that he imagines building, to replace the one the Babylonian Army burned. The most profound of these rules is, “Whoever enters the north gate of the Temple to celebrate Yahh, the Interbreath of Life, shall leave by the south gate; and whoever enters by the south gate shall leave by the north gate. They shall not go back by the gate through which they came in.” (Ezekiel 46: 9). Once we enter a new spiritual experience, we must recognize that we leave as new persons.

Finally the Haftarah follows Ezekiel as he wanders away from New Moons, annual festivals, and the physical Temple altogether. He enters a different zone of sacred time -- dror, a word that is used in Leviticus 25, the most detailed teaching about the seventh year of Shabbat Shabbaton, when Earth, animals, and humans must be allowed to rest. Both dror and shmitah mean Release.

 

And here Ezekiel (and the rabbis who arranged for this passage at the end of the Haftarah to be part of it; they could have simply dropped it) –enters new “territory.” He examines how the Nasi, the king or powerful official, must use and not abuse his wealth. He may give gifts to his officials and supporters, but the gifts become his own again, or his children’s, when the dror – the seventh year, the Shabbat Shabbaton of the whole community, comes round again. And he may never rob the people of their holdings; only from his own personal holdings may he make gifts. (Ezekiel 46: 16-18)

 

This means that a certain degree of economic equality is part of the practice of shmitah/ dror. It means that a Nasi cannot build up a personal political following by bestowing gifts on his officials or his supporters, for the gifts are merely temporary. It means the Nasi may not punish the people or any group of them by impoverishing them, seizing their property.

And we might combine the two passages I have singled out as meaning that by whatever gateway we enter the sacred space-time of the shmitah year, we – the whole society --  must not go out again by the same gate. For we must become a new people, a new society. Together with our respect for all the life-forms of Planet Earth, we must affirm a new respect for all the human beings around us – and especially for their livelihoods and a measure of economic equality with each other.

 We can begin, we should begin, with the month of Passover, of new sustenance for shepherds and farmers and everyone else, of an Earth with no Pharaohs. Chodesh tov! – A new month of new good!

Torah of “Tamei”: Laser-Beam Holiness, Not “Impurity”

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

[Rabbi Phyllis Ocean Berman had this insight and wrote this Torah teaching. She is the lead co-author of A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven on the Jewish life-cycle, author or co-author of many essays and books on Torah, and a spiritual director. – AW, editor]

 By Rabbi Phyllis Ocean Berman

 The  Torah portion “Tazria” that we read this week begins (Lev. 12: 2-8) with the instruction that, when a woman gives birth to a male child, she's "excluded" from the community for 40 days because she's "tamei."  But when she gives birth to a female child, she's excluded from the community for 80 days because she's "tamei".  After that, she once again becomes "tahor."

 Reading this, I think about my experience as a mother who gave birth first to a male child and later to a female child. I re-member that, in the early weeks after the birth of each baby, all of my energy was focused on getting to know and understand how to respond to the needs of this new being. I thought about how it takes at least 80 very intense days to get the rhythm of sleep and awakenessof feeding and interacting with a baby before a woman can actually understand what the baby is communicating and needing and is finally fluent/fluid enough to re-enter a life before baby.

The conventional understanding of that text has always focused on why the separation-time after the birth of a girl-child was twice as long – assuming that the time for birth of a male child was the norm.

But my memory of mothering made me flip the conventional understanding. Rather than the 80 days being an "anomaly,” perhaps the normal time from a mother’s standpoint was 80 days, and the "anomaly”  was the shortening of the normal time needed for that bonding of mother and child, from 80 days to 40 days. 

Why might this shortening have been imposed? Perhaps the male society worried that a male child, left "isolated" with his mother for more than 40 days would become too "feminized" whereas they were unconcerned about the female child being "isolated" with her mother for 80 days.

This way of thinking then led me to probe the actual meaning of "tamei" and "tahor" which has, since the time of the King James translation of the Chumash into English, been most often translated as "unclean" or "unpure" (tamei) and "clean" or "pure" (tahor).  Instead, in considering those moments in life when we are completely consumed by something -- a new baby, a new love-making, a new creative development, sickness, death -- we naturally separate ourselves from the community. Then we can concentrate on that which demands our complete attention. We are "tamei" during a time of intense concentration on one aspect of our lives and separation from the other aspects. 

At other times, we are able to focus on multiple concerns, balancing them all with relative ease. Then we are "tahor", able to hold multiple identities and tasks in and beyond our home and work lives.

Both "tamei" -- that intense laser beam of concentration -- and "tahor" -- that balance that enables us to be in and out of community fluidly as appropriate -- are holy ways of being at different times of our life.  I believe these are the real meanings of these two terms that have been so poorly translated, with so much damage in particular to women, for so many hundreds of years.

When the Tah-may Sacred Candle Casts a Laser Beam of Light

Submitted by Editor on

Rabbi Phyllis Berman *, 4/6/2005

As we read from Parashat Tazri'a, we confront some of the most difficult concepts in Torah. For many years I felt horrified, offended, every single time we came across the words tah'hor and tahmay. In too many English translations those words have been translated as "pure" and "impure," or "clean" and "unclean," signifying that one is all good and one is all bad.

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