TAZRIA
Leviticus 12:1-13:59

Tazria takes us into the strange, gory world of the ancient categories of ritual purity and impurity. Here are regulations about blood impurity caused by giving birth, and various skin diseases. We must stretch to imagine a world in which spiritual and medical states were not understood to be separate, and in which a priest was the appropriate authority to evaluate the spiritual state of a person or object that appeared diseased.

The categories of “tahor” (pure) and “tameh” (impure) are very misunderstood and obscure. They do not denote not good or bad, right or wrong, clean or dirty, kosher or tref. They have nothing to do with a person’s value or morality or hygiene. They have only to do with a person’s eligibility to enter the holy space of the ancient Temple or tabernacle to partake in ritual offerings and ceremonies.

What would disqualify a person from such participation in Temple service? The most potent form of ritual impurity was death. A dead body was considered a contagious source of impurity. Many lesser degrees of brushes with blood and death also disqualified a person from entry. Blood and death force us to confront the finite nature of our lives, and often plunge us into disorienting grief in which chaos prevails until we accustom ourselves to the profound changes that have occurred. They also disturb others with reminders of their mortality.

By contrast, the Temple was a place of life and eternity. It was a model of the connection between human beings and God; a place where God could be symbolically present with people. In ancient terms, the human role in response to God was to serve, obey, praise, and express gratitude and humility. God’s role was to accept offerings of sincere gratitude, praise, celebration, and repentence. The Temple existed in part to maintain and constantly restore this proper relation, and by so doing, to maintain spiritual order for the community.

Every priest and every Israelite often cycled back and forth between states of ritual purity and impurity, much as dishes in a kitchen are always on their way from clean to dirty and back again. There is nothing wrong with a dirty dish.. You wouldn’t want to prevent dishes from getting dirty. But you wouldn’t set a table of dirty dishes, or put clean ones in the dishwasher. As long as each thing is in its place, all is well.
One of the central priestly duties was preserving the boundary of ritual purity around the Temple. Priests themselves could only enter and serve in the Temple if they met stringent conditions of ritual fitness. In the ethical and legal realm of human interactions, justice and kindness toward everyone were required. But the Temple was in part a theater; a stage on which a symbolic truth was enacted. Just as there is no “fairness” in casting a play, there is no “fairness” in the exclusion of the ritually unfit person or animal from the Temple grounds. Only the “actors” that are right for the “role” were allowed to take part. Appearances matter in symbolic presentations.

A synagogue of our day is not a Temple; it is simply a gathering place for prayer and study among ordinary Jews. Priests have no required duties, and only a few ritual privileges, such as the right to be called for the first aliyah to the Torah. In the Reconstructionist community, they don’t even have that privilege, because we insist that treating everyone equally is holy.

Our sensibility of what is holy has changed. Our growing grasp of science and medicine has removed many things from the realm of the superstitious, and perhaps blunted our spiritual sensitivity. Certainly spirituality plays a role in illness and healing, but we do not consider people who are suffering to have been “smited” by God. But when we explore the frame of mind of our ancient ancestors, we can appreciate their devotion to preserving the holy, and their sensitivity to varying levels of spiritual purity, and still learn from it. We know that certain experiences leave us feeling alienated from the rest because we are so ill, so depressed, so in grief, or so traumatized. We can look to the ancient wisdom of the priests to develop ceremonies to draw such people back into community, and back to a sense of being welcome in the presence of God. The goal is always to return.

Rabbi Alexis Roberts
April 2003