Parashat Tazri`a-M'tzora

By Rabbi David Greenstein

 This Shabbat is Rosh Hodesh, the beginning of a new month. This is a time which the overwhelmingly male-centered tradition assigned for celebration of the place of Jewish women in the community. In the old days women would observe Rosh Hodesh as a quasi-festival, refraining from unnecessary work and household chores. In modern times the feminist renewal of Judaism has enhanced this traditional association of Rosh Hodesh and feminism in many creative and meaningful ways.

It is in this context that we read the beginning of this week's Torah portion, Tazri`a-M'tzora. While the bulk of this double portion deals with the phenomenon of tzara`at, a surface affliction, commonly but incorrectly translated as leprosy, the start of the reading deals with childbirth and its purity and ritual effects on the mother.

The Torah (Lev. 12) states that if a woman gives birth to a male baby she shall be ritually impure for seven days. On the eighth day the baby shall be circumcised. Then another thirty-three days (making a total of forty days) of ritual quarantine follow before the mother is allowed access to the Sanctuary, where she must offer sacrifices in commemoration of the birth, after which she resumes her former place in society.

There are all sorts of questions that these provisions arouse. But none is as salient as the contrast we find between these details and the regulations that apply to the birth of a female baby. Here the Torah states that the initial period of impurity is twice as long, extending to 14 days. Of course there is no eighth day circumcision ceremony to mark the end of the first time period. But the question leaps out - why is the time period doubled? And so is the following period. The quarantine lasts for sixty-six days, making the entire period go for eighty days duration. Again, why the doubling?

This question is not one that has puzzled only modern, egalitarian-minded readers. We know that over two thousand years ago Jews were struggling to find some logical answer to it. For example, the Book of Jubilees posits that this distinction goes back to the creation of Adam and Eve. "In the first week [- of Creation] Adam was created and also the rib, his wife. And in the second week He showed her to him. And therefore the commandment was given to observe seven days for a male, but for a female twice seven days in their impurity." (Jubilees 3:8) It goes on to teach that the forty-day and eighty-day periods of impurity relate to the placement of the first couple in the Garden of Eden. While the adequacy of this explanation is questionable, it clearly indicates that people were thinking about the problem. It also indicates that they concluded that the difference stemmed from the secondary status of women.

A more noxious explanation was offered by some Biblical commentators. They explained that the woman is an essential source of impurity, being the one gender who experiences menstrual bleeding. When she gives birth to a girl, she has become a double source of impurity, since another female has been brought into the world. (See, e.g., Kli Yaqar on the Torah text.)

Is it possible to read this text in a way that acknowledges its problematic treatment of women and yet rejects such a stance?

We might begin by remarking that the privileging of male babies over females is not some ancient attitude that is no longer present today. A recent NY Times report highlighted the particularly extreme effects of this attitude in Chinese society. There are now 32 million more Chinese males under the age of 20 than females. (NY Times, April 10, 2009). This is the effect of choices Chinese couples make to abort female fetuses before birth or to neglect them and abandon them after birth. Such a custom has caused terrible loss of life and will inflict huge problems upon tens of millions of males who will have no chance to find a life partner.

In light of this propensity to reject female babies, perhaps we can read a paradoxical tension in the Torah text. Females are, indeed, subject to secondary treatment in patriarchal society. The danger that no one will care for a girl baby is too horribly real. Perhaps the Torah is combating that tendency in its own way. A male baby is welcomed into the community after a mere week. But the extended quarantine period for a girl baby, lasting almost three months may have encouraged a longer bonding process between mother and daughter, a process that would thwart the social pressure to give up or neglect the child.

This "Maimonidean" reading suggests that the Torah was realistic enough to allow for societal prejudices, while programming within its teachings the seeds for the overthrow of those prejudices. Perhaps, in this way, we can read the text as promoting another kind of purification, a purification over time of our own limited views.

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Rabbi David Greenstein is Rosh Ha-Yeshivah of AJR.