Bodies Matter - Learning from Tazri'a - M'tzora
Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah
This week’s double portion, Tazri’a-M’tzora (Leviticus 12:1-15:33) is not for the squeamish. Starting off with childbirth, the Torah goes on to consider, skin eruptions – and, by extension, the impact of tzara’at, ‘leprosy’, on garments – rising damp (and other related problems that can ‘plague’ one’s home), seminal emissions and menstruation. It’s all part of everyday human experience – but what’s it all doing in a ‘sacred’ text like the Torah? What’s it got to do with ‘holy’ living? According to classical Liberal thinking – not a lot – and, of course, the ancient rites and practices regarding bodily states and ritual purity have not been part of Jewish life since the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, and its system of worship, almost 2000 years ago.
So why continue to read about it all? An obvious response is that it helps us to remember what ancient Jewish worship was like back then. But is that enough? Maybe it wouldn’t be enough if there weren’t actually some very important things for us to learn.
First, we learn that the sacred is not just about ‘spiritual’ issues; it also concerns blood and guts – and, yes, bodily fluids. For our ancestors, there was no distinction between the physical and the spiritual: each and every creature – including the animals – was a nefesh chayyah – a living being (Genesis 1:24; 2:7). For them, nefesh did not mean ‘soul’ – a Greek idea – but the tangible life-force represented by the blood coursing through us – which is why, the dietary laws include not eating the blood (Genesis 9:4). In recent years, there has been increasing interest in ‘holistic’ thinking and practice – in particular, ‘holistic’ approaches to health as we have become dissatisfied with the tendency for classically western-trained doctors to treat the various ailing parts of their patients, rather than attend to the whole person. So, maybe Tazri’a-M’tzora no longer seems so irrelevant?
And there is more: Another aspect of contemporary attitudes to medical practice is the notion that the patient is not simply a passive object, a set of symptoms and ailments to be cured by the expert physician, but rather, an active agent, who should be empowered to participate in their own healing. Similarly, although the Book of Leviticus describes a hierarchical religious system, dominated by the priests, who had the power to pronounce the individual both diseased and ‘whole’ once more, each and every person played an active role in dealing with their condition, undertaking rites of purification and bringing offerings after varying periods of confinement or segregation. Of course, the details may seem alien, even repugnant – but the point is that the individual was actively involved in healing themselves.
One last thing to think about: The anthropologist, Mary Douglas, in her book, Purity and Danger (1966), helped us to understand how the sacred separations we find in the Book of Leviticus, functioned to enable our ancestors to contain and manage human conditions and situations that broke boundaries or categories, and so were potentially disruptive of the social order. Modern attitudes to childbirth, skin ailments, seminal emissions and menstruation may seem radically different – less primitive, more rational and scientific – but one of the consequences of the great ‘progress’ we have made is that we have succeeded in essentially privatising human experience – which may partly explain why, perhaps, in reaction, there is now a growing appetite for ‘reality’ television programmes that explore people’s personal lives in graphic detail. We all have bodies – indeed we are all, basically, bodies, underneath all the layers of sophistication we have acquired in modern times; Tazri’a-M’tzora reminds us that we are matter, and that our bodies, and everything about them, matter – not just to us personally, but also, to the society around us. Perhaps, thinking about all that this double parashah has to teach us, it may soon be time for Liberal Judaism to consider re-instating the body-aware morning blessing that thanks God for ‘opening’ all the parts of our bodies that need to open and ‘closing’ all those that need to close?
Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
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