Made With Bodies and Blood
When the chips are down we see things physically. We exist as bodies, and we only enter this world by being born–we are bodies that come from bodies, like plants are born from seeds. We are born in blood, bleed when cut, and if we die by violence we die bleeding.
Though the truth of bodies and blood bears with it an illusion: that we are nothing but them. But they alone do not decide or explain us, and nowhere is this more true than in the Torah and Jewish tradition, which are constituted by the covenant, a covenant that is deliberately made with bodies and blood. Yet in this world we are also inseparable from bodies, blood, and the biological seeds we consume, grow from, or bear. In the poetry of the seven Jewish wedding blessings, God “prepared for humanity, from Himself an eternal construct”–a mortal kind of immortality. * We need our bodies, blood, and seeds not just to see but to think and feel with, to live onward.
The name of this week’s Torah portion is Tazriaˁ, literally “when she bears seed:” When a woman bears seed and gives birth to a male, she shall be ceremonially impure for seven days…” The link it makes between human and plant would have carried almost as much biological weirdness in ancient Hebrew as it does in today’s English. While the verbal root for “seed” (ZRˁ) is frequent with the plain meaning of what a plant bears, and also often refers to “a man’s semen or offspring,” only once does it refer to the life a human woman bears. Indeed in this causative form meaning “seed-bearing” it appears in only one other place, at the beginning:
“And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation: plants that are seed-bearing (mazriaˁ), fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so.” (Gen 1:11)
What larger conception does a mother “bearing seed” reflect? An illuminating analysis by Marianne Grohmann explains how until the end of the 19th century, the great minds of Western Civilization held a variety of flaky-sounding ideas about where babies came from including 1) a “one seed” idea shared by Aristotle, Mesopotamian, and some biblical writers that babies came from fathers alone, with the mother just serving as incubator 2) an alternative ancient idea “two seeds” idea that both male and female “sperm” combined to form a baby or 3) a later European idea the baby’s form came from whatever the mother was looking at or thinking about at the moment of conception.
The idea of us as seed confronts us with our nature in the crudest, most embarrassing way. Just the sheer fact that we are nature, and also that as nature our ruptures can be the subject of thought and ritual, that instead of working to keep our involvement in birth, death, and fertility tidy and out of the way, we can shine light on them, study these workings like natural phenomena, or decide them like law. As Charlotte Fonrobert, the great scholar of Rabbinic purity law, writes of the tradition around these laws:
Like few other cultures, rabbinic Judaism in this tractate transforms blood and bodies into language, analyzes the nature of blood and pads, of births and abortions or miscarriages. One detects no sense of embarrassment, shame, or disgust in those pages of the Talmud, feelings familiar to those of us who have grown up in the cultural context of the West, which allows mostly only euphemistic, hidden references to bodies and their messiness. The texts in Tractate Niddah might just as well be about zoology, astronomy, physics, or mathematics, judging by their tone.
Fonrobert, Menstrual purity : Rabbinic and Christian reconstructions of Biblical gender (Stanford UP, 2000)
But, as the joke has the white Lone Ranger’s companion Tonto reply to him when outnumbered by native warriors, “who do you mean ‘we’?”
For as Fonrobert’s study shows, ancient Hebrew ritual purity is in essence a men’s science. Priestly and Rabbinic laws around childbirth and menstruation are not just some general human thinking about human nature. They are a male expert tradition of scrutinizing and theorizing the workings of women’s bodies as cosmic mechanisms inadequately translated as “pure” and “impure.”
The Torah’s idea of ceremonial purity is simply not our ideas of “clean.” Being tahor “ceremonially pure” is in fact so far from modern cleanliness–or even basic hygiene–that it faces puke, piss, and shit undisturbed; one can be crusted in snot or caked in manure and completely tahor. And consider the term ṭame’, which applies to a new mother and which I translated “ceremonially impure.” Far from a mere physical condition, this purity and impurity is a cosmological term unaffected by things like hot showers.
Like a Crashed UFO
In an early argument for the religious and moral value of this system of ceremonial purity, Rabbi Rachel Adler argued that it would illuminate how all members of a society undergo bodily conditions of purity and impurity in shared ways. Her “Tumah and Taharah: Ends and Beginnings,” (The Jewish Catalog, 1973) argued that bodily cycles of purity put us all on a level playing field. But as Gail Labovitz writes, Adler later realized that
this is no longer helpful for understanding tum’ah in the post-biblical and particularly rabbinic Judaisms that followed. Post-rabbinic tum’ah is gendered particularly female, such that all females are (treated as) suspect of being in the process of menstruating and hence impure, while men, who certainly must have come into contact with sources of impurity such as seminal emissions and proximity to a corpse, nonetheless experience themselves as pure at all times.
Labovitz, commentary on Adler in Kurtzer, ed. The New Jewish Canon
In other words, the cosmology was itself inseparable from its interpreters’ own bodies and what they meant in their own society, their identities as male experts in the system they ruled.
On reflection, after a mighty good-faith effort to uphold this worldview, Adler decided the whole system of purity was worthy of rejection.
I tried to make a theology to uphold this truth, and as hard as I tried to make it truthful, it unfolded itself to me as a theology of lies.
I do not believe the laws of purity will ever be reinstated, nor should they be. The worlds reflected in such rules are not worlds we inhabit. Neither should we seek to replicate such worlds. They are unjust.
Adler “In Your Blood, Live: Re-visions of a Theological Purity,” Tikkun 8 (1993)
I will not try to salvage or recuperate such a cosmology of the body here, only reflect on its familiarity and alienness. For the second chapter of our Parshah, Leviticus 13, hinges equally around an untranslatable term, ṣaraˁat. Classically rendered “leprosy” and carrying with it similar marks of rejection and isolation, it is actually one of those rare words that should probably not be translated at all.
For the Torah’s ṣaraˁat fits modern categories about as well as a crashed UFO. Leviticus 13:47-51 go on to explain what to do “when ṣaraˁat occurs in a cloth of wool or linen fabric, in the warp or in the woof of the linen or the wool, or in a skin or in anything made of skin.” Unlike any known human illness, it can spread to furniture, which is described as ceremonially impure and even “malignant, painful” (13:52).
Ṣaraˁat is a vision of the vulnerability of all organic matter, and like the Tabernacle it is a mythic vision. It is not an object we would ever directly encounter in this world. We only encounter it via the sacred text itself.
But I think what Fonrobert really shows is that this is true of women–and maybe men–in the Torah too. As in the title of the great Sanskritist Wendy Doniger’s book Women, Androgynes, and other Mythical Beasts, they are treated as mythical: cosmic icons in a ceremonial system, icons only mapped onto human individuals. Bodies and blood are icons that Priests and Rabbis thought with.
How would people in different bodies and lives think with them? One promise of a new understanding and enactment of this might come from feminist reuse of the rituals. As Labovitz writes,
For Adler, it was in fact seeing women create new rituals involving the mikveh that brought her to an insight of this very sort in “In Your Blood, Live”: “When Jewish women who were not Orthodox appropriated my reframing of immersion … to mark occurrences for which no ritual expression had existed, they taught me an important lesson about the possibility of salvage … for the feminist Jew, impurity seems to mean the violation of physical or sexual integrity, death by invasion” (41). She now holds that a truly new theological understanding must go hand in hand in hand with an actual feminist and female positive ritual expression.
If we want to enter into the covenant, we can only do it deliberately with our bodies and blood. But here the “deliberately” and the “our” are the most important parts.
*My translation of Sheva Brachot #4, וְהִתְקִין לוֹ מִמֶּנּוּ בִּנְיַן עֲדֵי עַד
sethlsanders 