Two Minute Torah Podcast

Tazria-Metzora 5769 by Rabbi Elyse Winick

Shalom, this is Rabbi Elyse Winick, Associate Director of KOACH. Welcome to KOACH's Two Minute Torah, a project of the college outreach department of The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.

It's a good thing Tazria and Metzora usually come linked as a double parashah, read together, as they are this year. Their images of houses and bodies that ooze and discolor render us uncomfortable and ill at ease. Better to read them in a single week and get them over with, than to prolong the agony.

Behind these unpleasant descriptions, though, hides a discussion of great significance and which is anything but, well, yucky.

In Leviticus 15:19 we read, "When a woman has a discharge, her discharge being blood from her body, she shall remain in her impurity seven days; whoever touches her shall be unclean until evening." This verse is the basis for the laws of 'Family Purity,' or Taharat HaMishpahah. (If you'd like to know more about those laws and why I think they're relevant in 2009, drop me an email at winick@uscj.org. For the moment, though, let's focus on the words in this verse and why the English translation, so beautifully rendered by the JPS, pains me no end.)

Where most translations use the words 'impurity' and 'unclean,' the original Hebrew says nothing of the sort. 'Impurity' is used here for the Hebrew niddah, which means 'separate.' 'Unclean' is the translation of 'tameh,' which is a spiritual, rather than a physical state.

For generations we have translated these terms in easy, but misleading ways. They convey a message that the menstruating woman, or anyone else to whom they might be applied, is dirty. By perpetuating translations with negative connotations, we have closed the door to many who might otherwise have seen our tradition as a portal to greater holiness and meaning.

Given that 'tameh' (and its mirror image partner 'tahor,' which is usually rendered as 'pure') are spiritual, rather than physical, categories, we would do well to translate them differently. Much more clunky, but much more accurate, would be to define them as 'spiritually incomplete' and 'spiritually complete.' Those whose souls are scattered, for any number of reasons, are ill equipped to bring their whole selves to the business of life, let alone the sanctity of ritual. Immersion in the mikveh, or ritual bath, the repair for the condition of tumah (the state of being tameh), exists not to clean the unclean, but to mark the renewal of one who has been spiritually diminished.

While it may seem like the distinction is simply semantic, retooling our language can, in turn, retool our thinking. Having just recently purged our homes and our spirits of hametz, this is an ideal time to consider how we might maximize our individual holiness, return our souls to wholeness and prepare ourselves to once again receive the gift of the Torah and use it well.