There are two theories of tumah v’taharah. There are two ways of thinking about the vast system of purity and impurity laws that dominate so much of the middle sections of Vayikra. One position, which was made famous by Rambam, can be summarized by the phrase “tumah happens.” I’d love to make a t-shirt with that message. According to this theory, the vast system of purity regulations serves the purpose of preventing us from adopting an overly casual relationship with the mikdash. We can’t just roll out of bed and mosey on down to the Temple. Since a wide variety of, completely neutral, naturally occurring, and quite frequent bodily functions create tumah, one can only enter the mikdash after a deliberate process of preparation. This inculcates reverence for the sacred space. Imagine if you needed to prepare your body and all of your surroundings for two weeks every time you wanted to come to shul.
The other theory looks at the causes of tumah and sees patterns and themes. There is a negative valence to tumah, these thinkers claim, and the there is a corresponding negative valence to the causes of tumah. The avi avot ha-tumah, the most potent and primal source of tumah is a corpse and other forms of tumah have associations with death or decay. The worship of God in the mikdash is focused on life. Reminders of death and decay must be removed from the mikdash.
But Rambam’s position finds support from the Torah’s language itself. Several years ago, Rabbi Dov Linzer noted that, when talking about the causes of tuma’ah in these middle chapters of Vayikra, the Torah focuses on verbs and not identities. From the case of ishah ki tazria v’yaldah, a woman who gives birth to a son or daughter, to וְאִם־פָּר֨וֹחַ תִּפְרַ֤ח הַצָּרַ֙עַת֙, if the marks spread on the skin, אִ֣ישׁ אִ֗ישׁ כִּ֤י יִהְיֶה֙ זָ֣ב מִבְּשָׂר֔וֹ, if any person has a discharge,
וְאִשָּׁ֡ה כִּֽי־יָזוּב֩ ז֨וֹב דָּמָ֜הּ יָמִ֣ים רַבִּ֗ים בְּלֹא֙ עֶת־נִדָּתָ֔הּ etc. There are verbs. There are processes. These are all natural and fairly common biological processes.
In later rabbinic literature, these get turned from verbs into nouns. This is understandable for the Mishnah and Gemara because when there is a need for complicated halakhic adjudication, it is important to have a rich vocabulary with various statuses that one can evaluate and compare. Nidah vs. Zavah, Metzorah and T’vul Yom are all nouns. These are halakhic statuses, each one with their own rules and regulations and parameters.
The danger is that when we transition from learning Torah in the abstract, to interacting in the real world with real people, that we take those clinical labels and apply them to real human beings who have experienced, for example, one of the biological experiences that have halakhic consequences. When this happens, human beings, each one of us, created in the image of God, each one of us, with unique fears and ambitions, and talents and spiritual potential, can be flattened into a label.
Sometimes a similar dynamic occurs, in very painful ways, among those speaking about someone suffering from a severe illness. Even close family – even the nurses and doctors – sometimes speak about sick and infirm people as though they were not present, in the room, quite possibly listening to how they are being spoken about. Someone incapacitated in a hospital bed is still a human being, created in the image of God, with unique fears and ambitions and talents and spiritual potential. But too often they are treated as an object, a mere noun, instead of someone undergoing a challenging process.
We see this dynamic too in the aftermath of the struggles of individuals and couples whose life-narrative departs from the fairytale script that our community shares as a model of achievement: academic success, marriage at a young age, a succession of cute and healthy children, and a smooth and unencumbered professional path. People who aren’t married at the age when many of their peers marry become part of a “crisis” and are too often treated as though they are not full members of our community (a single friend once shared with me how much trouble he has convincing families to accept his Shabbat invitations – yes, he is a single man, and he can host a Shabbat meal).
And the pain of individuals and couples who struggle to have children or grow their families can be especially acute because their disappointment is compounded on the one hand by the social isolation that comes from missing that fairytale narrative of success and achievement, and, on the other hand, by the stigmatization that accompanies various medical diagnoses. Challenging medical processes, verbs, are transformed into nouns, which then become labels that flatten our identity
Most weeks we print a notice in the shul bulletin concerning an infertility big sibling / little sibling program. We offer to match individuals or couples struggling with infertility with a somewhat older member of the community who went through that experience ten or twenty years ago. A big sibling can offer encouragement, emotional advice, and provide a friendly phone call on the days when a fraught medical procedure will take place. Since we launched this program, perhaps half a dozen big sibs have come forward and offered to help in this way. Yet not one single person has asked to be a little sib.
I’ve wondered about that imbalance. Maybe everyone already has a wonderful local support network of friends and family? Maybe the thought of asking me for that referral feels so traumatic that suffering in isolation seems easier? Maybe the mere fact that the program is advertised in the bulletin is enough to normalize conversations among friends about an all-too-common experience in our community. That alone can allow those experiencing infertility to get away from seeing themselves as medical diagnoses and can instead understand that they are experiencing a process, ultimately no different then every other human being who traverse this world in a body that doesn’t always cooperate with our plans.
Why is it so easy to turn verbs into nouns and to label and stigmatize one another when “tumah happens” and our embodied selves encounter a dangerous and messy world? Why is it so challenging for those of us who can’t see our own lives reflected in the fairytales that we tell about what it means to be a good Jew? Why do we even tell those fairy tales? It is so destructive for fairy tales replace an honest understanding of the diversity of our community and the many paths that our lives take.
I believe that we tell those fairy tales because we are trying to sell our community and to promote our sacred way of life using secular yardsticks. Join our team! We easily achieve academic success, marry young, produce cute children, and then enjoy unencumbered professional achievements and satisfaction! There is nothing wrong about happiness, success, and cute children, but our own allegiance to Judaism should be about more than just an attachment to the finer things in life, with a Hebrew veneer.
A religious ideology and lifestyle should be evaluated by its adherents “olam ha’bah acceptance rate.” Since we cannot know how God evaluates and values our mitzvot, we look for proxies. Does our connection to Torah and mitzvot provide opportunities for us to experience transcendence? Do we encounter sanctity? Does our way of life promote ethical excellence and intellectual stimulation? Are those in pain comforted? Are those who are lonely find companionship? When we celebrate good times, do we set an extra spot at the table?
Our community isn’t defined by our demographics or by how many members are successful in various ways. Our labels do not define us, not the positive labels and not the negative stigmatized labels either – we aren’t a collection of nouns. We are a collection of verbs, living human beings who have the chance to do, and to be, and to make a difference.
The Torah’s system of tumah and taharah, the vast body of purity regulations and laws that at one time comprised fully 1/6th of the corpus of the Oral Torah, are, ultimately, about how to process being a human being in a body. Tumah happens. Tumah happens because we are human beings. Thankfully, the Torah teaches us how to navigate around those episodes, and to then find taharah, purity, and ultimately kedushah, sanctity.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 