Tazria-Metzora: Women Are Inherently Connected to Purity

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These two parshiot centre around the theme of tuma and tahara, commonly translated as purity and impurity. The weakness of this translation is that “impurity” suggests the presence of something unfavourable, perhaps unclean – but this is far from the truth. Tuma is the absence of the flow of a life force. This is why a deceased person creates tuma, there is a vacuum, a hole where the person’s life force was.

Women are especially attuned to tuma and tahara because of their physiology. It is women who menstruate, become pregnant and bring life into the world. In fact, it is the tuma brought about by childbirth which the Torah brings as the first example of tuma. The process of labour begins with the woman carrying the precious life force of her baby and after delivery, this life force no longer exists in her body. This transition creates tuma as there is a space where life flow once happened which has now ceased to exist in the mother.

Rabbi Steinsaltz in his essay¹ on tuma notes that the miracle of pregnancy, of a woman’s body literally sustaining two beings, and the subsequent miracle of childbirth, is often understated. The transition of an actual life force emerging from the woman happens so fast and immediately, her body shifts to accommodate. The pregnancy hormones and changes disappear. Yet, this immediately invites tuma due to the exit of the life energy the woman was carrying. Rabbi Steinsaltz notes that perhaps this spiritual vacuum is reflected in what sometimes becomes an emotional vacuum for some women: postpartum depression. The quick transition from carrying a life force to delivering that life force can be difficult for the woman. On a spiritual level, it is Hashem Himself delivering every baby and upon the delivery, His Shechina withdraws from the mother’s side, leaving in its wake this tuma.

In our monthly cycle, women become nidda which means ritually impure. We are considered tamei during our time of menstruation (until we have experienced our seven clean days and then immersed in a mikve). This is because each month, a woman’s body prepares itself to carry life. When the eggs are not fertilised, the body releases blood and the tuma status of the woman signals the cessation of life force. There was a potential for creation which is now no longer. We see both from menstruation and childbirth how in touch a woman is with the flow of life, emulating her Creator Who is the Source of all life.

It is powerful to consider that although the halachot of tuma and tahara are complex and some of them belonged exclusively to the realm of the kohanim, it is only women who nowadays have a halachic process to rid themselves of tuma and emerge tahor. As Mrs Faigy Pollack explains, we are all currently tamei met until the coming of Mashiach where men and women alike will purify themselves. But when immersing in a mikve after counting her seven clean days, a woman is the only one in galut who can change her status from tamei to tahor. This doesn’t mean she was “dirty” in her menstruating days. In fact, the halacha is that a woman may not shower when she comes out of the mikvah in the same place as the mikvah to demonstrate that she did not come to physically cleanse herself but to spiritually cleanse herself. In the way my kalla teacher, Rebbetzin Roodyn, taught it: a mikvah is not just a bath the same way the shofar is not just a trumpet. There are spiritual processes occurring, much deeper than just the physical immersion in water.

Connecting to Hashem in the Beit Hamikdash is second only to experiencing the creation of life itself. The Torah is not disrespecting women by keeping them away from the Beit Hamikdash for a period after birth. It is in fact the greatest honor to all the woman is and all she has done. She is emulating Hashem so perfectly by creating life and experiencing being so attached to life that she does not need the Beit Hamikdash.

Mrs Faigy Pollack describes the beauty and the challenge of women: that we are constantly cycling from full to empty and empty to full. Whether, as we explained above, that is the massive process of carrying a life to delivering it or whether it is transitioning from menstruating to clean days and eventually back to menstruating again. A woman hormonally, physically and emotionally is forever moving between feeling her strongest and feeling her weakest, bleeding and taking space, to connecting and being present.

If we learn through the first few pesukim of the parsha, we will see that the purification process for the mother to remove her tuma from childbirth is twice as long when she has a girl than when she has a boy. For 33 days after she has birthed a boy, she may not enter the Temple but for a girl it is 66 days. Why does a girl being born generate more tuma? When a girl is born, not only is there tuma contracted by the loss of the life force inside the mother, but the loss of the potential for life inside her daughter. Even a baby girl carries eggs and therefore holds more potential for life than a baby boy. Since there is a far greater life force to begin with, the spiritual vacuum left behind is far larger, and therefore requires a longer purification.

Rabbi Sacks zt”l wrote² beautifully about the mother not being allowed to approach the Beit Hamikdash after birth (due to her tuma). He explains that Hashem is the Force of life itself. Connecting to Hashem in the Beit Hamikdash is second only to experiencing the creation of life itself. The Torah is not disrespecting women by keeping them away from the Beit Hamikdash for a period after birth. It is in fact the greatest honor to all the woman is and all she has done. She is emulating Hashem so perfectly by creating life and experiencing being so attached to life that she does not need the Beit Hamikdash. As Rabbi Sacks so eloquently captured it: “Her bedside replicates the experience of the Temple.”

All the halachot of tuma and tahara are founded on life and life force. It is therefore a privilege to be a Jewish woman so attuned to the creation of life and the spiritual powers of life, just by cycling through our weeks and months, ever changing from tamei to tahor.