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Tazria: Newborn Spirituality

3/30/2011

 
Once a month, I lead a spirituality discussion group in the psychiatric unit of our local hospital. Once a month, I spend forty-five minutes talking with people for whom the struggle to find meaning is as urgent and necessary as breathing. Often, there is a power to the insights revealed in this setting that I have not experienced anywhere in the so-called "normal" world. 

I always begin the discussion by asking a simple question: "What experiences have you encountered in life that you would describe as spiritual?" Often, I am surprised by the powerful answers I hear. Some describe imagined visits to other worlds. I have heard people talk with frightening intensity about losing someone they love. I have listened to people recall moments of joy, terror and wonder.

Take a moment, please, to think about your answer to the question. What experience or relationship have you had in life that you would describe as "spiritual"?

In all of the hundreds of answers I have heard to the question, I find one common element. The experiences we call spiritual are those in which we feel connected to something beyond ourselves. Whether it is the intensity of deeply and sincerely empathizing with another person, or the overwhelming realization of ones smallness in a vast universe, spiritual experiences are moments in which we reach beyond individuality and discover that we are inextricably linked to something beyond ourselves.

There is also this surprising fact: In all of the hundreds of answers I have heard to the question, there is one answer that is, by far, the most common. I find that about one in five people says that his or her most memorable spiritual experience is the experience of becoming a parent. It is, in fact, the answer that I would give myself. 

There has been no other moment in my life that compares to holding that dear, tiny, new baby child—who is an echo of my own life—for the first time. In that moment, I feel intensely connected to all the generations that have preceded me and all that will follow. I am gazing into the eye of eternity and see myself to be part of it. It is a moment of shocking clarity and also of disquieting amazement—like being pulled, temporarily, out of the world to catch a glimpse of a deeper reality.  

Does that sound crazy? Or is it, rather, a release from the ordinary insanity of our lives?

This week's Torah portion, Tazria, opens with one of the most baffling laws in the Torah. The law states that a woman is considered ritually impure (tamei, in Hebrew) for a set period of time after giving birth. During her impurity, she must not touch any holy object or enter into the holy place of God's house. For thirty-three days after giving birth to a son, or for sixty-six days after giving birth to a girl (!), the mother is kept apart from the things that "normal" (sane?) people consider sacred.

This law asks many questions; it offers few answers, if any. Why is a woman who may be at a peak spiritual moment considered unfit for the sacred? Why does the birth of a girl force a period of impurity that is twice as long? 

It seems to me that there is something deeply frightening to the normal world about a woman who has just given birth. There is something about her that must be controlled. Boundaries have to be put in place to keep the contagion of danger from spreading. A fence is built around her.

As I ponder this, I consider that this is also how I sometimes think about my spiritual moments—the moments of feeling deeply connected. They, too, are a threat to so-called normal life. I sense that, if I were to linger too long in the place where I am inextricably linked to something beyond myself, I would be in danger of losing myself. It can feel wonderful to dive deeply into the ocean of intense spirituality, but before long, I have to come up from the depths to breathe the air of individuality, self, and boundaries that separate myself from others.

The woman who holds newborn eternity in her hands—who brings the future and the past together as they suckle at her breast—she represents the danger of living without the boundaries that separate conventional reality from the numinous. She defies the laws of differentiation by being two beings in one. Declaring her tamei is a declaration of our own limitations. We are not meant to live in the world of undifferentiated pure holiness.

For those thirty-three or sixty-six days, she is passing through the place without boundaries. It is the place where the distinctions between sacred and profane are obliterated. It cannot last for long, but while it does, what does it matter if she cannot enter the place that normal people deem holy? To her, in that moment of supreme connection, every place and everything is holy.
Susannah
3/30/2011 01:55:21 am

This is a lovely drash but I wish you had connected it back up to your experiences with the psychiatric group. For example, have you ever worked with women suffering from post-partum psychosis or depression? What is your take on that and the tamei law?

Ilana DeBare link
3/30/2011 06:17:22 am

I appreciate your effort to find meaning in a law (ritual impurity after birth) that seems baffling and out of date.

But I wonder at what point looking for spiritual meaning turns into justification or glossing over something that simply is wrong.

My feeling is that this is a law that is sadly a creature of its time -- a society where the rules were made by men who often disrespected, exploited or feared women.

If the impurity laws around childbirth were intended to fence off women's holiness, why not have similar impurity laws for men who experience a spiritual moment -- for the prophets, the rabbis etc.? Or for men who are mourning the loss of a parent (arguably as spiritual a moment in life as giving birth to a child)?

I hate to disagree, but I feel the impurity laws are simply sad reflections of our patriarchal society.

Reb Jeff link
3/30/2011 06:22:50 am

Susannah,

Thanks for the comment!

Yes, I have worked with women struggling with different forms of post-partum depression. I think there is a connection between that experience and the extended period of tumah (ritual impurity) for women who have given birth.

The concept of ritual impurity in the Torah seems to be connected with any disruption in the normal (there's that word again) boundaries between life and death. Living people become tamei when they have come in contact with death in many forms. The period around childbirth was a dangerous one in the ancient world with very real concerns about death for both mother and child. When the ancients saw the changes in the mental health of the mother of a newborn, the fear likely was even more intense.

In our own times, we can think of the parents of newborn as traveling through a time that is filled with all sorts of danger -- depression, sleeplessness, exhaustion, nursing difficulties. They often receive special status in our communities. People bring them food and offer help in a way that, interestingly, is most similar to the status and support we give to families grieving during shivah. Our contemporary version of tumah can be understood, not as "ritual impurity," but as a status that excites the community's concern, compassion and support for people who are especially vulnerable.

If viewed this way, I imagine that the practice of immersion in mikveh could be reclaimed for women at the end of the traditional period of tumah following birth. It is not an act of cleansing as much as a declaration that their "danger" is passed and they are ready to re-enter a "normal" status.

I did want to connect this issue to the psychiatric issues I mentioned in the opening paragraphs, but it is something that would take more time and space to develop. I believe that people with mental health problems today have the functional equivalent of the Torah's "ritual impurity." They are treated as if contagious and dangerous to "normal" people. Their lives are given over to specialists (psychiatrists=priests) to be either restored or hidden from sight.

The parallel can be extended further. If we think of tumah as a natural and necessary passage that everyone experiences along life's journey -- not as a moral taint -- we may also come to a better way of thinking about mental health. We all lose our grip on reality in different ways at points in our lives. If the journey toward taharah (purity) is seen as a restoration of balance to people's lives, we might be more successful in treating the mentally ill with dignity and respect.

Reb Jeff link
3/30/2011 01:49:34 pm

Ilana,

You'll get no argument from me that the laws of purification for a woman who has give birth are the product of "a society where the rules were made by men who often disrespected, exploited or feared women." No doubt.

The question for us, though, is this: Shall we just reject the laws we don't like or shall we engage with them to find opportunities to find redemption and spiritual meaning for ourselves?

I don't discount the first possibility. The rabbis of antiquity rejected many of the Torah's laws because they did not mesh with the needs and values of their times. (Haven't seen too many rabbinic courts condemning a rebellious son to death? That's because the rabbis defined that law from the Torah out of existence.) We can do the same thing.

On the other hand, if we dismiss everything in the Torah that does not meet the ethos of our own time, we will merely be substituting our own values for the values of Torah and Jewish tradition. That does not work, either.

My preference, in general, is to engage with the tradition -- to continue the conversation that began when Jews first asked what the words of Torah actually mean -- and to come to new understandings of Torah that work for our times without giving up on the process of ongoing revelation.

There is already an outstanding example of this approach with regard to the laws of ritual purity. Mayyim Hayyim is a liberal mikveh and education center in Newton, Massachusetts, that has done amazing work to reclaim the ritual of immersion in a mikveh. (See the link on the "Favorites" page).

Forty years ago, the idea of creating a liberal mikveh would have sounded like an oxymoron. People would have asked (and they did), "Why would modern Jews have any interest at all in perpetuating a patriarchal, misogynistic idea that defines women's normal body functions as pollution?" But when you see Mayyim Hayyim (and you really should) you realize that _redefining_ the ancient traditions that bother us is such a better way to address them than to just turn our backs and pretending that they don't exist.

Mayyim Hayyim turns the mikveh into a an occasion for personal transformation that puts the joy and holiness into moments like conversion, wedding preparation, holiday preparation, healing from illness, and, yes, following menstruation and following childbirth. They show that ritual purification does not have to have all of the awful assumptions about pollution and impurity that we have come to expect.

That's what I'm aiming at -- reinventing the ritual of immersion in a way that opens Jewish women and men to a new/old way of discovering God in one of life's most intensely spiritual moments.


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