Tazria - Birth And Death Revisited

Tazria: Birth and Death Revisited http://www.radicaltorah.org/2006/02/23/tazria-birth-and-death-revisited/ Parashat Tazria is generally regarded as the most boring in the Torah. It describes the ritual for “purifying” new mothers after the birthing process (as if they needed purifying) and also the ritual for cleansing those with tzara’at, a disease characterized by white scaly skin. As Gershon Winkler has noted, there’s a shamanic element to both rituals: an attempt to represent the Infinite through natural elements. When we decode the symbolism in the ceremonies, we begin to get at the way our ancestors might have looked at the process of birth, death, and rebirth. The ritual for cleansing a leper involves “two live clean birds, cedar wood, crimson thread, and hyssop” as well as fresh water and an earthen bowl (Leviticus 14:4). One bird is killed over the water in the bowl. The other bird is dipped, along with the wood, thread, hyssop, and cedar, in the blood/water mixture. The mixture is sprinkled seven times on the person to be healed, and then the live bird is set free. The elements here all represent rebirth. Fresh water, in biblical thought, always represents life and change, and the earthen vessel is the body, the container of this change. The live bird dipped in blood, then set free, represents the live spirit of the ill person, who has faced death and then been set free. The cedar wood represents the wood of the sacred shrine, built of cedar: a sign of holiness and immortality. The red thread is the umbilical cord, tying the healed person to a new life. And the hyssop, like a sponge, absorbs the blood, just as the individual being healed absorbs the healing power of the ritual. The seven sprinkles represent the days of creation: also a kind of birth. The elements of this ritual indicate it is a rebirth ritual, and the white scaly disease represents a state of death from which the person must be redeemed. The illness may be seen as a spirit illness, from which the soul must be liberated. In the childbirth ritual, the number seven also figures prominently. The woman giving birth must wait seven days in the case of a boy, and fourteen in the case of a girl, befroe presenting herself in the sacred shrine. these days represent a particualr period during which both mother and child are vulnerable. Many cultures, from European to Native American, recognize that when a child is born, it is no longer in the womb, but also has not entered the human community. Birth rituals enter the child, and also sometimes the mother, into the culture so

that they once again come under the protection of societal form and ritual. Europeans once did this by laying the child on the ground and raising it up as a sign the child was separated from the world of nature. In fact, Jews borrowed this lifting ritual, in Germany called Hollekreisch, to welcome and name baby girls as well as boys. These kinds of ritual separations are a “second birth”–the child is now born to the community, not only to the mother. Circumcision, for Jewish boys, provides this introduction to culture, and literally “separates” a piece of flesh just as the boy is separated from the umbilical cord. But what about for a girl? How does she separate? The Torah mandates a fourteen-day waiting period, twice seven, before a girl may be brought into the community. As Arthur Waskow has noted, twice seven may indicate the girl is a life-bearer and will herself give birth one day (seven indicating a complete life). Fourteen is also the distance from new moon to full moon and may suggest waiting until the girl is “full” and complete before initiating her. The actual ceremony for a girl is lost, though we have the ceremony to reinitiate the mother, using flowing water and sacrifices. This is why Jews borrowed rituals from other culture’s like Hollekreisch (see my article “Holle’s Cry” in Nashim, Spring 2005 for more details: http://muse.jhu.edu/cgibin/access.cgi?uri=/journals/nashim/v009/9.1hammer.html) and also las fadas, a Turkish Sephardic ritual, the name of which mentions “fairies” (like the fairy godmother in Sleeping Beauty). But possibly the ritual had to do with the moon, with naming, or with a separation of some kind from the mother. Parashat Tazria offers us a glimpse into the shamanic, nature-based roots of our people and enlivens the rituals that have been passed down to us. It also provides us with a fresh way to look at rituals of healing, birth, and rebirth. In that sense, it’s certainly not boring. This entry was posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 at 8:21 am and is filed under Nissan, Tazri·a ‫עירזת‬.