Parashat Tazria (5760)
With God’s help, on the eve of the holy Sabbath, Parashat Tazria, 5760
Impurity and Holiness: ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’
This week’s portion begins with the Torah’s command that every woman who gives birth conduct herself in a state of impurity. We will try
to understand, in some measure, why childbirth entails impurity. These matters are of course bound up with understanding the concept
of impurity in general.
There are several types of impurity in the Torah: corpse-impurity, impurity of one with a discharge, of a woman after childbirth, of a creeping creature, and so on. The impurities are divided
into primary sources and derivatives of impurity. The primary sources define the basic kinds of impurity, and the derivatives define the
secondary kinds of impurity. There is one exception to this hierarchy, and that is corpse-impurity. A corpse
is not merely a primary source of impurity like all the other primary sources; it is called ‘the grandfather of all impurity.’ It seems that such a designation
hints that there is something essential in death that lies at the basis of the concepts of impurity in general. This is
the kind of impurity that stands at the top of the pyramid.
Impurity is always connected to the absence of life. A corpse is the basic form of the absence of life, and therefore it
is called the grandfather of all impurity. So too a person afflicted with biblical leprosy (which is addressed in the next portion), according to the Sages, is considered as dead.
In light of this we can also understand the impurity of a woman after childbirth. Throughout the entire
pregnancy she carried life within herself. When she gives birth and the living fetus emerges from her, the absence
of life causes her impurity. This is of course a positive absence of life, that is, the addition of new life to the world through the creation of a body that now
exists outside the mother, but our conclusion is that the absence of life always causes impurity.
The opposite state to impurity is holiness. If death is the grandfather of all impurity, then life,
which emanates from the source of life, is the grandfather of all holiness. This is the ‘sanctity of life,’ whose true meaning
is that the more life there is, the more holiness there is; and the less life there is, the more
impurity increases.
Purification from impurity is effected in a ritual bath of water. Water is a symbol of life. In the portion of the red heifer
the Torah describes the purification process of one who has become impure through a corpse. For this root impurity, immersion
in a ritual bath does not suffice. A person who has contracted corpse-impurity must wait seven days and only afterward immerse. During
those days one must sprinkle him with living water mixed with the ashes of the red heifer. The entire process of purification
is accompanied by contact with water, and the prevalent metaphor associated with water, especially in this context, is ‘living
water.’
Up to this point the discussion may seem somewhat detached. In our world there is a widespread feeling that holiness means a withdrawal from
life, whereas impurity, precisely, is bound up with intense life. Needless to say, this conception is foreign
to the spirit of the Torah.
There are conceptions that indeed understood real holiness to be attainable only through withdrawal from
life. This is primarily a Christian conception, though it has a certain place in the Torah’s outlook as well, especially
in the section of the Nazirite. It is well known that a Nazirite is called a sinner because of his withdrawal from the world, and he
even brings an offering for this. It is true that when certain circumstances arise in which a person feels that he
cannot live in holiness, he should vow a Nazirite vow and withdraw from the world. In his withdrawal
it will be easier for him to maintain standards of holiness.
The Torah’s fundamental conception is that holiness means a certain mode of life. Admittedly, there are
those who claim that a person must redefine the very concept of life, not as it is commonly understood in the world, and only
such a life will be a life of holiness. But this is only another formulation of the previous conception. It seems to me
that the Torah’s view is that whatever a reasonable person calls ‘life,’ the Torah too calls ‘life.’
It is true that the forms and proportions must be dictated by the Torah.
The Torah is meant to direct life, not to replace it with an alternative of ascetic withdrawal. Every faculty
given to a person is part of his life, and insofar as it is such he must use it in a positive way. There is no faculty
in the world that is meant only to be hidden away or overcome; every faculty also has a positive role for which it was
intended. It is true that there are certain uses of the various human faculties that the Torah
rejects, and especially any unrestrained use of any of those faculties.
The drives, such as the desire for honor or for illicit sexual relations, are what stand at the root of life. There are schools
of psychology that place these various forces as the fundamental forces that move
the human being. Freud, founder of the first Viennese school of psychology, held that the sexual drive is
the basic energy that moves a person, and Adler, founder of the second school, held that the drive for honor
is the main ‘engine.’
An ascetic conception maintains that a person must overcome these drives and extinguish them. The Torah’s conception is
that a person is charged with directing them and using them in the proper directions, for
extinguishing them is like extinguishing a person’s ‘engine.’ The Torah is not interested in an extinguished person, but
on the contrary, in a living and energetic person who directs his energies in the proper directions. A life of
holiness does not mean a life of extinguished drives, but a life of channeling them in proper directions.
Here perhaps enters the approach of Viktor Frankl, founder of the third Viennese school
of psychology, who located the basic human energy in conferring, or seeking, meaning (the school of
logotherapy). Directing all of a person’s powers toward meaningful ends—that is holiness.
By contrast, extinguishing the various powers within a person is a kind of putting him to death in many respects, and
there is in this something akin to impurity. The holy person, in the Jewish-Torah sense, is a living and active person within
this world, in all its shades and all its spheres of activity. In this sense, logotherapy is not merely
another psychological school, but a unification and completion of those that preceded it.
Sabbath peace
This may be placed in the genizah of any synagogue or yeshiva. Comments and responses are welcome.
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With God’s help, on the eve of Passover, 5760
‘Now We Are Free Men’: Liberty and Freedom
Moses our teacher demands of Pharaoh, ‘Let My people go, that they may serve Me.’ Oppressed groups in the modern world,
such as Black Americans in the United States under the leadership of Martin Luther King, or the Jews of the former Soviet Union during
the years of Soviet oppression, adopted this saying of Moses our teacher as a slogan for their struggle, except that usually
in these contexts they quote ‘Let My people go,’ and omit the addition ‘that they may serve Me.'[1]
At first glance, unlike in the humanistic world where freedom and liberty are values in and of themselves, in the Torah
freedom is only a means to the service of God.
This picture is overly simplistic. The Festival of Liberty was established for all generations as the central festival and as the foundation of the Hebrew calendar.
In light of the picture in the previous paragraph, Passover would be nothing but a prelude to the festival of the giving of the Torah, which comes
fifty days later. But that is not so. What emerges here is a conception of liberty itself as a value, even in the
Torah world.
It may be that part of the explanation for this dual attitude is hinted at in a striking difference that exists in the Hebrew language
between the two expressions ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty.’ In our language one can say ‘to be free,’ whereas
one can only ‘go out [from slavery] to liberty,’ and not speak of ‘being in liberty.’ In Hebrew, ‘liberty’
does not describe a real state in which one can find oneself, but rather a utopia to which one can only aspire
and in whose direction one can advance. ‘Freedom’ is a state in which a person finds himself when no
limitations are imposed upon him. A Hebrew slave ‘goes free’ after six years, and immediately afterward he is
‘free.’ After an ‘exit to liberty’ one is not ‘in a state of liberty,’ but, at most, ‘in a state of freedom.’
Our world is a world of limitations by its very nature, and if the Holy One, blessed be He, had wanted a state of liberty
He would have created it without limitations. The Holy One, blessed be He, wants an aspiration to emerge from limitations while
remaining within them, and therefore He created His world in this way. The world to come is what is called ‘the world
of liberty’ (= the world of freedom). Only there can liberty prevail as a real state and not merely as a process.
The expression parallel to ‘being free’ is ‘being a free man.’ A ‘free man,’ like ‘one who belongs to the world
to come,’ is a person who exists in this world, in chains, but has some connection to a world of liberty
(the world to come). He walks toward it, and perhaps already begins to taste it here. A ‘free man’
is a person who exists in a process of liberty, and not in a state of liberty. As stated, one cannot exist
in a real state of liberty in this world.
The place where we encounter liberty as a concrete state is in the first tablets of the covenant. There
we find ‘the writing of God engraved on the tablets,’ and the Sages expound: do not read ‘engraved’ but rather
‘liberty.’ The letters on the first tablets stood miraculously upon the tablets, and were read from both
sides of the tablets in exactly the same way (without reversal). That is what a state of liberty in this world looks like,
contrary to all the rules and impossible to understand. When Moses our teacher brought these tablets down, he
immediately had to break them. Liberty as a state cannot exist in this world. The first tablets
were given to us as a signpost indicating what we should aspire to, as a marking of utopia. In daily
life we operate with the second tablets, the work of Moses our teacher’s hands.
An attempt to realize utopias in an immediate and drastic way is doomed to failure. Communism was
an attempt to realize, in practice, immediately and fully, the utopia of equality. It failed. Today
our world is attempting to realize the utopia of liberty and freedom as fully as possible, by
shattering every limitation that can be shattered. This attempt too will fail, for that same reason. A symbol
of this is the ruling of the American court last week regarding Microsoft. In the land
of unlimited possibilities, the wings were clipped of the institution closest to complete economic freedom
(a monopoly), when the degree of its freedom exceeded what this world allows. Usually
complete freedom for one party involves denying the freedom of another, and is therefore doomed to fail.
One can say more than this: liberty has meaning only where limitations exist. A person’s reaching
the moon acquires meaning only because there is a law of gravity in the world (attraction to the earth). The voyage to the moon
is the use of certain laws of nature in order to circumvent others. In a world without laws of nature,
no scientific-technological achievement would have had any meaning. Reaching the moon would be like
reaching Petah Tikva. It would be a dull world devoid of meaning.
An example from another angle: a person who accepts upon himself the yoke of Torah and commandments can be creative in a
special and original interpretation of the Torah; but one who does not accept this system at all, his
interpretation of it lacks any meaning of liberty, or any creative significance (in the normative-religious sense, not
the literary one).
To be a ‘free man’ means to aspire to liberty without shattering the chains. This is the essence of
the difference between ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty.’ A life that is all freedom lacks a dimension of value, and usually
also turns out to be devoid of flavor and purpose. The value, or experience, of liberty can receive its
meaning only through the conduct of a ‘free man’ within chains and limitations. The Festival of Liberty is
the festival on which one must live liberty as a process, and not as a state. Liberty is indeed a value in itself
even in the Torah’s worldview, except that it is a utopian value that marks a direction, and not a concrete realistic state.
In the Torah, unlike in the humanistic world, the intrinsic value is ‘liberty’ and not ‘freedom.’
Sabbath peace
This may be placed in the genizah of any synagogue or yeshiva. Comments and responses are welcome.
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[1] Yeshayahu Leibowitz would cite examples of such meaningful omissions, such as the one in the slogan of the Reali School in Haifa, ‘walk humbly’ (with the omission of ‘with your God’), or, more famously, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ (with the omission of ‘I am the Lord’), and others.
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