Tazria תזריע
Parashat Tazria continues the laws of purity and impurity begun in Parashat Shemini. One of the key roles of the priest was to be able to distinguish tahor from tamei, pure from impure, the latter debarring an individual from entering the sacred space of the Sanctuary.
These categories flow from the contrast between God and human beings. God is immortal, humans are mortal. God is spiritual, humans are also physical, and whatever is physical is subject to disease and decay. Conditions that render a person tamei are those that testify to our mortality and physicality. People who had a reminder of mortality in ways specified by the Torah may not enter holy space until they are healed and purified.
The parasha begins with the laws relating to childbirth – the impurity it brings, and also the command to circumcise a male child on the eighth day. It continues with laws relating to a still-unidentified condition, tzaraat, often translated as leprosy, but which refers to something larger than a disease, because it affects not only people but also clothes and houses. The parasha describes some of the symptoms, which may appear following a skin inflammation, or a burn, on part of the skin covered by hair, or a bald spot, as well as on garments. It was the task of the priest to examine such symptoms, declaring the person clean or unclean or to be quarantined until a clearer diagnosis could be made. The sages see tzaraat as a punishment for the sin of evil speech.
The first essay is an attempt to place brit mila, circumcision, in the larger context of sexuality and violence. The second is about Judaism’s radical replacement of power with love. The third is about the laws of childbirth. The fourth is about tzaraat and why the rabbis understand it as they did. The fifth is about the haftara and the fascinating encounter between the prophet Elisha and Naaman, commander of the Syrian army.
Circumcision, Sex, and Violence
Parashat Tazria opens with the command that, for males, is the distinguishing mark of Jewish identity: circumcision.
The traditional name for this is brit mila, literally “the covenant of circumcision.” It is the only command to bear this explicit association with the divine-human partnership between God and Israel. For Jewish males it is the sign of identity, the mark they carry for the rest of their lives. It is an ontological sign – a state of being rather than a state of doing – testifying to membership in the people of the covenant, the “kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
The point is made powerfully in a Talmudic passage. It says that when King David entered the bathhouse and found himself standing naked, he said, “Woe is me, for I stand naked without a single commandment to my merit.” But as soon as he remembered the covenant of circumcision in his flesh, he was comforted.1Menaḥot 43b.
Mila is the command Jewish men carry with them for the whole of their lives.
Already in the days of Abraham at the dawn of Jewish history it had this significance. It was the first command given specifically to a Jew.2This way of putting it is, of course, an anachronism. The word “Jew” was not used until many centuries later. Abraham was described as an Ivri, a Hebrew.
It first appears in the great passage in Genesis 17 where God outlines the covenant He is about to make with Abraham and his descendants:
Abram fell face down, and God said to him, “As for Me, this is My covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations…” Then God said to Abraham, “As for you, you must keep My covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come. This is My covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised…. For the generations to come every male among you who is eight days old must be circumcised.” (Gen. 17: 3, 9–12)
To this day we call circumcision, “the covenant of Abraham our father.”
As to why the command is repeated here, Maimonides gives the answer in his commentary to the Mishna.3Maimonides, Commentary to the Mishna, Ḥullin 7:6.
Although Abraham was given the command of circumcision as the sign of God’s covenant with him, the covenant God made with the Israelites at Mount Sinai superseded all previous commands. Therefore, the fact that we perform circumcision today is not because of the command to Abraham, but because it was repeated as part of the covenant at Sinai. The command is historically linked with Abraham but legislatively with the revelation to Moses.
Spinoza, the child of the Enlightenment who abandoned Judaism and was excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam, wrote in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus a remarkable sentence: “The sign of circumcision is, as I think, so important, that I could persuade myself that it alone would preserve the [Jewish] nation for ever.”4Baruch Spinoza, “On the Vocation of the Hebrews,” in Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.
As a permanent mark of difference and singularity, brit mila was a guarantor of Jewish identity through the generations.
The obvious question, though, is: Why this command more than any other? Why did circumcision become the mark of Jewish difference, the sign of the covenant, and the symbol of Jewish identity? Why a mark in the flesh, and why this part of the flesh? There is no explicit statement in the Torah, but there must surely be a reason, and it must go to the heart of what makes Jews and Judaism different.
The commentators offer several explanations:
1. According to Midrash Sekhel Tov5To Genesis 17:11. and Sefer HaḤinukh,6Command 2. it exists to serve as an outward sign to differentiate Jews from gentiles. It is like the other signs such as tzitzit, tefillin, and mezuza, different only in that it is actually a part of one’s body.
2. According to one explanation given by Maimonides,7Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, III:49. it is a unifying mark that identifies Jews as part of a people, linking them together as a nation in the most ultimate, existential way.
3. Nahmanides sees it as a way of conferring kedusha, sanctity, on the act of procreation.8Commentary to Genesis 17:4. Abrabanel gives a similar explanation.
4. Rabbi Joseph Albo in Sefer HaIkkarim9Rabbi Joseph Albo, Sefer HaIkkarim 4:45. takes it as a sign of continuity and perseverance across the generations.
5. In The Kuzari,10Judah Halevi, The Kuzari, I:115.
Judah HaLevi says that it was given to help people control their bodily lusts. Maimonides offers a similar explanation:
Similarly, with regard to circumcision, one of the reasons for it is, in my opinion, the wish to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question, so that this activity be diminished and the organ be in as quiet a state as possible…. None of the activities necessary for the preservation of the individual is harmed thereby, nor is procreation rendered impossible, but violent concupiscence and lust that go beyond what is needed are diminished. It is indubitable that circumcision weakens the faculty of sexual excitement and sometimes perhaps diminishes the pleasure…. In my opinion, this is the strongest of the reasons for circumcision.11Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, iii:49.
Each of these is part of the answer, but there may be a way of seeing the command in the wider context of the Torah as a whole.
To see what this might be, we have first to ask a question about the first book of the Torah, Genesis. What makes the patriarchs different? How does Abraham mark a new beginning? What is it that he brings to the world that was not there before?
Genesis, the book of beginnings, tells the story of God’s disappointment with humankind. Having given them freedom, He finds that they abuse it. Adam and Eve sin. Cain kills Abel. Within a short time the world is “full of violence.” God brings a flood, saves Noah and his family, and begins again.
This time, God vows never again to bring a flood to destroy the world. He limits His demand to Noah to several simple commands, chief of which is the prohibition against murder (Gen. 9:6). Human beings are for the first time permitted to kill animals for food so long as they do not exercise needless cruelty (the stated example is a prohibition against eating a limb from a living animal). Again, humanity disappoints, this time by attempting to build a tower that will blur the boundaries between heaven and earth. God divides humanity into many languages and cultures and scatters them across the face of the earth, and begins again with Abraham.
But what is the religion of Abraham? Other than circumcision, Abraham was given no commands.12The sages attribute to Abraham the institution of the morning prayer; see Berakhot 26b and Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Melakhim UMilḥamot 9:1. But this was not commanded of him.
Nor do we find him challenging his contemporaries about idolatry. He does not speak as a prophet. He does not deliver a critique of polytheism. He does not call all humankind to worship the One God. Only in midrashic tradition is Abraham the breaker of idols and the maker of converts. These things are not explicit in the text itself.13Joshua 24 refers to Terah, Abraham’s father, as an idol worshipper, but again there is no mention of this in Genesis.
What then is distinctive about the way of life Abraham represents?
The book gives us one inescapable clue. Wherever and whenever a member of the covenantal family finds him- or herself entering another society or group, there is always a moment of danger – and the danger is always rooted in an absence of sexual ethics. There are six such episodes.14There is a seventh: Judah’s casual relationship with a woman he takes to be a prostitute, but who is in fact his daughter-in-law Tamar. This case has certain unique features that differentiate it from the other six, so I have not included it among the examples.
Twice Abraham and Sarah are forced to leave home because of famine. Once (Gen. 12) they travel to Egypt. The second time they go to Gerar (Gen. 20). Isaac and Rebecca are forced into almost exactly the same situation in Genesis 26, when they too travel to Gerar.
On all three occasions, the men fear that they will be killed so that their wives can be taken into the royal harem. On the first occasion Abram says to Sarai, “When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me but will let you live” (Gen. 12:12). On the second he says, “I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife’” (Gen. 20:11). On the third, Isaac says, “The men of this place might kill me on account of Rebecca, because she is beautiful” (Gen. 26:7).
On all three occasions, Abraham and Isaac are forced to pass off their wives as their sisters, something they would only do in the face of a real and present danger of being killed.
The fourth episode takes place when two visitors (angels in human form) come to Lot in Sodom (Gen. 19). The local populace surrounds the house, demanding of Lot that he bring them out “so that we can have sex with them” (19:5) – intended homosexual rape.
The fifth happens when Dinah “went out to visit the women of the land” and was abducted and raped by the local prince, Shechem. Dinah’s brothers Simeon and Levi have to execute a bloody reprisal in order to rescue their sister (Gen. 34).
The sixth occurs when Joseph is left alone with Potiphar’s wife, who attempts to seduce him, and when she fails, brings against him a false accusation of rape. There is no violence in this case, but Joseph is thrown into prison, ostensibly for life, for a crime he did not commit (Gen. 39:6–20).
So we have six episodes, in five of which there is actual or potential violence and in the sixth a flagrant miscarriage of justice – and all are about sexual desire. Hence the unexpected conclusion that what makes the difference between the patriarchs and matriarchs of Genesis and their neighbours is less religious belief than sexual ethics. Why is this so significant?
The answer lies in violence, not sexuality itself. Judaism is not critical of the sexual urge as such. It did not tend to give a sexual reading of the sin of Adam and Eve. Abraham calls Sarah a beautiful woman. We see Isaac and Rebecca embracing. There is nothing puritanical or ascetic about Judaism’s approach to sexual desire.
What is being hinted at is a proposition stated in terms of evolutionary biology by David Buss in The Murderer Next Door.15David Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill (New York: Penguin, 2005).
What is it, he asks, that leads humans to murder one another? His answer is sexual desire.
In primate societies, alpha males, those who are stronger than the others, have the greatest freedom in their choice of mates. It is sexual desire that causes them to seek dominance, and this in turn leads them to acts of violence against other males in their own or other groups.
Neo-Darwinians like Buss believe that the primary driver of behaviour is reproduction: the act of passing on one’s genes to the next generation. There is, though, a marked difference between males and females in this respect. The female investment in childbirth is far greater than that of the male. The female carries the young during pregnancy and cares for them during childhood. The interest of the female is therefore in the male best able to protect her and provide her with food and shelter while she is carrying or feeding the next generation.
The male has no such interest. His contribution ends with ejaculation. What interests him, therefore, is impregnating as many females as possible, thus ensuring the largest possible number of those who will carry his genes. The only interest the male has in fidelity is not in his own but in that of the female. Males will not willingly make sacrifices for children not carrying their own genes. Even today, children are seventy times more likely to be murdered by a stepfather than by their biological father.16Martin Daly and Margo I. Wilson, “Some Differential Attributes of Lethal Assaults on Small Children by Stepfathers Versus Genetic Fathers,” McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, http://anthro.vancouver.wsu.edu/media/Course_files/anth-395-nicole-hess/daly-and-wilson-some-attributes-of-lethal-assaults-on-small-children-ethology-and-sociobiology.pdf.
The argument has recently been restated by William Tucker in Marriage and Civilization: How Monogamy Made Us Human. He sums up his argument in these words:
In almost all species, males spend most of their time fighting among themselves for access to females. The unique social contract of monogamy – a male for every female, a female for every male – lowers the temperature of sexual competition and frees its members to work together in co-operation. It is at this juncture that human societies – even human civilisations – are born.17William Tucker, Marriage and Civilization: How Monogamy Made Us Human (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2014), 5.
The Torah’s story remains compelling in the light of all we know about the history of sexuality. It suggests that in the earliest (hunter-gatherer) societies, pair-bonding was the norm. Hence the statement of monogamy in Genesis 2:24, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.”
However, with the development of agriculture, cities, and economic surplus, some humans became richer and more powerful than others. We then find a regression to more primitive, even prehuman, forms of behaviour. Kings, rulers, and pharaohs – human alpha males – could command an almost open-ended gratification of sexual desire. Polygamy became possible for a minority of males. Harems made their appearance: hence Abraham and Isaac’s fears that they would be killed so that their wives could be taken into the harem. Well into medieval Europe, the phenomenon jus primae noctis, the right of a feudal overlord to deflower the bride of any of his tenants on the first night of marriage, persisted.
The Torah describes this phenomenon in an enigmatic passage:
Man began to increase on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them. The sons of God saw that the daughters of man were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, “My spirit will not continue to judge man forever, since he is nothing but flesh. His days shall be 120 years.” The titans were on the earth in those days and also later. The sons of God had come to the daughters of man and had fathered them. [The titans] were the mighty ones of old, men of renown. The Lord saw that man’s wickedness on earth was increasing. Every impulse of his innermost thought was only for evil, all day long. God regretted that He had made man on earth, and He was pained to His very core. (Gen. 6:1–6)
Who were the “sons of God” and the titans (nefilim)? Most commentators translate the first phrase as “sons of rulers, judges.” They were people in positions of power. Saadia Gaon and Maimonides understand the phrase “daughters of man” as girls or women of the lower classes, commoners, serfs, or slaves. “Titans” is as graphic a word as we could want for alpha males. In short, the Torah is telling us what we know now from other sources, that in the evolution from hunter-gatherer to settled populations and the growth of civilisation, there was a breakdown in sexual ethics.
According to the Torah, this was the prelude to the statement:
The central message of Genesis is that sexual anomie – the unfettered play of Darwinian forces and alpha males – leads to a society marked by widespread violence. William Tucker, in the book cited above, presents compelling historical evidence for precisely this equation. The Torah views this whole cluster of behaviour with distinct abhorrence.18It should be noted as well that this is also what leads King David, and then King Solomon, into sin. The Tanakh is telling us that even the greatest are neither immune from the temptation nor capable of resisting it.
Such behaviour privileges some people against others. It turns women into instruments of male desire. It places power, not love, at the heart of human relationships. It treats women as objects rather than as subjects with equal dignity and integrity. It divorces sex from compassion and concern. It dishonours the most intimate human bond, the one in which we are most like God Himself: the love that brings new life into the world.
Above all, though, it leads to violence, and the Torah regards violence – the cause of the Flood – as the single greatest threat to humanity. Murder, the supreme prohibition of the Noahide code, is not merely a crime but a sin since the human person is the image of God, and murder is therefore a form of sacrilege.
Hence circumcision as the sign of the covenant. The purpose of circumcision, as all the commentators note in one way or another, is to mitigate sexual pleasure, control sexual desire, and consecrate the fundamental biological imperative of reproduction. Given the evolutionary and genetic asymmetry between males and females – with females placing a premium on fidelity, males on adultery and promiscuity – it becomes obvious why this should be a constraint of male rather than female desire. For it is males who overwhelmingly throughout history have committed crimes of violence. Eighty-seven per cent of murders are committed by men.19Buss, op. cit., 22.
And the primary driver of violence is sexual desire.
The meaning of brit mila should now be clear. It counteracts a set of drives to which the human male is prone, which are socially dysfunctional and sometimes dangerous. Most significant is the connection between violence and male sexual desire. A second is the male tendency to promiscuity, adultery, multiple and serial relationships, and the relative lack of male interest in the continuing responsibilities of parenthood. In Britain in 2012, around ninety-two per cent of single-parent families were headed by a woman; only eight per cent by men.20Lone Parents with Dependent Children, January 2012, UK Office for National Statistics.
As Margaret Mead is reported to have said, the primary challenge of any civilisation is how to socialise males into becoming fathers.21Quoted in Jerry Jensen and Larry Cyril Jensen, Families: The Key to a Prosperous and Compassionate Society for the 21st Century (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen, 1999), 91.
Covenant is about faithfulness in human relations, especially in the bond between male and female. That bond must be consecrated. It should be exclusive. Though the Torah does not legislate monogamy – it was not to become obligatory until the edict of Rabbenu Gershom in the tenth century – it is clearly implied by Genesis 2, as well as by the stories of tension between Sarah and Hagar, Rachel and Leah.
Sigmund Freud, a Jew though not a believing one, placed sexuality at the heart of his analysis of the human personality and of civilisation itself. Libido was one of the primary human instincts. On the one hand, it was a desire for life as opposed to thanatos, the death instinct. On the other, unchecked, it led to conflict and chaos. Civilisation, for Freud, depended on the ability to defer instinctual gratification.
This is the key to understanding brit mila. It is the consecration of sexual desire. Judaism takes a balanced view of the human personality. Our instincts are not evil in themselves. The religious life is not a matter of self-denial and renunciation. But neither is it hedonism, the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure. Instinct has its darker side, which culminates in violence. The good life involves education of the passions and the acquisition of habits of self-restraint. The holy life involves the sanctification of instinct. Only thus can we create a gracious society in which love, not power, rules the affairs of humankind.