Blood on the Tracks: Tazria/Metzora 5783

The priests of Leviticus identified four possible contaminants in their surroundings, contact with which could trigger a state of tum’ah, or ritual impurity. Note that ritual impurity does not mean physical uncleanness, but in ancient Israel it separated one from God,sacred things, and the community. The four sources of tum’ah: human corpses, animal carcasses, bodily fluids such as menstrual blood, the blood of childbirth, semen, and other genital discharge, and, a specific affliction known as tzara’at which could be contracted by people, articles of clothing, and physical structures. Impurity, in Leviticus, arose in response to moments in which people walked the boundary between life and death.
--Rabbi Hilly Haber

Why is a woman to be in a state of impurity (tum'ah) twice as long following the birth of a girl (two weeks) than the birth of a boy (one week)? Sometimes critics have seen this as another example of the Torah's supposed misogynistic mindset. But in recent years exactly the opposite interpretation has taken hold: that is, that tum'ah means not "impurity" in the sense of "uncleanness" but as the liminal state where life and death encounter each other.
--Rabbi Richard Levy (z"l)
Childbirth is a fragile time, infant mortality used to be very high. In menstruation, where a woman is also in a state of tum'ah, the outpouring of menstrual blood signifies that a new life was not created. Dr. Rachel Adler² first espoused this theory of tum'ah many years ago, and it leads to the suggestion that a baby girl, who herself may well give birth in due time, bears a double portion of this life/death encounter. Thus the birth of a baby girl initiates a potential infinite series of births, which over time will create—or sustain—the Jewish people. Again, the human body—in this case the woman and her female baby—is symbolic of the body of the eternal Jewish people.
--Rabbi Richard Levy (z"l)

According to Mary Douglas, Leviticus is concerned all over with boundaries, structures, and containers. The various details and strictures surrounding the preparations of sacrifices and what we may and may not eat reflect this concern.^[2]
Looking specifically at the laws pertaining to צרעת, Douglas observes that Leviticus,
“uses the simple idea of covering to build up a series of analogies for atonement from the skin covering the body, to the garment covering the skin, to the house covering the garment, and finally to the tabernacle: in each case, when something has happened to spoil the covering, atonement has to be done.”^[3]
Prof. Rabbi Wendy Zierler
https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-skin-of-the-metzora-and-the-heart-of-the-messiah

This point is driven home at the end of Chapter 13 of Vayikra, where the צרוע (person afflicted with scale disease) is painfully depicted as a mourner in torn clothes and loose hair, crying out tameh, tameh ([“I am] impure”) so as prevent others from touching him or her (v. 45.) The afflicted individual finally ends up dwelling בדד (alone), outside the camp (v. 46.) Here “the insiders,” whose bodies are whole and pure, are kept in, while the outsiders, those whose skin has been intruded, are kept out. Our association of the word בדד with the breached, defiled, destroyed state of Jerusalem in Megilat Eichah (1:1), only adds a sense of grief or desolation to this ritual depiction of the מצורע.
Prof. Rabbi Wendy Zierler
https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-skin-of-the-metzora-and-the-heart-of-the-messiah

The Torah: A Women's Commentary
Dr. Rachel Havrelock
By moving from a state of ritual impurity to one of ritual purity, the ever-changing human body serves as the index for the transformation of identity...As the body undergoes the permutations of ritual purity and impurity, the impure body is sometimes exiled--but not abandoned to its exile. The appearance of a priest outside the camp (14:3) signals that exile is ephemeral and that restoration will begin.,,,
Focus on the body emphasizes the changes undergone by the self in the process of becoming another self. Signs on the body gauge identity and mark transformation. When the sick are healed, their bodies bear the proof. Yet one's body is not only an indicator of change but also a vessel of memory...The body attests to change as well as to the indelibility of experience. Therefore descriptions of identity, predicated as they are on the language of body, convey the tension between the possibility of change and the integrity of forms.