YAVNEH STUDIES IN TAZRIAH Lawrence Kaplan

The line between exegesis and eisegesis of a biblical text, between what one draws out of a particular text and what one reads into it, is often quite thin. It might prove instructive to examine a single verse in the sedrah of Tazriah and see how it became the focal point for varying interpretations, each interpretation reflecting the general religious outlook and perspective of the commentator who suggested it.

The sedrah states that the yoledet, the woman who has given birth, is tameh, “ritually impure,” for seven or fourteen days and then counts thirty-three or sixty-six yemei tohar, days of purification, depending on whether the child was male (7:33) or female (14:66). At the close of that period she must bring two sacrifices, the olah, the burnt offering, and the chattat, the sin offering. (Leviticus 12:1-8) The requirement that the yoledet bring a chattat, has perplexed both Jewish and non-Jewish commentators. What sin could she have possibly committed that would warrant a chattat?

Most modern commentators are of the opinion that the purpose of the chattat is not to atone for any sin at all, but rather to effect a “purgation” from the ritual impurity that prevented the woman from entering the sacred precincts. (See the commentaries of Hertz and Martin Noth.) Even assuming, however, that the chattat does imply some sin on the part of the woman, the Torah itself does not specify or even give the slightest hint as to what her supposed sin could be.

It is precisely this scriptural ambiguity that guarantees the basic subjectivity of the commentators’ responses that allows us to view their suggestions as to the nature of this “sin” as being primarily personal projections of their own interests and concerns. The scriptural verse in this instance, then, may be compared to a Rorscheach test, insofar as the subjects’ responses to the stimulus material (the verse or the instrumental ink blot) reveal more about themselves than about the stimulus material. (This comparison, as well as the basic approach of the above paragraph, is based on Richard L. Rubenstein’s The Religious Imagination chapter 2, “Dreams, Psychoanalysis and Jewish Legend.”)

Despite the almost limitless freedom that Judaism has granted to the sphere of derash (in contrast to peshat, which is subject to many limits - philological, historical, contextual, etc.), a freedom that is a direct consequence of the subjectivity we have described above, we can still distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate derash. Legitimate derash upholds the authority of the verse to which it is appended as a comment; illegitimate derash tends to subvert this authority.

As an example of illegitimate eisegesis of the parasha under discussion, we wish to cite the classical Christian interpretation. I would like to present excerpts from the representative Christian commentaries:
In the birth of a child the special original curse against the woman is regarded by the law as reaching its fullest, most extreme and most consummate expression.

For the extreme evil of the state of sin into which the first woman, by the first sin, brought all womanhood is seen most of all in this, that no woman, by means of those powers given her for good and blessing, can bring into the world only a child of sin. (Kellog’s Exposition Bible)

[The purpose of this law] is to impress upon the mind . . . of fallen man how all the leading processes of natural life. . . how everything, even his own bodily nature, lies under the curse of sin . . . (Keil and Delitzsch biblical commentary)

Note all of the traditional Christian themes which came into play in this eisegesis: the permanent damning character of original sin, the falleness and ineradicable guilt of “natural” man, the negative attitude toward sexuality and the family.

More revealing than all of this, however, is the conclusion of Keil and Delitzsch.

… so that the law may be a schoolmaster to bring unto Christ and awaken and sustain the longing for a Redeemer from the curse that had fallen on his body.

It is here that the subversive quality of the Christian interpretation is most clearly revealed. The purpose of the law is to impress upon man the corrupting power of sin and its [the law’s] own ability to redeem man from sin. The purpose of the law is to point to its own inadequacy; it points to a time when it will have been superseded, to a redeemer who will be able to accomplish what it could not accomplish. Such an approach, it need not be said, directly contradicts the principle “that this Torah shall not be nullified.” The import of the classical rabbinic approach to this verse becomes clearer by contrast to the Christian approach. What the rabbinic interpretation does, essentially, is to stand the Christian interpretation on its head.

And what was the sin that the yoledet committed? When she was in labor she vowed that she would no longer have any relations with her husband, and since she made this vow because of her pain and it is an improper vow. . . the Torah required her to bring a chattat for atonement. (Niddah 31b)

Not sexuality and childbirth, then, are sins but rather the flights from sexuality, the shrinking from childbirth, is considered sinful and requires atonement.

It is inconceivable that the sages, with their generally this-worldly attitude, with their insistence upon the prime importance of the family, with their realistic appraisal of the demands of man’s biological nature, could ever have imagined that the fulfillment of the first commandment of the Torah, “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth,” could be considered a sin. To the contrary, the negation of the commandment is a sin.

While the standard Jewish commentators properly treated this rabbinic interpretation as sheer derash, it cannot be said that their approaches are significantly closer to the peshat of the parasha than that of the sages.

Samson Raphael Hirsch, for example, discusses the “sin” of the yoledet within the context of his symbolic interpretation of Tumah and Taharah.

Tumah is man’s physical lack of free will, his having willy-nilly to submit to physical forces. Taharah is his complete free-will in moral and spiritual matters.... Physically man is unfree but morally he is free. (Hirsch on Lev. 5:13)

The whole process in the body of a mother for the production of a new human being - is of purely physical nature… If anywhere it is here that the fact must be established, that, in spite of this, once he is born, man is a morally free agent. Above all, the mother herself, under the fresh impression of her physically-completely passively and painfully -having to submit to the forces of the physical laws of nature at the most sublime procedure of her earthly calling, has to re-establish again the consciousness of her own spiritual height. (Commentary to Lev. 12:1)

It is just the experience of having been given up to a completely helpless suffering condition ...which threatened her with the danger of losing all her taharah, with the danger of losing the conscious self-assurance that, in spite of this experience, she is never expected to lose her power of self- determination in all moral matters that necessitate that she first vow in her chattat that she will not allow her power of self-determination in all moral matters to be broken by the painful days which are inseparable from her high calling in life. (Commentary to Lev. 12:6)

Hirsch, no doubt, felt that he had discovered the true symbolic meaning of tumah and taharah and the reason why the yoledet must bring a chattat. The critical reader, however, can only discern in Hirsch’s interpretation the imposition of Kantian categories upon scriptural concepts.

Hirsch follows Kant in two respects. First, he (Hirsch) completely identifies taharah, (and kedushah as well) with moral self-determination. This accords with Kant’s view that the holy will is simply the perfectly moral will. For Kant and for Hirsch there is no specifically metaphysical or religious quality to either God’s or man’s holiness. As Yitzchak Heinemann (Ta-amei HaMitzvot be-safruz’ yisrael, Vol. II, pp. 148-154) has pointed out, in this respect Hirsch is in complete agreement with the great liberal Jewish theologian, Herman Cohen. Both, to this extent, are children of the nineteenth century. While Rudolf Otto, in The Idea of the Holy, may have overreacted to this prevalent moralistic view of holiness by insisting that the primary character of the holy possesses no specifically moral quality, he has quite conclusively shown that this moral reductionism contradicts the testimony of the Bible, Judaism, Christianity, as well as the other major world religions.

Moreover, Hirsch’s conceptual apparatus for the contrast he draws between tumah and taharah is straight out of Kant. For Kant, man as phenomenon, as an object of scientific knowledge, is merely one link within the causal chain of nature; his actions are completely determined. Man as noumenon is outside this causal order and is morally free. Indeed, man is aware of his moral experience since the moral “ought” to which he feels himself subjected logically implies a “can.” The nature of the interaction between man’s action as noumenal being and his actions as a phenomenal being, is, of course, a very serious problem with which Kant, with only partial success, grapples. Hirsch, not being very interested in technical philosophy, skirts the issue. But the influence is clear. Hirsch’s explanation of the parasha of Yoledet, then, reveals itself as nineteenth century humanistic derash which does not significantly contribute to our understanding of tumah, taharah or the chattat of the yoledet.

All the commentators we have discussed have, in some manner, linked the “sin” of the yoledet with condition of her pregnancy and child-birth. Abravanel, however, views this whole parasha as merely a random- illustration of a general philosophical proposition. Abravanel is of the view that all pain comes as punishment for sin. The yoledet suffered pain - ergo, she must have sinned. What the sin was, we do not know and, in any event, it bears no relationship to the woman’s pregnancy; it is a purely logical deduction on our part.

For Abravanel, then, to view any type of pain as somehow being an inevitable concomittant of natural processes is to question God’s justice. Moreover, despite the seeming inevitability of pain in child-birth, we can always assume that this pain is justified by the commission of some sin since “there is no righteous person on earth who will do only good and never sin.” The parasha, then, becomes a lesson of sekhar ve-onesh.

It seems to me that Abravanel’s divorcing the chattat of the yoledet from the fact of her pregnancy and the tumah which follows quite clearly shows that his interests in devising a philosophical theodicy, in this case, affected his exegetical talents.

This brief comparison of these various commentaries should alert us to the difficulty of separating derash from peshat. The peshat of Abravanel and Hirsch becomes the derash of our generation and while the greater sense of a historical context of a text that we have may prevent us from straying too far from its intended meaning, we can have no a priori guarantees that our peshat will not, in turn, become the next generation’s derash.

Finally, this discussion should make us aware of the extremely wide range of interpretations that the Bible is capable of eliciting; while at the beginning of this essay I suggested that this range was made possible by the terseness and ambiguity of the biblical text, I should point out that in the view of the kabbalists, this range is due to the fact that “the absolute word is as such meaningless, but it is pregnant with meaning.”

For the Lurianic Kabbalah every word of the Torah has six hundred thousand “faces,” that is, layers of meaning or entrances, one for each of the children of Israel who stood at the foot of Mount Sinai. Each face is turned to only one of them; he alone can see and decipher it. Each man has his own unique access to Revelation

Authority no longer resides in a single unmistakable “meaning” of the divine communication but in its infinite capacity for taking on new forms (Gershon Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, chapter I, “Religious Authority and Mysticism,” p. 13).

With our modern critical approach to the biblical text, we cannot dismiss its intended meaning, the peshuto shel mikra, with such daring ease. Let me, therefore, amend the Lurianic metaphor somewhat.

There are six hundred thousand and one faces to the Torah. The one face of peshat is the Torah we share in common. Each of us, in addition, possesses one of the six hundred thousand faces of derash. It is this which makes the Torah a uniquely personal possession. The Torah, then, is at one time an intimate, private possession which belongs to me and no one else, and it is the most accessible teaching possible for it is the common possession of us all.