Parshat Tazria 5768

During a religious school game this past week, I overheard a teacher say firmly to one of our students, "Please take my hand, there are no such thing as cooties."

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, "cooties" refer to those invisible things a boy and girl might accidentally catch if they were to touch one another. Cooties are part of a complicated playground purity classification system, which those of us outside of its bounds may never fully understand. And, while I take no issue with the teacher's wise counsel, her words are ringing in my ears as I study this week's Torah portion, Tazria.

Tazria is all about cooties or, in the biblical language, about those things that can cause a person to become tamei (best translated as "impure"). Tazria describes a series of events or conditions that can make a person tamei; for example, childbirth renders the mother tamei and certain skin diseases cause the afflicted to be tamei.

In our contemporary setting, many of us take issue with this system of purity and impurity. The idea of labeling new mothers as tamei, not to mention those with certain skin diseases, feels discriminatory, foreign, and potentially cruel. Why, then, would our ancestors have embraced such classifications and what role did they play in their society?

Leviticus scholar Mary Douglas suggests that the categories of tamei (impure) and its counterpart tahor (pure) not only reflect ancient boundaries, but also give voice to our ancestors' very real fears about that which they didn't understand. Biblical scholar Howard Eilberg-Schwartz explains that, for our ancestors, people or things that were labeled tamei often represented missed opportunities for life or even symbolized death itself. By labeling things tamei, Leviticus seeks to apply some sort of human control over those aspects of life our ancestors feared most, that which they could not control.

And this is why I call Tazria the "cooties" Torah portion. Young people create concepts of cooties to assert boundaries between themselves and those they don't understand. As contemporary Reform Jewish adults, I recognize that most of us don't much worry about whether things are tamei, tahor, or full of cooties. However, I think we can all agree that our world is filled with plenty of classifications that attempt to assert order in chaos or to define that which seems inexplicable. This is why we have labels and classifications, to organize and explain our world.

Tazria reminds us that while these classifications can be constructive tools for organizing society and asserting a sense of control in areas of chaos, they also have the potential to become destructive. Sometimes classification systems make us feel safer, but they can also distance us from that which is "other" than us or from those who we do not understand. This is why we, as adults, must move beyond the classifications we use, and engage in real dialogue, careful examination, and ongoing study. It is only when we question the labels we use that we ensure a sense of holiness in our world. On this Shabbat, let us consider carefully the words we use and the labels we apply. How do these labels help us and how do they hurt us? Do they bring a sense of holiness to ourselves and to our community? Let us continue both to define and to refine the world around us.