Torah Posting: מצרע
There’s not a very clear division between this week’s parashah and last week’s, but such as there is, it is that we now shift to the priestly ritual of purification for one who has צרעת. It is rather elaborate, and also beautiful, and I just want to appreciate this part for how seriously these ancestors of mine took the unity of the physical and the spiritual as well as the responsibility to take care of themselves in those dimensions.
When the priest learns of the case of צרעת, he must go outside the camp to where the (I’m just going to use this word for convenience now) lepers are, and if he sees that the affliction has healed, he shall order two live, pure birds, cedar wood, some wool dyed crimson, and hyssop. Ibn Ezra says that the significance of the cedar and hyssop is that they are the largest and smallest plants, respectively.
The priest shall have one of the birds slaughtered over fresh water in an earthen vessel — and remember from previous parshiyot, one of the defining qualities of an earthen vessel is that it is porous, and so it can absorb impurities and cannot be purified of them. The priest then takes the live bird, the cedar wood, the crimson wool, and the hyssop, and dips them all (yes, including the live bird) in the blood of the bird who was slaughtered. He then sprinkles the blood seven times over the person to be purified and then sets the bird free in the field, as though to carry the impurity away.
Then the leper must wash their clothes, shave off all their hair, and bathe in water. After remaining outside the camp for seven more days, they shave again, wash their clothes and body again, and then they can return. On the eighth day, they are to bring two male lambs and one female lamb, a meal offering, and an oil offering, and bring them to the Tent of Meeting to be offered up by the priest who purified them. The priest follows familiar procedures for slaughtering the animals and anointing his own body and the body of the person being purified — the ridges of the right ears, the right thumbs and big toes, all that. The oil offering is poured onto the left hand, though, so the right hand can be used to anoint with it. The last step is putting that oil, via the left hand, on the anointed person’s shaved head.
Again, as in previous sections, a provision is given for less fancy offerings for those without the means to follow the full procedure. I do enjoy the community care message this offers, but I also can’t help but see these things as a sort of baked in menu for the barbecue restaurant this priest caste is trying to initiate here by channeling all these things into text.
Then there’s a break where God relates something new to Mosheh and Aharon, this time concerning the kind of disease that we also saw in the previous parashah that can afflict non-living materials. Last time, it was mostly concerned with fabrics and such, but here it’s explained that צרעת can corrupt an entire house, live in its walls, and render the whole place impure.
God begins by explaining that this will happen when they enter the land of Kena’an, because they don’t have houses right now; they live in tents. Once they do, though, Mosheh and Aharon need to know that God may choose to inflict those houses with צרעת. When that happens, the homeowner is supposed to tell a priest who then comes to examine it.
Before the priest enters, he is to order it cleared of all people and objects. Then he enters and examines the wall. He’s looking for greenish or reddish streaks that appear to run deep inside the wall. If he sees them, the house is to be closed up for seven days. When the priest returns, if he sees that the plague has spread, the house has to be dismantled. It seems the plague can reside inside the stones, so those have to be pulled out, removed from the city, and cast into an unclean place. The coatings of all the walls must be scraped off and dumped. Then the stones must be replaced with new ones and the walls recoated. If after all that the plague comes back, the whole house has to be torn down, and anyone who enters the house before it is demolished becomes impure until evening.
If replacing the materials fixes the problem, the priest can declare it pure, but first it must be purged with the same ritual as for the person: the two birds, the cedar, the crimson wool, the hyssop, the water in the earthen vessel. The chapter ends by saying this ritual applies to every צרעת, which contemporary translators render in this general case as an “eruptive affliction,” whether on bodies or materials.
Oh, you think we’re done with the yucky stuff now, but we are not.
Chapter 15 introduces the topic of impure discharges from the genitalia. It’s a related subject; we’re not getting into sexual immorality here. Matter-of-factly, if a man has a runny discharge from or blockage in his penis, this renders him impure in a way that is transmissible to his surroundings in the same way צרעת is. His bedding is impure, and anything he sits on is impure. Anyone who touches him or objects rendered impure by him must wash their clothes and bodies and remain impure until evening. If he spits on someone who is pure, that renders them impure. If he touches someone without washing his hands, they are impure. His saddle or means of riding is impure. Anything that was under him is impure, and anyone who touches such things is impure. When the condition clears up, he must wait seven days and then make an offering of two birds at the Tent of Meeting on the eighth day.
When a man ejaculates, he shall bathe and be impure until evening. All absorbent materials that semen touches shall be washed and remain impure until evening. Then it says that a woman who has sex with a man shall bathe and remain impure until evening, in that the discharge that transmits this impurity has touched her.
Two things to say about this:
First, remember Onan? How easy it was for me to demonstrate that it is completely illiterate to interpret that story as being about the capital offense of ejaculating on the ground, and to take this as a prooftext that the Torah forbids ejaculation? Well, here is the Torah saying that ejaculation, regardless of how or where, simply renders a man impure until nightfall in a completely run-of-the-mill way. It also says that both parties are impure until nightfall if the emission happens in sexual intercourse, and lest you are preparing to argue that this is an indication that having sex is some kind of moral problem, I point you to the first commandment in the entire Torah, which is to have sex.
Second, the Torah is about to turn its attention to discharges from a woman’s body that render her impure, as well as anyone who makes contact with her. Many people feel that this section is oppressive to people who menstruate, and it is unquestionable that these teachings have been expressed culturally in forms that are oppressive to people who menstruate. I am not into stigmatizing menstruation. I am also not into stigmatizing ejaculation. I just want to point out here that those two completely normal bodily emissions are about to be treated exactly the same way, in matter-of-fact ways, in the course of a general section about emissions, impurity, and purification, and what that all means, and I hope I have made the case by now that these transmutable states of purity and impurity in the Torah are about conditions of readiness for high-intensity ritual; they are not stigmata that people are punished for. To me, the fact that ejaculation from the male body is considered before menstruation only proves the point that this section is treating menstruation as a normal thing that bodies do, and it is providing ritual ways of marking that and incorporating it into the ritual cycle.
And just to be extra clear: I am not saying that this section is interpreted justly by all Jewish cultures and societies. It may even have been interpreted in horribly sexist ways by the culture that wrote it down here. I just don’t see any basis for understanding it as inherently sexist in the text itself.
Anyhow, the section about menstruation is exactly the same, including the part about its impurity being transmissible to someone who has sex with the menstruating person. Again, I’m around people all the time who say this means the Torah discriminates against the sexual activity of women, but I’m telling you, it just got done saying that the conditions of making contact with semen are exactly the same.
The parashah ends with a warning, which lots of the long explanatory legal sections do, to describe the specific problem the preceding laws are meant to address. God’s warning is quite clear: The problem with impurity is that the people may defile the Mishkan by going there when they are impure. This is a mortal danger. But it’s not about becoming offensive to people. It’s about whether or not a person is ready for ritual, which often they are not. These commandments simply describe what they must do to get back into readiness.
🦠
