#tazria

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Etymologically, translation is the act of carrying (latio) something across (trans). Typically, this means carrying the meaning of a text from one language to another, but sometimes it means carrying the literal words themselves. You’ll see this all the time with Biblical translations, especially when it comes to the book of Leviticus. The book is full of technical terms that have no exact equivalent in English, and many translators opt to transliterate the Hebrew rather than relying on an imperfect parallel.

One of these technical terms is the linchpin of this week’s double portion. These four chapters all revolve around sources of ritual contamination and detail specific rituals to render people and things טָהוֹר | tahor | “clean/pure”.

For many, that’s a fraught translation. I’ve encountered many Jews who, when commenting on these passages, assert that later Christian interpretations have freighted ritual cleanliness (the kind of cleanliness meant by tahor) with a moral weight that it doesn’t have in the Hebrew. The claim is that clean/dirty [a] in the Bible really refer to readiness to enter the sanctuary complex and not to any kind of sin or state of ethical goodness or badness.

[a] Or “unclean” or “impure”. This is a place where I actually think English is better able to express the concise antonymity than Hebrew is. The English prefixes im- and un- convey a kind of exact mirroring of the word they apply to that has no equivalent in Biblical Hebrew. The opposite of tahor is טָמֵא | tamei, which comes from an unrelated linguistic root (hence the choice of “dirty” in the main text — one could argue that that’s less technical than something like “unclean”, but tamei is also used in rather colloquial ways elsewhere in Tanakh, so I don’t think it’s necessarily inapt).

There’s a lot to this argument, altho I think it can be overstated. Certainly, moldy fabric is handled in these passages amorally — sometimes fabric just gets mold on it, and that’s not because anyone sinned, it’s just a morally neutral thing that happens sometimes. And indeed, in the strongest cases, it can actually be a mitzvah to become ritually dirty: Having reproductive sex and burying the dead both lead to ritual dirtiness, yet both are central mitzvot.

And yet it’s not quite so simple as that. The affliction of tzará’at is a major barrier to ritual cleanliness, and it’s traditionally understood to be a direct punishment from G-d for specific sins. Even if Leviticus understands ritual cleanliness and dirt in narrow, technical ways, prophets like Yəḥezqeil (himself very concerned with the ritual senses of cleanliness!) deploy these terms freely in emphatically moral contexts (for example Yəḥezqeil 22:4–5 decries the “dirty-named” who stand guilty of, among other things, murder) — when Psalm 51:11–12 begs G-d to “wipe away all my immorality!/Make me a clean heart”, the issue clearly goes far beyond technical fitness to enter the Temple complex.

This is sometimes presented as an alien concept to contemporary Jews, but it doesn’t seem so strange to me. When I ask my husband if the dishwasher is clean or dirty, I’m not inquiring about the moral quality of our silverware. But if I want to know whether a politician in a bribery scandal is clean or dirty, moral opprobrium has certainly entered the picture. (And, just to round things out, there are times when dirtiness is good, just as Biblical ritual dirtiness can be the result of a laudable act: If I come home from a ceramics class and say that I didn’t have a chance to get my hands dirty, I’m almost certainly bitterly disappointed.)

Indeed, I think the similarities here run even deeper than this. One of the key differences between cleanness and dirtiness is that the latter is contagious while the former is not. If you have some of the severer kinds of ritual dirt, that ritual dirtiness can hop from you to someone else, sometimes if they even so much as touch something you sat on. This is a familiar idea.

It’s familiar in the prosaically literal sense, of course (take off your shoes when you come in the house; cover your mouth when you sneeze; wash your hands after going to the bathroom), but even beyond actual dirt and germs, I find it’s an idea that’s alive and kicking.

I’ve been involved in a number of activist spaces, and have spent an amount of time studying activist movements from years past. Again and again, I find the same tension cropping up: the tension between those who prefer to work for change within existing systems of power and those who prefer to pursue change outside those systems. I’m not interested in adjudicating between these two approaches here — as with most things of this ilk, I think generalizations are of limited use here and that each individual circumstance has to be weighed on its own merits — but I do want to note a common (if sometimes unexpressed) sense of contagion lurking behind the arguments this tension sometimes produces.

Specifically, I think arguments against working within established power structures sometimes cross a line from “I think this is an ineffective strategy for achieving our ends” to “I think working within existing power structures makes us complicit in the harm they do”. Doubtless, this is sometimes correct. But it has a tendency to spread: Group A works with the establishment, so they’re tainted by it; activist B volunteers a lot with group A and so shares in their pro-establishment nonsense; organizer C is close friends with activist B and is similarly untrustworthy — and on and on, as far as one is willing to trace out the connections. The only way to avoid contamination is to cut ties early and often; only then will we be safe. Only then will we stay clean.

Clean here, of course, goes well beyond the technical. We are in the realm of morals. And, of course, who doesn’t want to be righteous? Does anyone of good will want to be responsible for causing harm?

I return to the ritual dirtiness of childbirth. I’ve read a fair amount of analytic hemming and hawing over why childbirth, the creation of new life, should be considered a source of ritual dirt when the other biggest sources — dead bodies and deathly-white skin conditions — are so strongly associated with death, but there doesn’t seem to be much mystery there to me. The lack of records makes the precise precise rate of death in childbirth in the ancient world difficult to determine, but I’ve seen estimates that about one in every forty pregnancies may have ended in the death of the person giving birth [b]. Even if the true rate was half that, it doesn’t seem hard to make a conceptual link between pregnancy and death.

[b] This number comes from Donald Todman’s “Childbirth in Ancient Rome”, published in the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in March of 2007. He gives the number as 25 in 1,000 based on much more recent data from rural England; I’ve reduced the fraction. For comparison, the CDC gives the rate in the USA as a little less than 20 in 100,000 (1 in 5,000) in 2023.

But there’s a subtler association here, too. One generation comes, and another goes. Children grow up to be the adults in the room, and the adults who were around when they were kids die off. Bringing a new generation into the world means coming face-to-face with the people who will one day, if it all works out, take your place. Life and death are not so very far removed.

Building a new world, too, means the death of the old one. There’s no reason to think that won’t get messy, even dirty. Is it possible to do such work while staying scrupulously clean?

There are an awful lot of ardent transphobes out there. I think the world would be a better place if there were fewer. In spite of their commitment to their beliefs, it does sometimes happen that they change, get peeled away from their hate movement, and become — even if only in a small, quiet, partial way — part of the movement for trans liberation. They seldom do this on their own; often this change requires the intervention of others close to them. It’s hard to do that interventive work, and there’s no guarantee of success. I am ill equipped to do it, but I’m glad that some people out there are.

Necessarily, the work of pulling people out of that abyss requires consorting with bigots. Not imperfect allies, but people who are really committed to destructive harm. Again we come back to the ambiguity of tahor, the ambiguity of ritual cleanliness. For all that being clean may be praised, there are times where it’s laudable to get down and dirty. The world does not change without mess.

The ancient Israelites had rituals to clean themselves of this metaphorical dirt. We read about them at length this week. The specifics in Leviticus don’t much appeal to me — when I feel morally compromised by imperfect political choices, sprinkling me with the blood of a dead bird would make me feel exactly the opposite of better — but I overflow with the need they’re responding to. What rituals do we have to wash away this spiritual dirt? When we have gotten our hands well and truly dirty with the — necessary! vital! life-affirming! — messy, imperfect work of changing the world, what repairs the breach we feel between us and our higher ideals? With no ablution available, I fear the miasma can only intensify, the contagion only spread. Once we’ve gone down into the mire, how can we come up again?