Tazria 5774: A Lesson in Gender, Shabbat HaChodesh, March 29, 2014

Arvind Sharma, co-editor of Her Voice, Her Faith, a collection of essays by women speaking about their own faith and religions, writes, 

“To appeal to one’s common humanity is to appeal to something profoundly moving.  However profoundly moving though, it is not unambiguous, for although our common humanity inspires us, it also obscures one fundamental fact about humanity – it’s even split into men and women.  When asked to respond simply as a human being, what if someone asked – as what, as a man or a woman? Of course one can speak with a common voice but is not the same voice.”  

As troubling as we may find its details, the opening eight verses of Parashat Tazria recognize this reality, and perhaps inherent challenge, of human experience.   The reality of gender differences.  These verses an ancient predecessor to Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus.

Parashat Tazria opens with a perplexing passage regarding a new mother’s status of spiritual impurity after childbirth.  The ancient and confounding constructs of impurity, of the states of niddah and t’mei-ah, aside (those are difficult enough on their own), what makes the passage particularly striking is that the length of the period of spiritual impurity following childbirth is dependent upon the gender of the child born.   There is here, in our Shabbat Torah reading, an explicit acknowledgement of gender differences expressed in ritual law. 

         We struggle with the text because it limits its recognition of individual differences solely to gender and then goes on to create rigid expectations based on solely gender.  We struggle with the text because the rituals imposed by Jewish law on women in order for them to rectify these states of impurity are written and imposed entirely by men.  As I reviewed and studied passages of the Talmud’s tractate Niddah, the tractate that deals with women’s states of impurity and the laws regarding how to remedy these states, I was struck by the same feelings of discomfort, violation, anger even, as I feel today when I hear men, or more recently corporations, striving to control women’s bodies and women’s health through legislation.   

         At the same time as the text poses great difficulty, Tazria can, however, serve to remind us – as Arvind Sharma so well articulates -  that while we share the commonality of our humanity, there are also differences between us as individuals, between us as male and female; and, these differences impact how we respond to and interact with the world.   Tazria should challenge us to consider how many of these differences turn into limitations because of the ritual expectations we impose on each other.   Gender still, too often, is a, if not the, primary determinate in too many situations.  Who is deemed the family caregiver? Who the primary wage-earner? What should an employee earn?  Who is given a voice in our society; and, who is actually heard?  To whom do we pay attention?  Whom do we take seriously?
          This week, Gloria Steinem, a prominent figure in the feminist movement, who helped raise awareness to all of these questions at a time when no one asked them,  turned 80.    A frequent speaker on college campuses across the country, Steinem has had the opportunity to observe and interact with many young adults.  She notes, still today, “I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing.”    We may have come a long way, baby, as an old advertisement suggests; but, clearly, we still make limited assumptions based on the categories of gender, assumptions that frequently lead to disparities in power, wealth, and influence.

Leviticus, as a whole, is a difficult read.  Let us be reminded that all of the ritual detail expressed in Leviticus was intended to solidify and strengthen a nascent community as it traveled from a state of enslavement towards a place of promise, to that land imagined to be full of milk and honey.   Even the rituals that were imposed upon women after childbirth were intended to contribute to that structure by offering boundaries between personal space and communal life.   Tazria’s rules remind us to honor and mark the difference between male and female.  Unlike our biblical ancestors, however, we must work to honor these differences not by creating and imposing rigid categories of expectation, not by empowering one by imposing limitations on the other.  Rather, we should work to honor our differences by paying attention to each other, by being flexible and compassionate to the other, and by sharing wealth and power equitably.