Is Tumah a Bad Thing?

This dvar Torah was written for Halachic Left’s weekly dvar torah series! I am republishing it here in full for paid subscribers!

Acharei-Mot and Kedoshim, contrary to earlier parshiyot in Vayikra, seem to believe that tumah is a problem. While earlier in Vayikra, tumah seems to be a state that is morally neutral but must be resolved in order to engage with certain sanctified objects and areas, in our parshiyot, tumah is a condemnation, for example:

וּשְׁמַרְתֶּ֣ם אֶת־מִשְׁמַרְתִּ֗י לְבִלְתִּ֨י עֲשׂ֜וֹת מֵחֻקּ֤וֹת הַתּֽוֹעֵבֹת֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר נַעֲשׂ֣וּ לִפְנֵיכֶ֔ם וְלֹ֥א תִֽטַּמְּא֖וּ בָּהֶ֑ם אֲנִ֖י ה אֱלֹ-הֵיכֶֽם׃

You shall keep My charge not to engage in any of the abhorrent practices that were carried on before you, and you shall not defile yourselves through them: I ה am your God.

Vayikra 18:30

How are we to square the tumah/tahara discourses of Tazria-Metzora, which treat tumah so matter-of-factly, as a set of rules around contact with dead bodies, creepy-crawly things, and assorted bodily fluids and functions, with this juxtaposition of tumah with to’eva, abomination?

My teacher R. Dr. Michael Rosenberg, summarizes the consensus of Biblical scholars as: “we find two distinct kinds of impurity, one fundamentally ‘ritual,’ and the other essentially ‘moral,’ in biblical literature.” Summarizing Klawans, R. Michael writes that:

Ritual impurity is generally unavoidable, contagious, not sinful, and temporary. Moral impurity, by contrast, is volitional and not transmitted by means of contact from one person or object to another; it is a consequence of sin, and more or less permanent. The effects of these two kinds of impurity are also distinct. Ritual impurity “affects the ritual status of persons stricken by it.” It leads to the defilement of people and objects, limiting their interaction with those things defined as sacred. Moral impurity, on the other hand, leads to the defilement not only of the sinner, but also of the sanctuary and the land (not via direct contact but rather, in an automatic sense), and, eventually, to the departing of the divine presence and exile.

But in our parshiyot, we find a moment of blending between these two separable concepts of tumah. Discussing niddah, Vayikra 20:18 reads:

וְאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר־יִשְׁכַּב אֶת־אִשָּׁה דָּוָה וְגִלָּה אֶת־עֶרְוָתָהּ אֶת־מְקֹרָהּ הֶעֱרָה וְהִוא גִּלְּתָה אֶת־מְקוֹר דָּמֶיהָ וְנִכְרְתוּ שְׁנֵיהֶם מִקֶּרֶב עַמָּם׃

If a man lies with a woman during her menstrual condition and uncovers her nakedness, he has laid bare her flow and she has exposed her blood flow; both of them shall be cut off from among their people.

Here we have a messy pasuk linguistically but a clear sexual prohibition: unlike in Tazria-Metzora, where niddah is all about ritual tumah, here, niddah is about a restriction on sex.

But Vayikra 18:19 places us somewhere between these two frameworks of niddah as ritual versus niddah as moral.

וְאֶל־אִשָּׁה בְּנִדַּת טֻמְאָתָהּ לֹא תִקְרַב לְגַלּוֹת עֶרְוָתָהּ׃

Do not come near a woman during her menstrual period of impurity to uncover her nakedness.

Noticing the differences between these two moments in our parshiyot, R. Michael writes:

Lev 18:19 is a sort of midway point between Leviticus 15 and Leviticus 20, or better, a conflation of the two.While Lev 15:24 addresses sexual intercourse during menstruation in the context of ritual impurity, and Lev 20:19 considers it under the legal rubric of prohibition, Lev 18:19 expresses a proscription, the violation of which generates prohibition-based impurity, using language lifted from the context of ritual impurity….While Lev 20:18, like Leviticus 15, reflects a strict compartmentalization between impurity and prohibition, with the former dealing with prohibition and the latter considering only impurity concerns, Lev 18:19 blurs the boundary between these two legal discourses.

How can we make meaning of niddah as a practice that exists at the locus of tumah as a ritual, technical concern, and tumah as a moral category?

i took this photo of some red cafe bathroom tiles with the thought “this will be great as an image for a substack post about niddah”

Dr. Mira Balberg argues that in the shift from the Bible to the Mishnah, the rabbis transform the contraction of impurity from a moment – eg, the time at which one touches a corpse – to an ongoing process in which awareness of one’s status in this system at all times is key. Purity becomes all about attempting to control an inevitably porous body by paying constant attention to it. In a sense, this is a conflation itself of ritual tumah with human will and discipline and therefore moral tumah.

But some bodyminds are less able to be disciplined: Balberg asserts that, influenced by Greek medical thought, the rabbis saw women as less capable of the mental discipline required to pursue purity in a way that was parallel to a menstruating person’s inability to control the “leakiness” of a body that bleeds.

The idealization of the impermeable body parallels the early Zionist embrace of Max Nordau’s Muskeljudentum, in which control over the strong body is at odds with the weak, feminine, diaspora Jew who does not sufficiently control his own body. This has also often been applied to the “national body,” insisting that safety can only come from impenetrable and violently enforced borders. We see – and I hesitate to say more and more, but what else is there to say as the Israeli government escalates its unyielding assault on Gaza – an insistence that only the cleanest distinctions, the firmest borders, can yield “holiness” in the form of national coherence and safety. This is discursive, harming those who speak against Israel’s actions, but of infinitely more importance are the material impacts, the children without parents, those burned alive in tents, the thousands of names and faces we encounter in the news and who don’t make it to the news.