The biblical laws defining which foods the ancient Israelites were permitted or forbidden to eat, found in
Leviticus 11, have led to some 21st Century developments that could not have been imagined in biblical times.
Leviticus 11, have led to some 21st Century developments that could not have been imagined in biblical times.
CHAPTER 2
Impurity Is Kryptonite
One of the biggest rabbinic challenges I’ve ever faced has been trying to come up with ways to teach my contemporary, liberal-minded American congregants about the biblical concepts of ritual purity and impurity in Leviticus. For eight years I had the even greater challenge of trying to teach these concepts to 7th graders preparing for their bar and bat mitzvahs. These are kids whose lives are filled with Facebook, algebra homework, iPhones, texting, YouTube, middle school hormonal earthquakes, and probably a bunch of other stuff I don’t even want to know. I came to think that if I could come up with some basic metaphors and thought exercises that would work with these kids, then I’d probably want to draw on the same images in teaching adults about this aspect of ancient Israelite spirituality that is so foreign to us in the here and now.
My 7th graders were deeply ensconced in the short-attention-span, online world of today’s middle school kids, and few of them lived in homes that were especially traditional in their Jewish ritual practice. So I knew that they had little in their daily lives that I could point to that would prove to be similar to the Levitical notion of purity/impurity. Other than the feeling that a sandwich that falls to the floor for even a few seconds has become “contaminated” and is now too gross to eat, I really wondered whether there was any way to help these kids understand, much less appreciate, how their Israelite ancestors believed that people and objects were constantly infused with one of two fundamental and opposed spiritual energies.1
Leviticus is filled with instructions detailing when a person, animal, or object is tahor (pure) and when it is tamey (impure). Chapter 11 of Leviticus lists which animals are tamey in terms of eating, and then details how plates, cooking vessels, and people who come into contact with tamey foods become impure, as well as what the ritual procedures are for restoring those respective things and persons back to a tahor (pure) status. Chapter 12 describes how giving birth renders a new mother tamey—seven days for a baby boy, fourteen days for a baby girl 2—and then describes the ritual offerings she is to make to complete her restoration to being tahor. Chapters 13 and 14 discuss how priests are to diagnose and implement the rules governing the outbreak of a skin disease called tzara’at in Hebrew (often mistranslated as leprosy). These chapters also discuss the priests’ role in identifying and managing the handling of certain kinds of moldy eruptions in cloth and in the walls of houses. Each of these scenarios involves priests as arbiters of whether or not the person or object in question has become tamey, as well as procedures involved for restoring purity.
Chapter 15 is where things get a bit more personal, as the focus of the text shifts to human genital discharges of various sorts, including semen and menstrual blood. These passages describe the ways that people shift status from tahor (pure) to tamey (impure) as a result of a variety of very private events, including sexual relations, menstruation, menstrual bleeding between periods, abnormal discharges of fluid from the penis, and wet dreams. The status of impurity can also transfer secondarily to objects or other people that have been in contact with the person who becomes tamey due to a genital discharge. The procedures for restoring purity involve some combination of allowing a prescribed amount of time to pass, washing clothes, bathing, and, in some cases, bringing animal offerings to the sanctuary. These are just some examples of how this system of purity and impurity operated in ancient Israel.
Are you still with me or have you checked out? In the modern Western world, we tend to have a hard time with this part of the Hebrew Bible, and many readers of these Levitical passages walk away with a feeling of great distance from the text, wondering how it was possible that people could imagine such “superstitious energy states” and “cosmic cooties” to exist. We tend to put it all down to their ignorance of what we now know about the natural world thanks to the discoveries of science and medicine. We say that they didn’t understand disease, or the biology of procreation, and that this ignorance led them to mistaken ideas that included ritual hocus-pocus to deal with the mysteries of blood, sex, birth, and illness. And, regrettably, in making this critique of our ancestors, we also tend to conclude that there’s no wisdom contained in this ritual-infused aspect of their worldview that we can learn from now. We seldom ask the question as to whether there are some ways in which we have lost the ability to harness certain forms of wisdom or insight that they might have had within the mindset that produced the notions of ritual purity and impurity.
When I’ve taught this material to grown-ups, I’ve found it helpful to ask the class to stop and consider our cultural and historical vantage point as people living in a time that is post-scientific-revolution and post-Enlightenment. It’s really only during the past few centuries, of all the many thousands of years of human civilization, that people tend to look at ideas like tamey and tahor as bizarre, irrational, and remote. For most of human history, communities around the globe have held deep concepts of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the impure. Everywhere you look around the world in pre-modern times, you find priests, shamans, or other holy men or women whose roles have been to facilitate the proper channeling and handling of varieties of these spiritual energies.
Mircea Eliade, the famous (and controversial) twentieth-century scholar of the concepts of the sacred and profane throughout pre-modern cultures, writes that people who lived in ancient societies saw themselves as living in a “sacralized cosmos.”3 Divine energy as well as dark or demonic energies animated all of the world, and proper ritual and ethical behavior were essential for maintaining a close connection to the sacred, which afforded divine closeness and safety from chaotic or evil forces. Eliade wrote that ancient people “tend[ed] to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects. The tendency is perfectly understandable,
because, for primitives as for the [people] of all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equivalent . . . in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being. Sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness . . .”4
In Eliade’s view, our post-Enlightenment period in history is the anomaly in the human experience. Writing in the 1950s about secular Western culture, he argued that not only is modern Western consciousness the first human outlook to view the world as a whole as desacralized and ordinary, but it is also the first human outlook that desires to see the world that way. “It should be said at once that the completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit.”5
Eliade’s work, along with that of other scholars of the pre-modern religions of the world, helps us take a step back and see the culturally and historically constructed nature of our own perspective on the world. These scholars help us realize that what we assume to be normal and natural about the world is truly framed by our context, and that we’re the odd-balls of history in our dismissive attitude towards rituals that deal with spiritual energetic states or seek to restore purity to a person or an object. In American communities today we tend to see churches, synagogues, mosques, and monasteries as sacred places, and in some of our mainstream religious communities, we continue to regard certain ritual objects or clergy persons as sacred as well. But the other 99 percent of the world we see as ordinary, and we like it that way. Eliade helps remind us how new this perspective is, and that it comes with its benefits to humanity as well as its disadvantages.
Quoting Eliade works great with adults, but not so much with those 7th grade students that I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. With them, I’d simply explain that in pre-modern times people understood the world around them very differently that the way we do. In ancient Israel, for instance, they didn’t know that the Earth was a planet revolving around a star, one of billions of stars in one of billions of galaxies. They thought that the domed shape of the sky was, in fact, a material dome covering over the land and the seas, and that surrounding the bubble enclosing our world were primordial waters, and beyond those waters, the abode of God and the heavenly host. Ancient Middle Easterners also thought that thunder, lightning, rain, hail, earthquakes, comets, and eclipses were caused by conscious spirits—gods, or as the Israelites eventually asserted, the one God. Similarly, dreams represented another mystical dimension of reality, an intersection between divine realms and human realms. I would encourage my students to try to empathize, to put themselves in the head-set of ancient people. “They weren’t less intelligent than you,” I would say. “They just had a different set of information about the way the world worked, and those ideas made sense to them the same way the things you believe make sense to you.” And then I would tell them another metaphor for explaining the concepts of tahor (pure) and tamey (impure) that they usually understood right away. . . .
---------------------
All outside sources are properly cited in the book.
My 7th graders were deeply ensconced in the short-attention-span, online world of today’s middle school kids, and few of them lived in homes that were especially traditional in their Jewish ritual practice. So I knew that they had little in their daily lives that I could point to that would prove to be similar to the Levitical notion of purity/impurity. Other than the feeling that a sandwich that falls to the floor for even a few seconds has become “contaminated” and is now too gross to eat, I really wondered whether there was any way to help these kids understand, much less appreciate, how their Israelite ancestors believed that people and objects were constantly infused with one of two fundamental and opposed spiritual energies.1
Leviticus is filled with instructions detailing when a person, animal, or object is tahor (pure) and when it is tamey (impure). Chapter 11 of Leviticus lists which animals are tamey in terms of eating, and then details how plates, cooking vessels, and people who come into contact with tamey foods become impure, as well as what the ritual procedures are for restoring those respective things and persons back to a tahor (pure) status. Chapter 12 describes how giving birth renders a new mother tamey—seven days for a baby boy, fourteen days for a baby girl 2—and then describes the ritual offerings she is to make to complete her restoration to being tahor. Chapters 13 and 14 discuss how priests are to diagnose and implement the rules governing the outbreak of a skin disease called tzara’at in Hebrew (often mistranslated as leprosy). These chapters also discuss the priests’ role in identifying and managing the handling of certain kinds of moldy eruptions in cloth and in the walls of houses. Each of these scenarios involves priests as arbiters of whether or not the person or object in question has become tamey, as well as procedures involved for restoring purity.
Chapter 15 is where things get a bit more personal, as the focus of the text shifts to human genital discharges of various sorts, including semen and menstrual blood. These passages describe the ways that people shift status from tahor (pure) to tamey (impure) as a result of a variety of very private events, including sexual relations, menstruation, menstrual bleeding between periods, abnormal discharges of fluid from the penis, and wet dreams. The status of impurity can also transfer secondarily to objects or other people that have been in contact with the person who becomes tamey due to a genital discharge. The procedures for restoring purity involve some combination of allowing a prescribed amount of time to pass, washing clothes, bathing, and, in some cases, bringing animal offerings to the sanctuary. These are just some examples of how this system of purity and impurity operated in ancient Israel.
Are you still with me or have you checked out? In the modern Western world, we tend to have a hard time with this part of the Hebrew Bible, and many readers of these Levitical passages walk away with a feeling of great distance from the text, wondering how it was possible that people could imagine such “superstitious energy states” and “cosmic cooties” to exist. We tend to put it all down to their ignorance of what we now know about the natural world thanks to the discoveries of science and medicine. We say that they didn’t understand disease, or the biology of procreation, and that this ignorance led them to mistaken ideas that included ritual hocus-pocus to deal with the mysteries of blood, sex, birth, and illness. And, regrettably, in making this critique of our ancestors, we also tend to conclude that there’s no wisdom contained in this ritual-infused aspect of their worldview that we can learn from now. We seldom ask the question as to whether there are some ways in which we have lost the ability to harness certain forms of wisdom or insight that they might have had within the mindset that produced the notions of ritual purity and impurity.
When I’ve taught this material to grown-ups, I’ve found it helpful to ask the class to stop and consider our cultural and historical vantage point as people living in a time that is post-scientific-revolution and post-Enlightenment. It’s really only during the past few centuries, of all the many thousands of years of human civilization, that people tend to look at ideas like tamey and tahor as bizarre, irrational, and remote. For most of human history, communities around the globe have held deep concepts of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the impure. Everywhere you look around the world in pre-modern times, you find priests, shamans, or other holy men or women whose roles have been to facilitate the proper channeling and handling of varieties of these spiritual energies.
Mircea Eliade, the famous (and controversial) twentieth-century scholar of the concepts of the sacred and profane throughout pre-modern cultures, writes that people who lived in ancient societies saw themselves as living in a “sacralized cosmos.”3 Divine energy as well as dark or demonic energies animated all of the world, and proper ritual and ethical behavior were essential for maintaining a close connection to the sacred, which afforded divine closeness and safety from chaotic or evil forces. Eliade wrote that ancient people “tend[ed] to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects. The tendency is perfectly understandable,
because, for primitives as for the [people] of all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equivalent . . . in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being. Sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness . . .”4
In Eliade’s view, our post-Enlightenment period in history is the anomaly in the human experience. Writing in the 1950s about secular Western culture, he argued that not only is modern Western consciousness the first human outlook to view the world as a whole as desacralized and ordinary, but it is also the first human outlook that desires to see the world that way. “It should be said at once that the completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit.”5
Eliade’s work, along with that of other scholars of the pre-modern religions of the world, helps us take a step back and see the culturally and historically constructed nature of our own perspective on the world. These scholars help us realize that what we assume to be normal and natural about the world is truly framed by our context, and that we’re the odd-balls of history in our dismissive attitude towards rituals that deal with spiritual energetic states or seek to restore purity to a person or an object. In American communities today we tend to see churches, synagogues, mosques, and monasteries as sacred places, and in some of our mainstream religious communities, we continue to regard certain ritual objects or clergy persons as sacred as well. But the other 99 percent of the world we see as ordinary, and we like it that way. Eliade helps remind us how new this perspective is, and that it comes with its benefits to humanity as well as its disadvantages.
Quoting Eliade works great with adults, but not so much with those 7th grade students that I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. With them, I’d simply explain that in pre-modern times people understood the world around them very differently that the way we do. In ancient Israel, for instance, they didn’t know that the Earth was a planet revolving around a star, one of billions of stars in one of billions of galaxies. They thought that the domed shape of the sky was, in fact, a material dome covering over the land and the seas, and that surrounding the bubble enclosing our world were primordial waters, and beyond those waters, the abode of God and the heavenly host. Ancient Middle Easterners also thought that thunder, lightning, rain, hail, earthquakes, comets, and eclipses were caused by conscious spirits—gods, or as the Israelites eventually asserted, the one God. Similarly, dreams represented another mystical dimension of reality, an intersection between divine realms and human realms. I would encourage my students to try to empathize, to put themselves in the head-set of ancient people. “They weren’t less intelligent than you,” I would say. “They just had a different set of information about the way the world worked, and those ideas made sense to them the same way the things you believe make sense to you.” And then I would tell them another metaphor for explaining the concepts of tahor (pure) and tamey (impure) that they usually understood right away. . . .
---------------------
All outside sources are properly cited in the book.