Efrat, Israel – “Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If a woman gives birth to a male child, then she shall be unclean seven days….” (Lev. 12:2).

Not surprisingly, the occasion of childbirth is so momentous that the Torah in this week’s portion of Tazria commands sacrifices to be brought after the birth.   But what does surprise many people is that the Torah distinguishes, seemingly arbitrarily, between the birth of a male and a female.

If it’s a boy, the mother brings the sacrifice after waiting 40 days, the first seven days in a state of impurity (tumah), followed by 33 days of purity (tahara). And if it’s a girl, the waiting period for bringing the sacrifice is eighty days, divided into fourteen days of impurity and sixty-six days of purity.

The first question to be asked is why the Torah stresses the sex of the child in regard to the mother’s state of being. Is there any record, be it scientific or folklore, that the process of giving birth to a male is different from giving birth to a female, and that the mother feels or experiences something different depending on the child’s sex?  Indeed, some might even accuse the Torah of patriarchal prejudice in telling the mother to wait one amount of time for the male and a different amount for the female.

There is, however, a more fundamental question. Regardless as to whether the period is seven days for a boy and fourteen days for a girl, why should the woman be tamei –ritually impure—at all? Indeed, what is tumah all about? How, and why, does tumah, bibilical ritual impurity, come into existence?

Conceptually, states of impurity treated in the Bible have something to do with the opposite of life –death.  Both life and death are mysteries, but the Torah wants us to “choose life,” and views the totality of life as good (Genesis 1). Hence anything that mitigates against life and expresses death is declared tamei, ritually impure, the severest form of such impurity being a human corpse. 

Not only death itself, but even the unfulfilled potential for life also creates tumah. This is the source for the tumah of a woman’s monthly menstrual cycle.  Every month the egg produced in a woman’s body is ready for fertilization, the birth of new life. If this process doesn’t take place, the blood vessels that would have nurtured the fetus burst, resulting in the monthly flow.  Had she become pregnant, her blood would be nurturing the new life growing inside the womb. The appearance of menstrual blood means that the potential for new life was not fulfilled, an indirect encounter with death.

For one to return to a state of purity after the appearance of menstrual blood, one must completely immerse oneself in a mikvah, a pool of water collected from rainwater or a well, as opposed to a bath, water being the symbol for life itself: the mikvah waters are Biblically called “living waters” (mayim hayim).

Now our earlier question is intensified. Why does the Torah speak of tumah in the context of childbirth? Why isn’t it conceivable that the creation of new life should result exclusively in tahara, purity, with no reference to tumah at all?

The fact is that childbirth is the moment when death and life come together.  I would like to suggest that the mother’s impurity comes from the fact that every woman who gives birth has a serious brush with death.  During labor, the suffering may become so intense that the mother actually believes she is about to die.  If something does go medically wrong, any doctor will testify that all of nature converges to save the child even at the expense of the mother.  It wasn’t all that long ago that the greatest cause of death among women was childbirth.  In fact, a woman who gives birth is required to recite birchat hagomel (the blessing of the thanksgiving) in the presence of a quorum in the synagogue, the same blessing said after successful encounter with death.

But since the act of childbirth was only a brush with death --mother and child emerging intact- the days of purity far outweigh the days of impurity, in a ratio of either 7 to 33 for a boy, or 14 to 66 for a girl, the days of impurity doubled for a girl because it is the female physiology in which the death-life drama is played out.

This juxtaposition between death and life is not at all rare. The two come together, for example, at the “binding of Isaac,” demonstrating that only one who is willing to sacrifice his life for a higher ideal actually lives a meaningful life. In Israel, where we’ll soon be celebrating the 60th year of the state’s re-establishment, the juxtaposition life and death is demonstrated each year in the annual calendar, Yom Hazikaron, the Memorial Day for the soldiers who fell in Israel’s battles for existence, followed immediately by Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day.

Emerging from the encounter with the death of Yom Hazikaron, Yom  Haatzmaut expresses that the painful birth –and existence—of Israel is the result of the continued sacrifices of the soldiers. The virtual contiguous placement of Yom Hazikaron (brush with death and destruction) and Yom Ha’azmaut (the birth of the state of Israel) parallels the Torah’s understanding of childbirth in our portion. Tazria does not only deal with the birth of a child, but it leaves us with an understanding of a relationship between a brush with death and the ultimate gift of life.  We come to learn that just as death and life are intimately, painfully and mysteriously connected, so too the states of purity and impurity exist in an eternal dialogue.