The Pshat Heard 'Round the World

What is one to do with all this skin disease? Parashat Tazria, the locus classicus for tzara’at (usually, but very probably inaccurately, translated as “leprosy”), a disease that could cover the entire body with repulsive, oozing, hairy and perhaps disfiguring growths, pustules, welts etc. And not content to invoke misery upon the body of the sufferer, tzara’at could strike clothing and house, systematically rendering impure in the extreme every “container” within which a life might take refuge. So it is more than a bit bizarre that the parashah opens with the laws of impurity of a birthing mother. “When a woman becomes fertile and bears a male…” Is there anything sweeter, more pure , than a newborn baby? The midrash in Vayikra Rabbah expresses amazement at the phenomenon: The mother is an av hatum’ah , capable of rendering impure other humans and vessels, yet the baby whose emergence invokes this impurity, is as pure as, well, the day he is born. That image, howeve...

The question everyone asks on the beginning of Parashat Tazria is: What does brit milah have to do with everything else going on here? We are in the midst of elaborating the laws of tum'ah and taharah (ritual impurity and purity), moving from the laws which regulate the tum'ah of animals to the laws which govern the tum'ah of humans, and there it is: "A woman, when she conceives and bears a male child, then she shall be impure for seven days, as the days of her menstrual separation shall she be impure; and on the seventh day shall his foreskin be circumcised; and thirty-three days shall she sit with her blood of purity, no holy offerings shall she touch, nor shall she enter the holy sanctuary until the completion of the days of her purification." Circumcision has nothing to do with tum'ah or taharah (Rabbi Akiva interprets that one who "separates from the foreskin is as one who separates from the dead, but, hey, this is the PSHAT heard 'round the wo...