Teaching Love

This week’s Torah portion is Tazria, which means, conceives. It speaks about a person’s state of ritual contamination and their subsequent purification: from childbirth, from skin rashes and skin disease, from burns, and also contains instructions about the contamination of clothing from mold and fungus.
At the beginning of the portion there is a puzzling section which speaks about the difference between the birth of a male child and the birth of a female child. The mother of a male is impure, for ritual purposes, for 7 days. For a female birth, the duration is 14 days. Then the mother is said to remain in the blood of her purity for 33 days for a male child and 66 days for a female child. Afterwards, the mother is instructed to bring a sin offering and an elevation offering to God.
Most of our Torah commentary was written in pre-scientific times, when the function of menstruation and bleeding in women was not well understood. So there is a great opportunity for modern and enlightened commentary on such a seemingly sexist part of the Torah. As with the Kosher laws, the intent of this section cannot be primarily about health, although health issues undoubtedly play a role. It is necessary and good for a mother to be able to rest after a birth and not be obligated to appear at the synagogue; or, in those times, to bring sacrifices to God. Rabbi D.Z. Hoffman has written that a mother should normally be considered ritually impure: that is: exempt from participating in ritual worship, for 14 days, but the Torah allows a mother to be ritually pure for a male sooner than 14 days, so that she can participate in her son’s Bris.
But what could “remaining in the blood of her purity” 33 days for a male versus the 66 days for a female be about? And shouldn’t the Torah read, the days of her impurity? If she is impure for 7 or 14 days, and then pure, what is this special time of purity about? Why should it be set aside? The time a new mother spends with her infant goes by in a blur: feedings, changing and dressing the baby, but mostly, holding, reassuring, and loving the child. And this, I believe, is the crux of what the Torah is teaching us. Erich Fromm, who studied Talmud and Torah, writes in his famous book, The Art of Loving, that love is something that can be taught. This is precisely what a mother does: she loves her baby and in so doing, teaches her child how to love; how to be a human being who knows how to love and can give it and receive it.
The difference between how a male was valued in ancient society versus how a female was valued may be a clue as to why the mother was allotted more time with her daughter. I say, allotted, because the phrase, “dwelling in the blood of her purity,” has a mystical ring to it, as if it is a special gift from God. In the Women’s Torah Commentary, Rabbi Helaine Ettinger quotes a Yiddish torah Commentary, Tzena Urena, as relating the state of a new mother to the state of a mourner, in that both are in an emotionally vulnerable state. They are dwelling in purity because their emotional state is, for the mourner, wholly dedicated to the memory of the deceased, and in the heart of the mother, wholly dedicated to the baby; and they are for that reason, freed from many obligations. A new Mother is vulnerable: tired, frequently in pain, and yet entrusted by God to perform one of the most important acts a person can do: teach another human being about caring, about compassion, about reliability, about acceptance, and about love. Perhaps the male child, at that time in history, would have received a tremendous outpouring of acceptance and affirmation by his parents and relatives, certainly by the greater society. But what of the female child? She is given twice as long to bond with her mother: 66 days; to learn how to love and be loved, possibly because the society would not have valued her as highly, but also, possibly because it will be she - this female baby - who will be entrusted with teaching the next generation how to love. Love, we feel, is terribly important, but it’s sometimes difficult to articulate why. If we feel unloved, we are miserable, lonely, feeling abandoned. But also, love as a skill, enables us to draw closer to God and experience the blessings that God has created for us. Love is truly the spiritual currency of the Universe. By learning love from our parents, we enlarge our loving circle to encompass other family members, friends, lovers or spouses, perhaps children, and finally, members of the community. We are also urged, in the V’ahavta, to love God, and in Kedoshim, to love our neighbors as ourselves. There is truly nothing else that the Torah can teach us. The love our mothers taught us is vital to our being able to function happily in this world. Learning how to love is so important, so precious and so vital to our well being that God has mandated a special time for mothers to teach it and babies to learn it. If we have learned it well, we can bring God’s blessings to others and to ourselves. If we have never been taught it, or taught it imperfectly, we can heal ourselves by giving unconditionally to others that which we ourselves needed but never received. Erich Fromm wrote: “Love is an act of faith. Whoever is of little faith is also of little love” May the love we give increase well being and blessing in the world, healing us, healing our relationship with God and with each other.