Voices of WRJ: Tazria-M'tzora

Ten years ago I became a bat mitzvah, and I read from M'tzora. I still give the same summary of the parashah that I gave then: it tells us how to clean lepers of leprosy, how to clean houses of mold, and clean women when they menstruate (a ritual more commonly known as the mikvah). This year, we read Tazria and M'tzora together—Tazria adds how to clean women after childbirth and begins the remarks on leprosy. People's eyes still widen as I tell them this. "But that's the worst one of the year!" they exclaim. I cannot disagree. The Torah: A Women's Commentary, along with whatever translation I read back then, emphasizes the treatment of lepers, moldy houses, menstruating women, and new mothers as 'ritual purification.' Certainly, as presented, that is the tie that binds these acts together. But that was never what struck me about this portion. Reading M'tzora, all I could see was exile. The lepers and the menstruating must leave their homes and molded homes must be left. Of course, the exile is considered to be for the 'Greater Good.' We can see that the lepers are contagious; we don't want the mold to spread; the mikvah is more like a spa, anyway. I'm not sure that I can disagree with any of these points;  after all, we continue to isolate our ill in hospitals so that others don't get sick; we sometimes have to leave our homes when they are not safe; and the mikvah is less relevant to non-Orthodox Jews. In my original d'var I wrote about the parallels between the biblical treatment of lepers and the treatment of gay and bisexual men in the 1980s, when an unknown disease was killing their community en masse. I thought again of M'tzorah as I watched the state of Maine place a woman who did not have Ebola under mandatory house arrest. Perhaps this exile is for the greater good, but it leads directly to the criminalization and vilification of otherwise innocent populations. Gay and bisexual men still cannot donate blood unless they commit to a year of celibacy. How has Ebola changed our perception of West Africans? And in the same breath, the Torah discusses the healthy, normal cycles of women and insists that those women need to be "purified" or made "clean." Biblical euphemism or not, the context does perpetuate shame in young girls and their vilification by the general public. We read Tazria and M'tzora every year, and every year kids in the throes of puberty read this parashah at their bat or bar mitzvah. At 12-going-on-13 I had not yet gotten my period and this was a source of great anxiety. I certainly was not going to write about the mikvah for my d'var, and have to read in front of my family and friends and classmates. Women are not wholly unequal in Judaism. It is true that women, thanks to WRJ, can be ordained as Rabbis in the majority of Jewish congregations and are visible leaders in many parts of the Reform Movement. Jewish feminist women continue to work hard to reclaim the mikvah. But, as Reform Jews for whom the mikvah is largely antiquated, our work is still not done: every year, as we read the Torah, we must loudly question when it calls women "unclean" or when it fails to represent women as equal to or as capable as men. We must continue to question when it vilifies other innocent populations—just as WRJ did in 1965, when we led the Reform Movement in demanding an end to the criminalization of homosexuality. We must make up for the lack of women's representation in Biblical stories by leading our communities now, in all aspects of religious life. And we can; after all, we are Stronger Together.