Tazria | Threshold Experiences

דַּבֵּר אֶל־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל לֵאמֹר אִשָּׁה כִּי תַזְרִיעַ וְיָלְדָה זָכָר וְטָמְאָה שִׁבְעַת יָמִים כִּימֵי נִדַּת דְּוֺתָהּ תִּטְמָא׃

Speak to the Children of Israel, saying, a woman when she produces-seed (tazria) and bears a male, she remains-tamei seven days

Leviticus 12:2 (Tr. Fox)

The next two Torah portions, Tazria and M’tzorah, present the roles and rituals of the ancient Hebrew priests, who serve as healers and essential public health workers. The people and the priests are intimately involved in rituals and examinations that the priests will perform to determine when a physical and possibly spiritual passage is complete enough so that  it is safe for people to return to the community.

Torah uses beautiful mysterious Hebrew words such as tazria, tamei, tza'ra'at and m’tzorah to convey stages of physically manifested spiritual afflictions, eruptions, and leakages. Produces-seed describes childbirth. Tamei, as the Fox translation above conveys, is a verb and a noun. It is a condition of aliveness signifying boundary-crossing, a threshold experience of the ivri, the Hebrew, whose society is being built in the book of Leviticus.

Tamei are boundary-crossing experiences that cause our skin and other openings, our apparent edges, to soften, erupt and call our attention to feel and allow unfolding experience. Our bodies are opening to reveal what has been unseen and unknown to us. Torah is envisioning a society that makes space for deeply contemplating and experiencing threshold passages.

We also can take these verses of Torah as instructions to begin our self-inquiry, our psycho-spiritual understanding, with the body. What am I feeling in my body? Spend time allowing and feeling how our emotions and experiencing are speaking to us through bodily sensations.

If I speak harshly, for example, as the Hasidic Sefat Emet translates the state described in this week's Torah as metzorah, it is likely because I am feeling anger. Something so important to me has happened that it has erupted into harsh speech. I need time to reflect and meditate, to feel and calm my body, so that I can re-enter society and express what is important to me without the violence of anger.

In Kol Zimra, a Hebrew chant leadership training, Rabbi Shefa Gold said, make the body your ally. This is the beginning of Buddhist mindfulness practice, written in the sutra (torah) known as the Four Establishments of Mindfulness. Establish your mindful concentration in the body, feeling the body while your attention is in the body. Feel the breath in the breath. Make your body your ally in understanding how you are experiencing what is happening in the moment.

This is also a starting point of Nonviolent Communication practice—learning to lead from the body, letting your body communicate feelings and needs. This practice is especially available at the places of what Torah calls tamei, the thresholds and edges of our experiencing. We look deeply inside ourselves to understand the roots of how we experience the present moment. From there we begin to recognize how what other people say and do generate our pain or happiness because they touch what is already deeply important to us.

"Outer experiences" impact whether and how we experience core Needs such as safety, security, dignity, acceptance and love. NVC empowers us to shift from express blaming or shaming to expressing this way: "I understand that I feel the way I feel because of what is life-giving for me, because of what I want more of in the world." I can then communicate how people and systems are affecting me because of the physical, emotional and historical conditions that have formed me. I don't blame or shame you for how your actions affect me. I don't give away my power by making myself a victim of your actions. I reclaim my power when I communicate that my needs and values, not your actions, determine my feelings and reactions.

Humans are meaning-makers. Our mind-consciousness is molded by our history and culture. We have been educated, as NVC founder Marshall Rosenberg said, to label what we feel, where we are, and where we think we are going, in dualities such as  good or bad, unwanted or wanted. An example of this dualistic mind set is the traditional, patriarchal Torah translation of tamei, the state that accompanies most of these physical eruptions, as "impure."

We look deeply to reformulate this. When we contemplate the word “impure,” the meaning shifts. Impure signifies interbeing, interdependence,  everything is mixed. There is a complete blurring of duality and separation. What was inside and hidden is being revealed. What we see, what stops us in our tracks for the first time, is the realization that there was always a seed inside. Tamei means "seed-producing" just as the Buddhist concept of Emptiness means "fertile void." These core life experiences transcend the dualistic concepts of desirable/undesirable that we usually resort to for meaning.

Torah scholar Avivah Zornberg draws on the writing of Primo Levi to illustrate a radical shift from a dualistic way [pure/impure] of ordering the universe:

[T]he so tender and delicate zinc, so yielding to acid which gulps it down in a single mouthful, behaves, however, in a very different fashion when it is very pure: then it obstinately resists the attack. One could draw from this two conflicting philosophical conclusions: the praise of purity, which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of impurity, which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life .... In order ... for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities, in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile.

— Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

In Plum Village, Thich Nhat Hanh's Buddhist monastery in Southern France, daily activities are practiced to advance non dualistic ways of experiencing the habitual. Physical acts like opening and closing doors, going to the toilet and eating, all acts that involve opening and closing, becomes doors to deeper experience. Over the years I have joined in making and hanging contemplative verses in the Plum Village bathroom stalls that say:

Neither pure nor impure.
Neither defiled nor immaculate.
Neither increasing nor decreasing.
These concepts exist only in our minds.
The reality of interbeing is unsurpassed.

A  corollary Jewish practice is reciting the Asher Yatzar blessing of gratitude and praise every time you urinate or defecate into in a toilet. The Asher Yatzar (“who formed”), is a blessing of thanksgiving for the workings of the openings and closings of human body, without which it would be impossible to live and stand before God.

The text of the blessing, in Hebrew and translation, is as follows:

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה’ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, אֲשֶׁר יָצַר אֶת הָאָדָם בְּחָכְמָה, וּבָרָא בוֹ נְקָבִים נְקָבִים חֲלוּלִים חֲלוּלִים: גָּלוּי וְיָדוּעַ לִפְנֵי כִסֵּא כְבוֹדֶךָ, שֶׁאִם יִפָּתֵחַ אֶחָד מֵהֶם, אוֹ יִסָּתֵם אֶחָד מֵהֶם, אִי אֶפְשַׁר לְהִתְקַיֵּם וְלַעֲמוֹד לְפָנֶיךָ אַפִלּוּ שָׁעָה אֶחָת. בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה  ה’, רוֹפֵא כָל בָּשָׂר וּמַפְלִיא לַעֲשׂוֹת

Blessed are You, Breather of Life, Our Form-Creating, Sovereign of the universe, in-forming the earthling with feminine wisdom (chochma) and creating within multiple openings and multiple hollow spaces. It is obvious and known before Your Seat of Honor that if even one of them would be opened, or if even one of them would be sealed, it would be impossible to survive and to stand before You even for one hour. Blessed are You, life-breather, healer of all flesh and wonder worker.

I began this practice in the Old City of Jerusalem, observing my host, Sarah Yehudit Schneider, stopping every time she came out of the bathroom. This is called “observing” in Jewish life. It is an example of the halachic path—walking the way of Torah way—as a mindfulness practice. It is a pause that connects your actions back to the Oneness.

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Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is open
in the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed
within us. And when we die, everything is open again.
Open closed open. That’s all we are.

—Yehuda Amichai (1998), translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld.