Rosh Chodesh Iyar 5773 Dvar Torah

I had the honor of learning much of VaYikra in depth while at Drisha under the tutelage of Tammy Jacobowitz. That year I was pregnant with Gus, learning about marriage (and breastfeeding) in Ktuvot, and learning about the midrashim on Tazria with Tammy. Sefer VaYikra will now always have a special place in my heart.

For Rosh Chodesh Iyar, I'm going to share this thought inspired by Parshat Tazria, which is the first Parsha of the month:

Tazria starts with the following 5 psukim -
א וַיְדַבֵּר יְהוָה, אֶל-מֹשֶׁה לֵּאמֹר.
 ב דַּבֵּר אֶל-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, לֵאמֹר, אִשָּׁה כִּי תַזְרִיעַ, וְיָלְדָה זָכָר--וְטָמְאָה שִׁבְעַת יָמִים, כִּימֵי נִדַּת דְּו‍ֹתָהּ תִּטְמָא.
 ג וּבַיּוֹם, הַשְּׁמִינִי, יִמּוֹל, בְּשַׂר עָרְלָתוֹ.
 ד וּשְׁלֹשִׁים יוֹם וּשְׁלֹשֶׁת יָמִים, תֵּשֵׁב בִּדְמֵי טָהֳרָה; בְּכָל-קֹדֶשׁ לֹא-תִגָּע, וְאֶל-הַמִּקְדָּשׁ לֹא תָבֹא, עַד-מְלֹאת, יְמֵי טָהֳרָהּ.
 ה וְאִם-נְקֵבָה תֵלֵד, וְטָמְאָה שְׁבֻעַיִם כְּנִדָּתָהּ; וְשִׁשִּׁים יוֹם וְשֵׁשֶׁת יָמִים, תֵּשֵׁב עַל-דְּמֵי טָהֳרָה.
1 And the LORD spoke unto Moses, saying:
2 Speak unto the children of Israel, saying: If a woman be inseminated, and bear a male, then she shall be tamei seven days; as in the days of the ilness of her niddah shall she be tamei.
3 And in the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised.
4 And she shall continue in the tahor blood thirty-three days; she shall touch no kadosh thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purification be fulfilled.
 5 But if she bear a female, then she shall be tamei two weeks, as in her niddah state; and she shall continue in the blood of purification sixty-six days.

There's a lot to unpack here. Unfortunately we don't have time for it all. We're going to look at one spcific point - Why does childbirth render a woman טָמְאָה?

It's important to note that Biblically speaking, after the initial 7/14 days, a woman would go to the מקוה and no longer be in the state of niddah. In modern times we are in a niddah state until the postpartum bleeding stops, which is usually 6 weeks after birth, but biblically that state was only for the first 7 or 14 days while the bleeding after was some form of טָהֳרָה. The קֹדֶשׁ she couldn't touch was only in the בית המקדש. The רמב''ם actually suggests (Moreh Nevuchim, 3:47) that the system of people becoming טמא was a method of crowd control for the בית המקדש.

Blood itself does not render a person טמא. There was blood all around the sactrificial area of the בית המקדש , and there was no admonition regarding people who were bleeding from a wound.

So, to go back to Pasuk ג - after 7 days of altered status, a woman was טהור, able to join her husband fully. And on the next day, after the completion of 7 days, there was a public שמחה.

But why was she טמא in the first place? We know that death, or - if you prefer - the negation of life, can create a state of טומאה; hence being טמא after attending a funeral or when we have our period. The negation of life, of potential, of connection to God, changes our status momentarily.

The overly pat answer I received in high school and have heard many times since is that the טומאה comes upon giving birth because a woman can't get pregnant right then and is therefore in an altered state. I hate this answer. It's ridiculous. If that were the calculus, we'd be a niddah most of our cycle and טהור only the few days during which we can get pregnant. And then post-menopausal women would be in a permanent state of טומאה, yet the opposite is true.

In his book 'New Interpretations on the Parsha', R' Yehuda Henkin suggests an alternative that I greatly appreciate (page 94):

The rock on which this explanation founders, however, is childbirth. Why is a woman impure after childbirth? Nothing seems further from death and decay than bringing a child into the world. Even if birth involves an element of illness for the mother, why should that outweigh the emergence of a new being?
The answer, it seems to me, is that not only death and decay are opposed to the idea of God, but birth as well. HaShem does not die, but neither is be born. The flux of human life, birth and death together, is antithetical to God's immutable and eternal nature. Tum'ah represents the waxing as well of the waning of life and has no place in the Sanctuary, the abode of the Eternal. For that reason a woman in childbirth is impure, for nothing is less God-like than the cycle of generation (Dani's note - this would also explain why a man is tamei after sex).
This can explain several of the laws of purity and sacrifices. Why is a woman impure for one week if a boy is born, but two weeks if she gives birth to a girl? Because the female is the more visible link in the reproductive chain.

So... how does this relate to the meaning of Iyar?

Just 2 days ago we commemorated יום השואה, and in 5 days time, we'll be moving from יום הזיכרון to יום העצמות.

Nothing sums up the cycle of modern Jewry's death and birth quite like this one week. It is a week of remembrance, mourning, and distance from daily life. After 7 days, the week culminates in a joyous celebration of our newly reborn land - a public שמחה.

There is no better cycle for this month than אייר. During אייר we count ספירה, which brings with it laws of mourning - we don't cut our hair, we don't listen to live music, we don't go to movies. And then we suspend it all for one day - the 33rd day. And we celebrate.

אייר's duality reflects back the cycle of Jewish loss and Jewish triumph. In this month we embrace our humanity, our very mortality. Our lives cycle up and down, but God is constant - as we experience אייר, we prepare for סיון and the end of the 7-week cycle - we have a public  שבועות ,שמחה, in which we can fully embrace life and קדשים again.