Edited and Adapted from Ari’s Grill and Torah on April 27, 2017
There is a lot going on in Parshat Tazria-Metzora, but the most puzzling topic is the very first one. A woman who gives birth must bring a sin offering. Before she does, she is considered ritually impure — for one week if she gives birth to a boy, two weeks if a girl. Only after 33 or 66 days is she permitted to return to the Beit HaMikdash.
The questions practically ask themselves.
What does giving birth have to do with tzara’at — the leprosy and various impurities discussed throughout the rest of these two parshas? Why mix the idea of childbirth, which is a joyous event, with sickness and impurity? And if we are taught that there are three partners in the creation of every human being — God, the father, and the mother — why is the mother singled out for a state of impurity? Where is the father? Why doesn’t he share in this status?
And then there is the deepest question of all. The woman is the one going through the pain. So why penalize her? When you are in pain, you want to get closer to God, not further away. Why is she kept out?
I want to suggest that what the woman goes through after giving birth — the impurity, the distance from the Temple — is not a punishment. It is not because she did something wrong. It is a lesson about life itself.
We, the Jewish people, have been kicked out of country after country. We have wandered. And then, in 1948, we came home. The Jewish people were reborn.
But if anyone thinks that being reborn means everything is suddenly fine — wrong. There is pain that comes along with it. It is not a hunky-dory ride.
This coming week we observe Yom HaZikaron, Memorial Day for our fallen soldiers — and then, immediately after, Yom HaAtzma’ut, Israel Independence Day. How do you switch from grief to celebration? The answer is: you don’t switch. You carry both. Because rebirth is not painless. It never was.
The woman brought out of the Mikdash is not being punished. She is living a reality. And that reality mirrors our own.
Yes — for 2,000 years we were far from God, far from our land, far from Jerusalem. Those who dreamed of returning were considered delusional. It lived in the prayer book, in the text, with no sense of real possibility.
But now we are back. The nation was reborn. And yet, even now, the pain continues. We feel it almost daily — enemies still trying to destroy us, and struggles within ourselves. We have to step back and acknowledge: yes, this is painful. And we can never judge someone who is in the middle of that pain.
There is a time frame to pain. And at the end of it, the woman emerges from her impurity, comes to the Beit HaMikdash, and brings her korban. She celebrates her child’s birth. But during the pain, that moment is very hard to see.
Some of the mefarshim — commentators — suggest that the sin offering she brings is for things she may have said during labor: cursing, or swearing she never wants to be with her husband again. But this explanation is difficult. A korban chatat — a sin offering — is only brought for something done by accident that, if done intentionally, would be punishable by death at the hand of Heaven. It still doesn’t quite fit.
I think the deeper answer is this: during times of pain, we turn inward. We struggle to hold on to our faith. And sometimes we lose a little of it. Nobody is immune — nobody is immune from asking, “Where was God in the Holocaust?” That question comes from pain. And that is exactly what this period represents.
That is why every woman brings a korban chatat. Not because she did something terrible. But because during pain, everyone loses some measure of faith. And anyone who says otherwise is fooling themselves.
After the chatat comes the korban olah — the elevation offering, in which everything goes to God. The message is clear: the pain and the joy, the struggle and the gratitude — all of it belongs to God.
Some of the chatat portions go to the Kohanim, the priests. The olah goes entirely upward. We are happy, and we give it all to God.
People sometimes ask: how can the State of Israel be the beginning of our Redemption when it has so many problems? And it’s true — we have problems. We bring up children, we have fights, we have enemies. But you don’t throw away the baby with the bathwater.
If you truly cry over the men and women who gave their lives for the State of Israel — if you feel in your bones the price they paid so that we could live freely in our land — then when you celebrate on Yom HaAtzma’ut, you can truly celebrate. Not just because you’re happy at the general idea of coming home, but because you understand just how much it cost. Childbirth is painful. Rebirth is painful. The celebration is real — and so is what it took to get there.
The main challenge is not to lose faith. But even if we fall, that doesn’t mean we can’t get back up. The woman who stumbled during her pain — you cannot judge her. I cannot judge someone who walked through the Holocaust and asked where God was. I am not going to judge them.
But there is always hope. And therefore, there is always an end to the pain. And that end is this: we come close to God again. We bring our korbanot. We return to ourselves.
This, I believe, is why the Torah connects childbirth to everything else in these two parshas. The man or woman afflicted with tzara’at is put outside the camp — not as a punishment, but to do a cheshbon nefesh, to look inside, to find what needs correcting. And when it is corrected, they return — and they are closer to God than before.
We see this principle in one of the most striking moments in the Torah. When Aharon HaKohen’s two sons were killed inside the Tabernacle — struck down by the fire of God, when all they wanted was to come closer to Him — Aharon kept silent. He didn’t know how to react. And that silence, that honest bewilderment, was the right response. It showed that we are not the center of everything. It showed that we do not know everything. And from that place, you turn to God.
The reward? The very next verse records God speaking directly to Aharon — not to Moshe, but to Aharon.
In memory and in honor of all those who have fallen over 2,000 years of exile — killed, burned, shot, gassed, beaten — in their honor and in their memory: may we merit to be strong. May we merit to build, to develop, and to continue moving forward in this unbelievably miraculous country called Israel.
You can close your eyes as tight as you want. But for 2,000 years we dreamed of coming home — and we came home. From all four corners of the earth, we came home.
Shabbat Shalom from the beautiful Judean desert.