At the beginning of Parasha “Tazria,” we are given the purity laws for a woman who has just given birth. Depending if it’s a boy or a girl the days of her state as Teme’ah (ritually impure) differ.
What is the meaning of these laws and why is the period after giving birth to a girl twice (2 weeks) that for a boy (7days) , then an additional waiting period until her blood is ritually clean. For girls 66 days and for a boy 33 days.
Then she can go to the Mikvah and is restored to ritual purity, and in the times of the Mishkan and Temples she would bring a burnt offering and a sin offering to be rendered “pure.”
The first principle essential to understanding the laws of ritual purity and impurity is that G-d is life and Jews are all about LIFE, anything that has death creates an impurity. So you must be thinking having a baby is all about life, so why does a woman become “ritually impure” by giving birth to a child?
When a mother gives birth, not only does she go through great danger, although today with medical advances childbirth has become safer, but also she is separated from until now had been part of her own body (a fetus, say the Sages, is “like a limb of the mother”) and which has now become an independent person. If that is so in the case of a boy, it is doubly in the case of a girl- who with G-d’s help, one day will become a source of new life. At one level, these laws signal the detachment of life from life.
At another level, there is something deeper. There is a concept in the Talmud that says: “when one is performing a mitzvah he is exempt from another mitzvah.”
H”S exempts the mother from coming before Him in the place of holiness because a mother who just gave birth is fully engaged in one of the holiest acts of all, which is nurturing and caring for her child. Therefore she doesn’t need to come to the Temple to attach to life, at this moment she is experiencing the holiest of holiest by knowing what it is to give life in the midst of mortality, the greatest kind of love.
Some excerpts taken from “Holiness and Childbirth” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
www.livealittlehigher.com
