The Circumcision Effect
Parashat Tazria deals with two subjects: the purification procedures to be followed by a mother after childbirth, and issues arising from certain skin conditions. The provisions regarding childbirth occupy Chapter 12 of Leviticus which, with only eight verses, is the shortest Chapter in the Torah. It is also one of the most difficult to understand and, to the modern sensibilities, one of the most difficult to accept, because it seems misogynistic on its face.
After a woman gives birth, she is considered ritually unclean and must bring a sacrifice at the end of a stated period of uncleanness. The character of the required sacrifice is one issue that is difficult to explain, but it is not the most difficult. The provision that creates the biggest problem is that the periods of uncleanness differ depending on the gender of the child.
If a boy is born, the mother is considered ritually impure for seven days. On the eighth day the boy is to be circumcised. The mother remains ritually impure for another thirty-three days, after which she brings the required sacrifice. So, her period of uncleanness is a total of forty days.
If a girl is born, the mother’s initial state of ritual impurity is fourteen days, and that period is then extended by sixty-six days, for a total of eighty days. At the end of eighty days the mother brings the required sacrifice.
The problem is obvious: why should giving birth to a female child result in a state of ritual impurity for eighty days, when the period of uncleanness after the birth of a male is only half that number?
Some of the solutions proposed in classical commentary reflect an ignorance of biology. For example, one suggestion was that it takes forty days for a male fetus to become fully formed in the womb, but twice that for a female, so doubling the duration of impurity for the female just maintains the ratio. One reason proposed for that more rapid development is that males generate more heat during development than females. Another suggestion is that gestation of the female affects the womb differently than that of a male in a way that requires a longer period of cleansing after birth. Another view is that a woman typically feels the movement of a boy child after forty days, but a girl child doesn’t begin to move for twice that long. None of those, of course, are true.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch suggests that the answer might lie in the provision of Lev 12:3 that the male child be circumcised on the eighth day. That seems to be an unnecessary provision since the command to circumcise on the eighth day had already been given in Genesis 17:12. Why is the repetition required here?
Hirsch suggests that it might teach us that there are really two periods of impurity: one for the mother and one for the child. The period attributed to the mother herself is forty days. The period attributable to the female child is also forty days. But the act of circumcision effectively negates any period of impurity attributable to a male child.
Hirsch points us in the right direction, but I would look more closely at the context.
The mother’s ritual impurity after childbirth is specifically likened to the impurity created by menstruation, and the procedures involved in purification there are directly associated with bleeding and the appearance or absence of blood. It is the blood of childbirth that creates the association between normal monthly impurity and the subject of Tazria. If the event of circumcision is interjected, apparently unnecessarily, I doubt that it is only the gender of the child that acts to truncate the period of the mother’s impurity. It could be that the circumcision itself, as an event of bloodletting, acts to change the duration.
It might be that the blood of the male child “atones” for a portion of the impurity. That approach views the blood of the child in a kind of homeopathic sense. A small dose of the substance that creates impurity actually relieves it, in part. That would be something like the paradox of the red heifer. There, the creation of the substance that cures impurity in others, actually creates impurity in the one who prepares it.
That idea has its own problems, of course. What happens to the durations in the event the circumcision is delayed, for example. But I will leave that for another time. I think we can say two things with confidence: the idea that the differences in duration relate to differences in gestation can be discarded; and the answer very likely lies in the issue of circumcision.