What makes an item tamei (ritually impure)? The Torah answers this question at great length from a technical perspective, but why conceptually did Hashem deem certain items tamei and others ritually pure, tahor?
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch explains that tumah is associated with bondage, with lack of freedom. Judaism, meanwhile, rests on the very opposite basis: freedom. If man doesn’t possess free will, he can’t be held accountable for his actions. If man is a slave to forces beyond his control – if he is victim of his past, his environment, or his “nature” – he is essentially an animal and cannot be expected to act properly.
But G-d does expect him to act properly. Unlike animals, plants, or anything else in this world, man is morally free. And yet, certain items (e.g., a human corpse) or situations (e.g., fluids unavoidably escaping one’s body) might lead a person to believe that he too is essentially a physical being subject to the universe’s inexorable physical laws. That’s why tumah is associated with these items and situations.
And that’s why even a woman who gives birth, of all people, become tamei. Why should she be tamei? Isn’t giving birth to a child a glorious occasion? Indeed, it is. But conceiving and giving birth “rest on physiological, animal procedures which, more or less belong to the physical unfree side of human beings,” writes Rav Hirsch. So “the fact must be established that, in spite of this, once he is born, man is a morally free agent.” (That’s also why circumcision, milah, is performed – to impress upon man that he isn’t a slave to his physical urges.)
And the “mother herself, under the fresh impression of her…completely passively and painfully having to submit to the forces of the physical laws of nature, has to re-establish again the consciousness of her own spiritual height” by following the process of purification outlined in Parshas Tazria.
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) was head of the Jewish community in Frankfurt, Germany for over 35 years – and a prolific writer whose ideas, passion, and brilliance helped save German Jewry from the onslaught of modernity.
Elliot Resnick, PhD, is the host of “The Elliot Resnick Show” and the editor of an upcoming work on etymological explanations in Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch’s commentary on Chumash.