Pause to Wonder
Parashat Tazria, Leviticus 12:1–13:59
Rabbi Stuart Dauermann, Ahavat Zion Messianic Synagogue, Santa Monica, CA
The twelfth chapter of Vayikra, Leviticus, is one of the most controversial and misunderstood passages in Torah. It speaks of rituals connected with women being sequestered after childbirth, and the sacrifices they must bring to then return to full communal participation. The term of sequestering and the sacrifices double when the baby is a girl and not a boy. This ordinance appears to label child-bearing women unclean, and doubly so when the newborn is a girl. What’s going on here?
In part, this controversy is rooted in misunderstanding the terms employed. The Hebrew terms tamei and tahor are not equivalent to the English terms “unclean” and “clean,” as some translations have it. Instead they connote being temporarily disqualified (tamei) or qualified (tahor) for contact with holy objects and holy space. It was a matter of temporary spiritual quarantine. Then, after bringing required sacrifices, and washing in living (moving) water, the woman was free to resume full communal access.
But what’s the reason for all this mumbo jumbo? Let’s look at how people became tamei, temporarily disqualified from contact with the holy. This could happen through contact with a corpse, to men having a seminal discharge and women in their time of menstruation, through childbirth, and through having a loathsome skin disease (such as leprosy). Conservative Rabbi Stephen Weiss tells us that when a person healed of such a loathsome skin disease offered a sacrifice marking their return to normalized status, this was sometimes called “the sacrifice of one who has returned from the dead.”
And what do these bodily conditions all have in common? They all involve contact with the mysterious boundary between life and death. The reason we become ritually separated at such a time is to acknowledge that we have touched that boundary. It is to remind us of the wonder of it all, and to provide occasion to recover equilibrium before returning to full participation in religious communal life. This time of waiting was a time to pause to wonder.
And why were women required to give double the sacrifices and remain quarantined for double the time when giving birth to a girl? This is because such a birth doubly put her in contact with the boundary between life and death because a female child would herself be able to bear children. See it as a tribute to our first mother, Havah, also known as Eve, of whom it is written in B’reishit/Genesis 3:20, “The man called his wife Havah [life], because she was the mother of all living.”
The capacity for wonder is fast disappearing in our day. But wonder is holy: it reminds us there is something, or Someone, beyond ourselves. Wonder causes us to sense and seek God. I am reminded of Ceil Rosen, of blessed memory, who was an atheist until she was pregnant with Lyn, her first child. At that time wonder overtook her, and she opened the door of her heart and mind to consider the Source of all things wonderful. Wonder whispers, speaks, and even shouts about God.
The eighth chapter of Sefer Tehillim (The Book of Psalms) describes the spirituality of wonder:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and stars that you set in place—
what are mere mortals, that you concern yourself with them;
humans, that you watch over them with such care?
This is a perfect portrayal of how perceiving a beauty, immensity, or grandeur beyond ourselves causes us to realize how small we are in comparison.
Wonder is profoundly theological because it moves us toward worship. Paul considered this mystery when he said, “For ever since the creation of the universe his invisible qualities—both his eternal power and his divine nature—have been clearly seen, because they can be understood from what he has made” (Rom 1:20).
Encountering the created world should inspire wonder. But that is not how paganized humankind responds, where the absence of wonder breeds idolatry. Paul tells us,
Therefore, they have no excuse; because, although they know who God is, they do not glorify him as God or thank him. On the contrary, they have become futile in their thinking; and their undiscerning hearts have become darkened. Claiming to be wise, they have become fools! In fact, they have exchanged the glory of the immortal God for mere images, like a mortal human being, or like birds, animals or reptiles! (Rom 2:20b–22)
Paul is pointing out the inevitable decline into idolatry that overtakes people who have lost the capacity to wonder. We turn from wonder to being preoccupied with managing and accumulating the stuff of life, like the rich fool in Yeshua’s parable whose life is all about building barns and bigger barns, “who stores up wealth for himself without being rich toward God” (Luke 12:21).
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel of blessed memory rightly insists, “The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.” Without wonder, our lives inevitably become self-referential. Sooner or later, without wonder, they become piles of moldering stuff. Albert Einstein got it right when he said, “He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”
How, then, may we open our eyes, making more room in our lives for wonder, and for God? Yeshua provides the key to his disciples after describing the folly of the rich fool. He says this:
Don’t worry about your life—what you will eat or drink; or about your body—what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body is more than clothing. Think about the ravens! They neither plant nor harvest, they have neither storerooms nor barns, yet God feeds them. You are worth much more than the birds! Can any of you by worrying add an hour to his life? If you can’t do a little thing like that, why worry about the rest? Think about the wild irises, and how they grow. They neither work nor spin thread; yet, I tell you, not even Shlomo in all his glory was clothed as beautifully as one of these. (Luke 12:22–28)
The key is to pause to contemplate the glories of God’s creation, whether like Abraham considering the stars in the vaulted heavens, or by pausing to consider the details of nature, the beauties of music, the effulgent richness of the created order.
When I was a little child, my Aunt Angela used to take me by cab to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, where she would marvel at the delicate beauty of flowers. She was a woman who never lost her capacity for wonder. Have we? If so, then let’s follow Yeshua’s counsel and that of the Psalmist. Consider the lilies of the field and the moon and stars that God has created. Look around you at the handiwork of God. Pause to wonder. Worship him.