Rabbi Natasha Mann

  Staying Outside the Temple Gates This week, I have spent time with two women whose thoughts and ideas are permeating my experience of our Torah portion. The first, Kerry, has been my best friend since before we can remember. Kerry is now Doctor Kerry, and her field of medicine is paediatrics. She spends her days (and often nights) in the NICU - the neonatal (or newborn) intensive care unit. Kerry’s babies are often just a couple of pounds, dwarfed in comparison to full-term newborns, and facing the fight for their lives. The second of these women is Rabbi Debbie Young-Somers, my guest in the Salon last week. Rabbi Debbie joined us to talk about the Wellspring Project, the building of a centre of wellbeing with mikveh - waters for ritual immersion - at its heart. Mikveh is not commonly used outside of the orthodox world anymore, with the exception of conversion to Judaism. The reasons for this are varied, but are mostly related to two things: off-putting experiences in orthodox mi...

There is a pervasive myth in Jewish tradition that menstruating women cannot touch the Torah scroll. This myth hasn’t appeared out of the blue - this week’s Torah portion is about the interaction between ritual purity/impurity and the ability of an individual to enter into the holy space of the Temple, handle ritual objects associated with the Temple, etc. There is even an obscure medieval text to back it up (though this text actually claims that - as a matter of custom - menstruating women did not enter the synagogue at all). However, it’s soundly rejected in Jewish law, by Yosef Karo (the Shulḥan Arukh), by Maimonides (the Mishneh Torah), and so on.  The main reason that there is no halakhic justification for claiming that menstruating women cannot touch the Torah scroll is that, in a world without the Temple, we are all considered ritually impure (or ‘ tamei ’). Therefore, any halakhic basis for the myth would naturally result in the inability of any person to interact with ...

The concepts of tumah and taharah , ritual impurity and purity, can sound uncomfortable to our modern ears. They sound to many of us like ‘bad’ and ‘good’. It is bad to be impure; it is good to be pure. However, there’s something a little more complex than that in the Torah’s concepts of tumah and taharah . I will remind you, for example, that contact with a dead body brings a person into a state of tumah , of ritual impurity - and it is a mitzvah, a religious obligation, to care for the deceased. Therefore, it cannot be the case that tumah (ritual impurity) is bad and taharah (ritual purity) is good. So what are these categories for, if not distinguishing the good from the bad? This week’s parashah has been concerned with two experiences that bring an individual from a state of taharah (ritual purity) into a state of tumah (ritual impurity): tzara’at, the mysterious skin affliction, and childbirth. The Torah does not tell us what these people have in common, but it becomes clear...

If you asked me how long it is until, God willing, I will be a rabbi, I might answer by saying: It is day 1,682 of my studies toward ordination. The likelihood is good that you would find that an odd answer, and not only because I know the exact number of days. When we are counting towards an important date, we usually count down , not up – so it might sound more natural to you if I said, ‘It is 394 days until my ordination.’ However, in this period of Counting the Omer – of counting every day between the second day of Passover until Shavuot – we count upwards. We start at Day 1 of the Omer, and we count every day until Day 49. But why not start at Day 49 and count downwards? If we counted downwards, we would always know how many days until the arrival of Shavuot, the holiday celebrating the giving of Torah. It would be dramatic and effective. And instead, we declare that today is Day 21 of the Omer, and even though we are counting towards Shavuot, we’re left to do the maths ou...