Tazria and Trauma: Between the Mishkan and Kfar Aza

Remnants of a home in Kfar Aza, post-October 7th

There was a dead body on the screen that our guide was showing us. Or so he said; I couldn’t understand how the collection of shapes and colors before us was supposed to represent a human body.

“You can see what they did to her,” he said, a muted rage in his voice. “You don’t need to be an expert to understand that there were rapes on October 7th. Anyone with eyes to see can tell you what happened to her.”

But I couldn’t see what happened to her. I couldn’t even see that it was a “her.”

The dead woman on the screen was so distorted and broken that she was illegible to me as a woman, as a human. I could barely tell that what I was looking at was human flesh.

I was reminded of the time I saw Hymen Bloom’s paintings of cadavers in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Back then, I had been entranced by the way Bloom pulled the dead bodies he depicted out of the normal, human context of their demise and painted them as beautiful, vibrant objects.

But looking at the woman’s body on the screen didn’t inspire in me anything but horror. Words in Hebrew are built out of three lettered roots, and the root h.l.l. (חל”ל) ties together the words space (as in empty space or outer space), a slain person, and desecration. Looking at this slain person, this “hallal,” felt like an act of desecration, “hillul.” I was looking at the space, “hallal,” that a living human being with dreams and loves and disappointments once occupied. It was this life that made the body sacred, holy. Our enemies pulled this woman’s body out of the context of her own experience of life, her own loves and hurts and pleasures, and turned it into an arena of abuse and murder. How could I go on looking at this flesh-and-blood site of desecration, once again pulling this woman’s body out of the individual context that gave it meaning in her life?

The burnt homes all around us were variations on the same profound violation. We were standing in what used to be the neighborhood of young adults and young families in of Kfar Aza until October 7th. Every single home we saw used to house living people. Each of them witnessed a thousand little moments of intimacy and meaning, a thousand routines, a thousand facets of its owners’ daily lives. And each of them was desecrated by the villains who turned these arenas of life into the setting of their owners’ death and torture. They weren’t simply destroyed and blackened; I felt as if these double hallalim, these desecrated spaces, were somehow corrupted, twisted into something unnatural.

***

The book of Leviticus is preoccupied with sacred spaces, and many of its laws and rituals are dedicated to keeping them separate from other spaces. Non-priests aren’t allowed into the Mishkan, for example, while regular priests (as opposed to the Kohen Gadol on Yom Kippur), aren’t allowed in the innermost space of the Mishkan – the holy of holies. People who contracted ritual impurity after coming into contact with death must remove themselves from certain spaces, and they can only return after a period of waiting and a purification ritual. The list goes on and on, filled with laws which are detailed, exacting, and for the most part entirely impracticable for the modern reader, tied as they are to the existence of a center of worship, which the Jewish people haven’t had since the year 70 CE.

But after seeing the ruins of Kfar Aza’s young neighborhood, it occurred to me that those ancient laws do more than govern the movement in and out of a certain space. They allow this space to live up to its intended promise – to be a home where we can engage with God.

All houses are formed of promises. The walls will protect us, the ceiling will shelter us, the floor will be even and stable underneath our feet. The same is true for the less tangible promises that make a house into a home: we will protect each other. We will care for one another. We will strive to meet each other’s needs and to be kind.

God’s home is no different. God promises to allow us to draw close to Him without hurting us, we promise to approach with appropriate reverence, and never to bring either “a foreign fire” or contamination into the consecrated space. These promises make the holy space a safe and secure one. And it’s this very safety that allows intimacy to grow.

But why are encounters with death, for example, a form of contamination? Why must we promise to keep certain human experiences, from menstruation to birth and all the way to leprosy, from coming with us into the sacred space?

In his commentary on the first verses of Parashat Tazria, Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch addressed this very question in a way that is rooted in human psychology. Certain experiences, he wrote, force us to encounter the limits of our free choice, the boundaries of our control over reality. When we encounter a dead body, for example, we are forced to confront our own mortality, the fact of our inevitable demise. When we give birth, we are forced to see the body as independent from our conscious volition – as an animal-like being capable of acting on its own. In undermining our faith in our ability to shape reality these experiences can make us doubt the point and purpose of any of our actions, and throw us into a passive state of mind.

Passivity is antithetical to what Judaism requires from us. From the first “go forth” God directed to Abraham, Judaism demanded that we act, choose, and elevate ourselves through our own initiative and free choice. We have to overcome our trauma-induced passivity if we are to have any hope of living to our potential. And this, according to R. Hirsch’s understanding of Leviticus, is where the laws of impurity, or ritual contamination, come in.

Impurity is the state we incur by experiencing the limits of our control over reality. The period of impurity – the length of time we have to wait before we can perform a ritual of purification – is meant to allow us time to heal from the negative, passivity-inducing effects of these experiences. Only after waiting until “this impression of lack freedom of will has completely passed away” can we enact the ritual of purification. Having allowed ourselves time to overcome the traumatic encounter with our own limits, we recommit ourselves to Judaism’s choice-centric and initiative-oriented vision of life (see R. Hirsch on Lev. 12:2)

It is only then when we are dedicated to life and creation, that we can draw close to God in the consecrated space of the Mishkan, and join him in the partnership that is embodied in that physical space.

This concept struck me many years ago as intellectually fascinating, but after standing in the ruins of Kfar Aza, it became relevant in new and painful ways. If homes are made of promises, the desecration of Kfar Aza’s homes and their residents’ bodies proved those promises hollow, “hallul,” yet another derivation from this multivalent root. The walls didn’t keep our enemies out, the roof didn’t offer shelter to the beautiful people who dwelled underneath. And what is true on the private level is true on the national level. A state, a national home, is also made of promises, and one of the core promises at the heart of the State of Israel from its very inception was that after millennia of statelessness and persecution, Jewish children will never again have to helplessly hide from a pogrom. In Kfar Aza, as in Be’eri, and Nir Oz, and too many other Israeli towns, this promise too proved to be hallul, hollow, on October 7th.

This profound violation, hillul, left me, like so many others, adrift in a sea of questions. Who are we, as Israelis, if we can’t safeguard our own people and fulfill the basic promise that underlies our State? Who are we if Jewish parents had to hold onto the doors of their shelters for hours, trying – and at times failing – to block those who wished to kill and rape their children?

And this state, this confusion, wasn’t one I could simply bounce back from. Standing in the ruins of Kfar Aza I knew that I needed time to come to terms with it. I needed time to recover from it. And then I needed to make a conscious choice to leave behind the helplessness that it induced in me and convince myself that we have the power to shape our future still.

Unlike the purification process, as R. Hirsch understands it, this process isn’t linear for me. I waver between periods of mourning when I feel small and helpless, and moments of re-dedication to initiative and choice. As early as October 7th I threw myself into helping others as a way to regain control and as late as now, months later, I still find myself at times sinking into a helpless, passive, torrent of despair. But R. Hirsch’s language gives me tools to understand and verbalize what we are going through. And it gives me the language to envision a future I want to keep marching towards – one where we will be strong enough to set our pain aside and pour all of our efforts into actively rebuilding our shared home.

A home that much like the Mishkan, is dedicated to nurturing intimacy and life.

***

When we walked among the ruins of Kfar Aza, one of its surviving members told us that the kibbutz voted to move to temporary homes in Kibbutz Ruhama. Despite the blackened walls around him, despite his own traumatic experience on October 7th, he was smiling as he spoke. “We will stay there,” he added, “until we can return home.”

As he spoke, I recalled that the root h.l.l. has another meaning. Lehallel means to desecrate, but also “to begin,” or to initiate. Behind this man, a ruined home stood blackened, like a grim reminder of the horrors that he and his family lived through only a number of weeks earlier. But this remarkable man was looking to the future. He was speaking of rebuilding, of new beginnings, of what lay ahead. I thought of his words as we drove back home and in all the days that followed. They became, for me, more than a particular statement in a particular moment. They became the promise of the state of “purity,” a sense of power and of agency, that is yet to come.

Rachel Sharansky Danziger, a Jerusalem-born writer and educator, teaches at Matan, Ma’ayan, Pardes, and Torah-in-Motion. Currently a Sefaria Word-by-Word Fellow, Rachel is working on a book about family drama in the biblical Book of Judges.