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November 19, 1997

Stray Thoughts (1997)

Torah Study Marriage & Sexuality
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A Hedge of Roses: Jewish Insights Into Sex and Marriage, Part 2 (1969)

In order to appreciate the implications of Family Purity, it is important to understand, as well, what it is not.For one thing, it is not the kind of superstition that, in other cultures, has stigmatized the menstruant as repulsive, placed upon her mysterious and stringent taboos, and banished her from the community for the duration of her menses. Maimonides, the eminent twelfth-century Talmudist, philosopher, and physician, forcefully rejected the superstitious beliefs and practices of the Sabeans, Magi, and other Eastern peoples concerning menstruation, and emphasized the spiritual content of Judaism’s teachings.״ The Torah’s legislation is simply not of one piece with, for instance, the primitive customs recorded in Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Unfortunately, such identification of the Torah’s laws with primitive pagan and mythological cultures often does take place in the mind of the contemporary Jew or Jewess who is uninitiated into the world of Torah and the Jewish Tradition and who cannot, therefore, view Jewish Family Purity from a broader perspective and greater knowledgeability. A terminological confusion is largely responsible for this unhappy distortion of the Torah’s larger purposes and the intrinsic meaning of its commandments. Tuharah and tum’ah (and the corresponding adjectives tahor and tamei) are usually translated as “pure” and “impure.” It is this deceptive semantic delinquency that leads to the interpretation of these categories as denoting some kind of intrinsic mysterious abhorrence that possesses the person of the menstruant and that must be purged by some magical incantation.But this is clearly not so. According to Jewish teaching, nothing whatever happens to or changes in the person or character or value of the individual, man or woman, designated as “impure.” No special quality makes such an individual inferior in any way to any other person re-fen־ed to as “pure.” The terms ta-harah and tum’ah signify halakhic or legal categories…
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The Yeshiva and the World (1997)

A Yeshiva is not a place of learning and attitude-building alone. In a yeshiva a student must also prepare and adjust to his future life. And if when in yeshiva he will restrict himself to its ד׳ אמות, and not prepare himself to live in the outer society, to mingle with people even as he inwardly communes with his Maker (as taught in חובות הלבבות), he will not attain the right way in his later career, after he leaves the confines of the yeshiva – and certainly he will not be prepared to exercise influence over the world, which is the mission of every Jew: to sanctify the Name, which is possible only if one is involved with his fellow men... We must therefore strive to find the middle path between the two extremes, such that the yeshiva student will intensively pursue the goals of yeshiva life and, at the same time, seek out occasions to develop relations with the outside world...One must also ponder how best to relate to others. There is nothing more harmful to the influence we can exert on others than snobbism. Our environment does not tolerate arrogance and superciliousness, especially by young people, and one cannot influence others unless he is liked by them.The author of these words is the distinguished Rosh Yeshiva R. Elyah Meir Bloch of Telz.
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