אשה כי תזריע וילדה זכר
A woman who shall conceive, and give birth to a male
Parshas Tazria begins with the birth of a Jewish boy, and a discussion of the laws of impurity which accompany that occasion. Midrash Tanchuma, in an apparent attempt to explain the proximity of this discussion and that of the Kosher dietary laws immediately preceding it (see end of Parshas Shemini), suggests that the sequence is reflective of the following process which precedes every Jewish birth.
Before the child is born, says Tanchuma, he is taught in the womb, “From this you may eat, and from this you may not”. Only after he internalizes that message and accepts the Torah, is he then allowed passage through the birth canal.
Tanchuma’s cryptic comment seems difficult to accept. After all, is not every child taught the entire Torah before entering this world? Why then, asks Rav Tzadok Hakohen of Lublin, does it make sense for the Torah to single out the laws of what one may and may not eat, as somehow being exclusive in this regard?
The discerning Torah student will remember another instance in which dietary laws seem to take center stage; an instance hailing back all the way to the beginning of time. God created Adam, we recall, placed him in the Garden of Eden, and issued him but one command: From all the trees of the Garden you shall eat, but from the Tree of Knowledge you shall not. As our Sages explain, this single positive and negative command, constituted the entire Torah at that point in the evolution of man. It was only after the Original Sin that we devolved as a species to the point where it became necessary to specify additional positive and negative commandments, leading up to the eventual giving of a Torah consisting of no less than six hundred and thirteen commandments.
Why, one must wonder, do the dietary laws assume such prominence in God’s world?
Apparently, all God wants from us is to eat well. The entire Creation exists solely for the purpose of Man growing into a spiritually robust, healthy individual. As humans, our role is thus simply to advance toward that end by drawing our energy, or “eating” as it were, from spiritually conducive activities, while refraining from “eating” spiritual junk food. That, in a nutshell, is Torah (lol). Back in Eden, where spirituality and physicality worked in perfect unison, this abstract concept of spiritual “eating” manifested itself solely within the confines of its corresponding physical counterpart.
Since then, as we all know, things have become a bit more convoluted, yet it is imperative that every Jewish child internalize the underlying concept which remains, before entering this world. He must be taught to accept the Torah not as some external ideal of right and wrong to which he is obliged to adhere by order of his Creator, but as a spiritual diet absolutely essential to his own wellbeing.
As a code of ethical conduct, the Torah can be hard to heed. As a strict diet for our highly allergic souls, however, it can be harder not to.
