The ideas of a D’Var Torah, literally a word of Torah, or a Drash, colloquially similar to the commentary tradition, Midrash, both refer to commentary on a text in Torah. The D’Var is usually associated with a Torah portion, while a Drash refers to a longer reflection that may not necessarily be restricted to a particular Torah portion; both activities are interpretive and seek to be instructive for a community. I hope you’ll find something helpful in today’s post.

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Porous Boundaries

Frank Ostaseski is a living legend in the end of life care space. He’s the author of The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully, and he’s the founder of the Zen Hospice Project (now, Zen Caregiving Project). Frank is a Buddhist teacher, and he’s an all around incredible thinker, speaker, and educator. I had the privilege of seeing Frank at an event in 2019 in an intimate conversation at the End Well Symposium, where I also spoke.

At the time of this conversation, Frank had recently suffered a series of strokes, and his life had transitioned from longtime caregiver and caregiving advocate to requiring extensive care for himself. During the chat, I was struck how Frank described vulnerability, as having porous boundaries. Now, a little more than four and a half years after witnessing this rare and intimate conversation, the idea of porous boundaries continues to shape my thinking on a number of topics, including the ways in which I conceive of empathy and our relationships with each other.

The porous boundaries of our lives allow us to share spaces together that transcend what we may reach on our own. When trusting, sure of our safety, and we consent to sharing, we may find two bodies blending in a shared space where the two mirror each other and one experiences what the other projects. These are the porous boundaries of our social lives that seek bonding. I think allowing, even actively seeking, to build these shared spaces of intimacy can help us generally practice more empathy in all that we do, cultivating a sort of loving kindness in the world.

The Psalms speak of loving kindness, usually within the framework of the Holy One’s mercy toward humanity. Mercy toward humanity is a pretty good definition for empathy; mercy for each other; mercy for ourselves; self compassion. Cultivating loving kindness is a shared cultural value.

Thick Boundaries; Thin Relationships

I do not fear porous boundaries, but I understand they may present a threat when the preference is for clear delineation, exclusion, and security. It is no surprise that vulnerability, as defined as porous boundaries, is in opposition to security. I am not sure if you can be safe and vulnerable. Vulnerability demands a baseline safety as a condition of trust to be open, but even within safe surroundings, vulnerability takes a risk, and a risk, by definition, cannot be safe.

Those who build walls will struggle to be vulnerable; to take a risk; to be porous. The more that one values security, the more difficult it will be to be vulnerable. The higher the walls, the lower the capacity for intimacy with the other. Thick boundaries make thin relationships.

This goes, too, for boundary markers of identity.

I’ve been making several videos recently around a similar theme on a short form video app. I’ve been exploring, if not pressing, the boundaries, on notions of identity and population group membership. I said recently that when it comes to identities within population groups, I am a self-identification type of guy. It’s my sense that few self-interested reasons exist to artificially align oneself with a population group that are not also reasons which are constructive, productive, affirming, and uplifting. What I mean to say is that while it really means something to be Jewish–or any other group association and dynamic, what it means should not be a function of exclusion but an invitation for engagement. It should mean something to be a part of the population group, and what this means should affirm members, challenge our participation, and maintain our accountability to shared community values. It is a weighty matter to be in the people group, but weightiness should be paired with permissiveness, not prohibition.

I do not suggest that anything goes when declaring identification with a group identity. Our identities carry responsibilities that affirm community values and are consistent with the norms, instruction, and traditions of the group, broadly defined. Things like matrilineal and patrilineal lines of descent as a marker of identity are important insofar as these markers carry significance in our community, but these markers cannot and should not be used to exclude. I’d limit traditional identity markers in at least two ways. First, as a general note, I think we could do a little less gatekeeping. What’s the risk here? Too many Jews? And second, to quote my rabbi at the Secular Synagogue, from a recent program, “Tradition gets a vote but not a veto.” We could take a risk to challenge traditional boundary maintenance.

I call for porous boundaries.

I don’t perceive the threat that the group loses its distinguishing character when its boundaries become more permissive. Just the opposite, in fact; a group becomes more robust with a broader base of relationships and members. A lesson of diversity and belonging work teaches us that the first step of diversity is acknowledging the diversity that already exists within a community. Even before the necessary effort is taken to “center the margins,” which is vitally important work for any institution, any consolidated power structure, to consider the groups it has wielded power against or failed to empower, there is a first step that is to look around and acknowledge the diversity already present.

Holiness

Holiness is to be set apart. To be holy is not to be common; not profane. Holiness is unique and set apart. The blessing formulation when performing an instruction, a mitzvah, recites, “You have sanctified us through your commandments (or instruction; guidance), considering, for example, this from Leviticus:

Consecrate yourselves, therefore, and be holy, for I am the Lord your God. Keep my statutes and observe them: I am the Lord; I sanctify you.

Leviticus 20.7-8 (NRSVUE)

What is instructive here is not anything inherent to the individual that sets one apart, but it is the actions performed, and more importantly, the reason for performing them, that sets one apart as holy. When our family gathers around candles on a Friday night, we are carving out a place in time that we separate from the common time of school, work, sports, chores, and so on, and we enter a time that is set apart, and we mark this time by performing simple rituals that sanctify this time.

If it is our treatment of time and our performance of rituals that sanctify and set apart, then why not have more porous boundaries to welcome more participation in sacred time? Not only do I not see this as a risk to group identity, I think we have only to gain from opening our gates for more people to discover, recover, rediscover, or reclaim their identities, and acknowledge the diversity that already exists and the contributions we all have to make to enrich our traditions.

I’d like to think that I’m contributing.

The Torah Part

In this week’s Torah part, the portion opens with describing the purification rituals after childbirth. These differ for sons and daughters, and the person who gives birth, the woman and mother in the text, is in an extended state of ritual impurity. I want to recall a brief conversation we had about ritual impurity, drawing our attention to the fact that impurity is a natural state. This is not a state of moral uncleanness, but it is a ritual state, in so far as one outcome of being in a state of ritual impurity is that you cannot participate in the cult; the rituals.

Still, the feminist critique stands that these ritual purity codes place women in a sort of pariah status, and later in the rabbinic writings, some states of impurity become associated with morality.

At this point in the development of the text, however, impurity cannot be understood as moral, behavioral, having to do with sin, etc. That develops in later rabbinic thought. Here in the Levitical purity codes, we must work to understand the conception of impurity. By the Levitical perspective, which is to say, by the P source tradition behind this text, impurity is truly a force, a material substance, something that can be transmitted; in effect, impurity is real, not a mere conceptual category. Understanding this, no matter how foreign to our contemporary conceptions of physical forces and the natural world, matters for understanding what’s going on in the text and connecting it to a broader point I am aiming to make.

A long discussion of skin disease, or many diseases culled under one category, Tzaraat, follows the purity instruction after childbirth. In a fairly unpleasant reading through various skin lesions and scalp problems, instruction is given for identifying, isolating, and diagnosing various dermatological pathologies, and naming those that meet certain criteria as impure. And by impure, yes, we mean that material thing; that real thing. The force and contagion. And this raises the question: Force of what, exactly? It is a force of death. Impurity is like a little bit of death that can be transmitted. Reason to think this is within the text itself. A person who is known to have this skin condition should be left with hair unkempt, clothes ripped, and covering their upper lip–these are signs of mourning, consistent with someone who is afflicted with a force of death.

Ritual impurity is like death, leaking into life.

Leaky Bodies; Porous Boundaries

Ritual impurity is that which comes from the body: Menstruation, ejaculation, childbirth, skin lesions, hemorrhaging blood, and so on. Ritual impurity is an outcome of porousness; an outcome of our leaky bodies. Like death breaching the boundaries of the living, someone who is deemed impure dons the markers of mourning. This all got me thinking about these porous boundaries again.

Ritual impurity is not a threat to community life, so long as the proper rituals are followed to address the impurity and prepare oneself to be ritually pure, and that ritual purity is a function of adhering to certain instructions. Adherence to instruction is one means by which we may be set apart, and to be set apart is to be holy.

Our leaky, imperfect, naturally impure, porous bodies naturally shift in and out of states of purity and impurity as we go along living our lives. When impurity breaks through, the ancient conception was to see this as a force of death that impinges on the living.

Having brushed near death himself, after bearing witness to so many people completing their lives, Frank Ostaseski observed that vulnerability is recognizing the porous boundaries between us.

I suggest that our porousness may be applied to identity markers, group membership, intimate relationships, and thin boundaries between life and death. The notion of holiness is not inherent to individuals but is an outcome that we may achieve when we set ourselves apart, and we do this by the performance of certain rituals. And so, it is not the nature of a person that is holy but it is their accountability to community values and their participation in at least some rituals to mark time and space as distinct.

There is not really any modern analogue for Levitical purity (though, plenty of observant communities do practice the Levitical purity codes in modified format), but I think we can still set ourselves apart through regular participation in a time that we ourselves sanctify, and in so doing, we may cultivate loving kindness when we are open to shared intimacy and affirm the diversity and belonging of radically inclusive communities.

Impurity reminds us of our imperfect bodies and the thin space between life and death, and in this liminal space, we are privileged to consider our mortality. The performance of ritual elevates our common time to a sacred space of being set apart that links holiness to loving kindness to empathy to intimacy to belonging. May our porous boundaries blur where one ends and someone else begins in our shared humanity.