Parshat Tazria - Ninety-Nine per cent Pure - Rabbi Yaakov Asher Sinclair

99.9% pure orange juice, says your orange juice carton. Now, maybe the OJ itself is 99.9% pure, but what about all the other stuff in there? We live in a strange world. On the one hand, we're obsessed with purity. We buy bottled water or we filter it. We demand that our food stuffs, the fluids we drink, and the air we breathe should be pure, unadulterated, and healthy, and we're right to demand that it should be so. On the other hand, in social relations, purity has become something of a joke. A couple of hundred years ago, in the secular world, it wasn't uncommon to name your daughter Chastity or Purity. In 2018, Chastity was number 10,325 on the list of most popular names for girls, but 2,344 parents had named their daughters Chastity more than the year before, so there's still hope. One of the most misunderstood concepts in Judaism is tumah and taharah, woefully inadequately translated as impurity and purity. The word tumah actually is connected to the word in Hebrew meaning sealed. The Jewish idea of impurity is something that blocks the light of holiness from reaching the soul. The greatest source of tumah, the av avi'at tumah, in the Torah, is contact with the dead body, a dead human body. Now, why should that be? The answer is we're never more separated, we never feel more separated, more sealed from holiness and from God than when we're in the presence of a dead human body, a cadaver. To the naked eye, it seems that there's no life there. We cannot see that the soul is still alive in the world of souls and that this body will eventually join it in the world to come. This is the greatest tumah, the greatest sealing off between us and God, the feeling that after life that there is nothing. The word taharah, purity, is related to the word for shining or light. Taharah is when the light reaches us, reaches the soul. When Noach, Noah, built the ark, God instructed him to put in a window, a zohar. Zohar comes from the same root as taharah. Just as a window lets light into a building, so taharah lets holiness flood into our souls, into our lives, and that's more healthy than all the oranges in Florida.