Tazria begins by telling us of the postpartum mother who is considered tameh, ritually impure, and therefore can not enter the Mishkan, the Tabernacle. Most sources of impurity in Judaism are associated with death, such as a dead body, the greatest source of impurity, or even a potential life that did not come to fruition, such as a man who has ejaculated or a woman who has menstruated. The obvious question is if ritual impurity is connected to death, why would birth, its opposite, cause impurity?

Perhaps the lesson is that in every birth, there is also death, since when we are born we begin the march toward our own demise. By definition, to be alive is to be vulnerable, always on the existential edge of fragility and non-existence. But there is also another kind of death associated with birth, the death of who we once were in the womb. No matter our gender, we have all, at one time, been someone else—our mothers. Then we are suddenly, and against our will, thrown out, exiled, alienated from our source, from our mother, from what we once were. This “crisis of birth,” as the existential psychologist Otto Rank called it, is a kind of death. A deep seated loss, perhaps our most profound one ever.

This separation also has a positive side, of course, in that we become our independent selves. Yet, it plants within us a deep yearning. We spend the rest of our days searching for our lost selves, for our primordial source. This, I think, motivates us to do important things in the world—to seek a better reality, and to fix that which has been broken. This deep sense within us that something is amiss can be a source of anxiety and discomfort, but it can also be a motivator to right that which is wrong, to bring redemption and return where there is exile and loss.

This redemptive sensibility, the desire to reconnect with our source of life, comes to fruition in the process of purification. One of the central ways of achieving Jewish ritual purification is by immersing in a mikvah, a ritual body of rainwater or in a flowing river or ocean. Why do these waters purify?

Death first comes to the world at the beginning of the Torah. Adam and Eve sin and the world changes into a place which is transitory and fragile, a place where there is death. They are then exiled from the garden, from the primordial womb of eternal life.

The Torah tells us that there was a river which flowed out of Eden and divided into four branches.

The Medrash relates that after Adam and Eve were exiled from the Garden and thrust into our transitory world of labor and loss, they longed to reconnect with Eden, but they could not since its entry was guarded by cherubs with flaming swords. But Adam and Eve realized that there was one way to touch back up with the Garden—by immersing in the rivers which flowed out of it. In these waters, and in all the natural bodies of water which are interconnected, there is a bit of Eden, a bit of the primordial self, a return to the womb, to before the crisis of birth, to before exile and the emergence of death.

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan suggests that this is why we use a mikvah to purify ourselves from contact with death. Death is not bad, but it is a reminder of the loss of Eden, and so, like Adam and Eve, we enter the waters and through them reconnect with our primordial, Edenic self.