This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary rabbinical student Dr. Cécile Bruriah Gonçalves, has been anonymously sponsored.
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Parashat Tzav seems entirely obsessed with the figure of the priest—his gestures, his garments, his portions, his investiture. Women appear nowhere, and bodies that do not conform to the priestly ideal seem equally absent. Yet, as Rabbi Dr. Tamara Cohn Eskenazi notes in The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, Tzav presupposes women in three domains without naming them: their place within priestly families, their role in producing sacred garments, and their participation in the sacrificial system. This is not merely a historical correction. It demands a method: reading Tzav not only through what it foregrounds, but through what it relies on, distributes unequally, and leaves in shadow.
Ash and Care
Tzav does not begin with the spectacle of sacrifice but with its maintenance. The priest lifts the ash, changes garments, and carries the residue to a pure place:
וְהֵרִ֣ים אֶת־הַדֶּ֗שֶׁן… וְשָׂמ֕וֹ אֵ֖צֶל הַמִּזְבֵּֽחַ… וְהוֹצִ֤יא אֶת־הַדֶּ֙שֶׁן֙… אֶל־מָק֖וֹם טָהֽוֹר׃
He shall lift the ash and place it beside the altar… He shall carry the ash out to a pure place.” (Leviticus 6:3–4.)
Commenting on this, the Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 23b, notes, “בהרמה—דברי הכל עבודה היא” (“All agree that the lifting of the ash constitutes a cultic service”).
Holiness, then, depends on maintenance. Patriarchal systems consistently elevate visible functions while relegating care, cleaning, and continuity to the background—labor historically assigned to women, as Dr. Carol Meyers shows in Rediscovering Eve. Without the removal of ash, the fire suffocates. By requiring the priest to handle waste, the Torah inadvertently sanctifies the domestic labor it has long rendered invisible.
The French commentator Rashi (c. 1028–1105) classifies the priest’s change of garments in Leviticus 6:4 as, not ritual obligation, but derekh eretz (דרך ארץ, “the way of the world”), citing the school of Rabbi Yishmael:
בְּגָדִים שֶׁבִּשֵּׁל בָּהֶן קְדֵרָה… לֹא יִמְזוֹג בָּהֶן כּוֹס.
The garments in which one has cooked a pot for one’s master are not used for pouring his cup. (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 23b.)
This distinction is social, not divine. A radical reading must therefore expose the politics of visibility that tradition has built. Rabbi Dr. Rachel Adler writes in Engendering Judaism that the fire of the altar and the fire of the hearth are the same fire. Tzav begins, almost against itself, by blurring the boundary it seeks to enforce.
The Perpetual Fire and Its Gendered Economy
אֵ֗שׁ תָּמִ֛יד תּוּקַ֥ד עַל־הַמִּזְבֵּ֖חַ לֹ֥א תִכְבֶּֽה׃
A perpetual fire shall burn on the altar; it shall not be extinguished. (Leviticus 6:6.)
This motif of continuity challenges any theology that conditions access to holiness on bodily conformity. In the spirit of Judith Plaskow’s critique in Standing Again at Sinai: if the divine presence never goes out, then women’s bodies—subject to cyclical impurity—cannot be obstacles to a presence that persists by definition.
Yet the exclusion is explicit:
כׇּל־זָכָ֞ר בִּבְנֵ֤י אַהֲרֹן֙ יֹֽאכְלֶ֔נָּה
Every male among the sons of Aaron shall eat of it. (Leviticus 6:11.)
Dr. Hilary Lipka shows that this is not a blunt exclusion but a hierarchy of access. Dr. Tikva Frymer-Kensky notes that women access holiness only through mediation—father, husband, family status. They never access it in their own name. The system justifies itself circularly: women do not serve because they are women; they do not eat because they do not serve. The female body becomes a relational variable rather than a central subject in the economy of holiness. (See Frymer-Kensky’s Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of Their Stories and Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, pp. 79–96.)
Garments and Women’s Technology of the Sacred
Tzav emphasizes priestly garments but says nothing of their making. Exodus 35:25 fills the silence by noting “וְכׇל־אִשָּׁ֥ה חַכְמַת־לֵ֖ב בְּיָדֶ֣יהָ טָו֑וּ” (“Every woman who was wise of heart spun with her hands”).
Meyers shows that textile work was a specialized, theologically charged competence. The priest stands before God because a woman wove his dignity. When Tzav consecrates Aaron’s garments, it consecrates—indirectly—the female labor that made them possible.
Hannah’s yearly offering to her son at Shiloh confirms this dynamic—as “וּמְעִ֤יל קָטֹן֙ תַּעֲשֶׂה־לּ֣וֹ אִמּ֔וֹ” (“his mother would make him a small robe…”) (I Samuel 2:19).
Her craft inserts her presence into a space forbidden to her. In The Five Books of Miriam, Dr. Ellen Frankel names the paradox: the ritual system cannot function without women and organizes itself precisely so that they do not appear.
The Tamim Body and Crip Theory
The investiture ritual maps the body through blood on ear, thumb, and toe — a validation of total functionality. Bekhorot elaborates the bodily defects (mumin) that disqualify a priest, constructing an ideal of the capable body (tamim).
‘Crip theory,’ following Dr. Robert McRuer, reverses this logic. Ritual holiness emerges from fragmentation: the animal is cut, blood poured, fats burned. The priest then remains seven days at the threshold (petach, “פתח”) of the Tent of Meeting—immobilized, dependent. This is ‘crip time:’ holiness grounded not in productivity but in vulnerability. (See McRuer’s books Crip Theory and Crip Times.)
The Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 23b, confirms the breach: “לימד על הכהנים בעלי מומין שכשרין להוציא הדשן” (“Priests with bodily defects are fit to carry out the ash.”) (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 23b.)
Visible centrality and real value diverge. The requirement of perfection is human; the encounter with God occurs in shared vulnerability.
The Thanksgiving Offering and the Politics of Interdependence
The thanksgiving offering (todah) requires forty loaves to be consumed on the same day—impossible alone. The rite begins in vulnerability, not autonomy. The todah is structurally communal: the survivor must expose fragility to rebuild bonds.
This challenges ableist individualism. Women who brought their own todah were initiating subjects, transforming vulnerability into gratitude and shared nourishment. Holiness resides in the collective banquet, not in the unblemished body at the altar.
The Fire and the Ash
After the Temple’s destruction, holiness migrated. In her article “Finding Meaning in Ancient Rituals,” Rabbi Dr. Nancy Fuchs Kreimer shows how Judaism relocated sacrificial meaning to the domestic table—kashrut, challah, Shabbat. Women kept the fire alive not as consolation for exclusion but as reinvention of the sacred. The fire endures because invisible hands tend it. The women of Theresienstadt who reconstructed recipes from memory—as retold in Cara De Silva’s In Memory’s Kitchen—testify that when bodies are destroyed, culinary memory becomes resistance, a todah addressed to the future.
Holiness does not reside at the center of the altar but in what the center depends on: maintenance labor, weaving, excluded bodies, shared vulnerability. Rachel Adler writes that women do not need to reclaim a tradition that excluded them; they must recognize that they have always had one (pp. 12–18). We are, in Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin’s phrase, a union of weavers—a tradition woven from the lives of those kept at the margins. (See her “Introduction” to The Tapestry of Jewish Time.)
The commandment not to extinguish the eternal flame is addressed not only to the sons of Aaron but to all who are willing to look at the ash as much as the flame, and to find holiness at the threshold, where we learn to depend on one another.
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