John D. Brey
Well-Known Member
Professor David Biale has an excellent essay that questions the gender-dynamics of blood within a Jewish religious context. Why is the blood of circumcision (male blood) sacred, purifying, ornamental, while the blood of the menstruant, the niddah (female blood), is a pollutant, poisonous, even demonic?
Though I've dealt with this question in depth in essays of my own, here I'm thinking about menstruation specifically in relationship to meiosis, and memes, and specifically in the context of the other thread on meiosis and Messiah.
To cut to the chase, within the context of a reworking of the ontology of gender (ha-adam initially possessed a female body), we can say the first human's female body represents "female" flesh (not remarkable) while the "androgyny" (which would better be termed "gynandrous") is not about a male existing inside ha-adam, or part of ha-adam's female flesh becoming "male" (inverting Genesis 2:21), but about revealing the true gender-dynamics of the Torah-text once some questionable Masoretic slips of the wrist have been removed from the interpretation of the Hebrew text.
Ha-adam's body, flesh, is female flesh, while ha-adam's blood (which Rabbi Hirsch calls "liquid flesh") is male.
The power of this thought is that within this context there's no visible male flesh, no manifest masculinity, unless there's some blood-letting, which usually lets us know death, or danger, is lurking in the vicinity. The power of this thought is two-fold since it accounts for taking a knife (brit milah) to the lie of male flesh (the phallus), while accepting the blood of that flesh as masculine, soul, spirit, life-giving, and then turning around and doing the complete opposite in the case of the niddah: her flesh is female, so it's not gallivanting as what it's not (as the flesh of the phallus is). But her blood, which is male, as all blood is, should not be "seen" outside a female body any more than soul or spirit should be seen outside of a body.
Where the foregoing is understood, so to say, a legitimate question arises as to why circumcision blood would be ok outside a body regardless of whether that body, that flesh, were male or female since being outside of a body, as stated above, implies that death, or danger, is lurking in the midst?
There's only one way that the death associated with, symbolized by, visible blood, can be good, pure, purifying, sacred: it must be an utterly unique symbol of death. It must be the symbol of death itself, which in this context, is the death of the death-dealing con-cept of "masculine flesh." Voila! Brit milah! . . . The blood of the "male flesh" (the phallus which is only gallivanting as what doesn't exist, male flesh, symbolizes the serpent of death, the rod of death, the weal and woe of death, therein symbolizing death itself: brit milah, the blood of brit milah, is good, sanctifying, salvific, even though it represents death just as much as does the blood of the niddah, for the express reason that it represents the death of death itself (whose deliver is the facade of male-flesh, the fallacy of male-flesh, the phallus), and therein represents everlasting life.
John
Though I've dealt with this question in depth in essays of my own, here I'm thinking about menstruation specifically in relationship to meiosis, and memes, and specifically in the context of the other thread on meiosis and Messiah.
To cut to the chase, within the context of a reworking of the ontology of gender (ha-adam initially possessed a female body), we can say the first human's female body represents "female" flesh (not remarkable) while the "androgyny" (which would better be termed "gynandrous") is not about a male existing inside ha-adam, or part of ha-adam's female flesh becoming "male" (inverting Genesis 2:21), but about revealing the true gender-dynamics of the Torah-text once some questionable Masoretic slips of the wrist have been removed from the interpretation of the Hebrew text.
Ha-adam's body, flesh, is female flesh, while ha-adam's blood (which Rabbi Hirsch calls "liquid flesh") is male.
The power of this thought is that within this context there's no visible male flesh, no manifest masculinity, unless there's some blood-letting, which usually lets us know death, or danger, is lurking in the vicinity. The power of this thought is two-fold since it accounts for taking a knife (brit milah) to the lie of male flesh (the phallus), while accepting the blood of that flesh as masculine, soul, spirit, life-giving, and then turning around and doing the complete opposite in the case of the niddah: her flesh is female, so it's not gallivanting as what it's not (as the flesh of the phallus is). But her blood, which is male, as all blood is, should not be "seen" outside a female body any more than soul or spirit should be seen outside of a body.
Where the foregoing is understood, so to say, a legitimate question arises as to why circumcision blood would be ok outside a body regardless of whether that body, that flesh, were male or female since being outside of a body, as stated above, implies that death, or danger, is lurking in the midst?
There's only one way that the death associated with, symbolized by, visible blood, can be good, pure, purifying, sacred: it must be an utterly unique symbol of death. It must be the symbol of death itself, which in this context, is the death of the death-dealing con-cept of "masculine flesh." Voila! Brit milah! . . . The blood of the "male flesh" (the phallus which is only gallivanting as what doesn't exist, male flesh, symbolizes the serpent of death, the rod of death, the weal and woe of death, therein symbolizing death itself: brit milah, the blood of brit milah, is good, sanctifying, salvific, even though it represents death just as much as does the blood of the niddah, for the express reason that it represents the death of death itself (whose deliver is the facade of male-flesh, the fallacy of male-flesh, the phallus), and therein represents everlasting life.
John
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