Parashat Tazria-Metzora, Leviticus 12:1-15:33

Jeanette Grosman has sponsored this week's parasha in memory of Lieba Sharon Lesk, a blessing in Jeanette’s life.
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Life is Messy

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Tazria and Metzora are probably the least favourite and hardest parashiyot for rabbis and Bnei Mitzvah students (and weekly divrei Torah writers). The book of Leviticus, with its focus on priestly ritual, the sacrifices and purity laws is hard enough, but this week's topics of skin ailments and bodily emissions are not for the faint of heart. Fortunately, this week we read a double portion and the two short parashiyot are combined, so at least I don't have to struggle for two weeks! Most Bar/Bat Mitzvah speeches saddled with this week's portion use the midrash that converts the unusual word 'metzora' (leprous) into a contraction for 'motzi shem ra' (giving someone a bad name) to springboard into talking about lashon hara (gossip) and the power of words. I sympathize with their predicament- as the Torah's purity laws are no longer applied, but in an effort to render the text relevant their solution twists the Torah's message out of shape. While the midrash against slander is always a welcome topic, turning this week's parasha into a lesson on proper speech is a bit of a stretch (and over-used).

The portion begins with a woman's ritual impurity after childbirth, and then goes on to discuss skin disease (mistranslated as leprosy), as well as a similar affliction that affects clothing and houses (mildew or dry rot?). The descriptions contain many technical medical terms (scall and tetter?) that are unclear. But let's take a step backwards. What is the parasha really about? We usually consider each parasha a discrete unit, but remember that the parasha divisions are not in the Torah scroll, and were introduced later and somewhat arbitrary. If we were to look at the Torah from what Rabbi Richard Israel (z"l) calls "The Airplane" point of view, we see that these laws of bodily purity follow rather naturally from the discussion of what goes into our bodies and the discussion of permitted and forbidden animals for food. Reb Salanter, the founder of the Musar movement, taught that we should be as scrupulous about what comes out of our mouths as we are about what goes into them.

Similarly, like the rules of kashrut which are often (incorrectly) claimed to be health related, these descriptions of skin diseases are also mistakenly seen as an ancient medical textbook, where the Kohen is functioning as a doctor- (or perhaps 'witch-doctor). Indeed, at first glance, it appears that the procedures reflect a primitive sense of sanitary regulations (with provisions for 'bathing' (=disinfection),  and isolation (=quarantine against contagion)). Yes, it is true that a person with a certain mark is declared 'unclean.' But Samson Raphael Hirsch, the great Orthodox champion of the nineteenth century vigourously disputes this view. He notes that a person who is entirely covered from head to toe with tzara'at, is declared pure! He asks why is this the only disease singled out for inspection? In borderline cases, the individual is deemed pure; if these regulations were for health reasons, they should be stringent even when in doubt. Furthermore, the Kohen's role is entirely ritualistic; he provides no treatment of the disease. The purification ceremony is performed after the individual has healed and recovered from his ailment. And note too, that touching the Torah rendered someone tamei [impure]. No, this is not about physical illness.

Because Judaism doesn't see a sharp division between body and spirit, the Rabbis see these cases not as natural diseases, but as a reflection of moral failure. In the Torah (and for the Rabbis) sickness and healing were instruments of the Divine. This joke illustrates the idea:

An elderly gentleman is sick and goes to the doctor, who tells him, "You've got a virus."

["A Virus" sounds like Aveiros, the Yiddish pronunciation of the Hebrew aveirot, transgressions- the opposite of Mitzvot.]

"A-veiros?" he replies, "Nu, from mitzvos you don't get sick."

But notwithstanding the joke, today we know that it is indeed actual viruses that are responsible for illness, and we don't really get sick from sins. Besides being bad medicine, there is another problem with this joke. The notion that, if illness comes from God (where else would it come from?) anyone sick must be morally defective, is extremely problematic. It feels like blaming the victim.

This connects to the other popular solution to this week's portion. Identify the modern 'leper' as the outcast in today's society: persons with AIDS, the homeless, or the mentally ill. But be careful. Just like the biblical 'leper' was interpreted to be suffering from a spiritual deficiency, there are those who see AIDS as God's punishment for homosexuality. According to this logic, is cancer then God's way to punish smokers. And diabetes a punishment for eating sweets? Besides being morally distasteful, if sickness were about moral failings and not medical conditions, then what could clothing and houses (that had rot) do wrong?

If the Torah's laws of 'leprosy' are not about bodily health, gossip, or morality, then what are they? Ritual impurity is a foreign concept for us today, but it seems to be akin to the anxiety we might feel when we encounter birth, death, or serious illness, when "life-generating fluids" appear to be "leaking". These moments of pregnancy, birth, recovery from illness, even death, seem to have a natural numinous quality, while standardized ritual is precisely an attempt to capture that sense of holiness in our daily lives. It has been suggested that perhaps these moments of "peak-experience holiness" and everyday, formalized ritual are mutually exclusive. In Judaism, the Jewish idea(l) is that the body and the spirit function together. When life is normal, the Torah believes that there is a pure state of being (tahor- not identical to cleanliness) where individuals can encounter the Divine.

I like to say that (like Trix, a cereal when I was growing up), the Torah is not for kids. We put such an emphasis on teaching Torah to our children, that we forget that the book has an R-rating. In order to make the stories accessible, we often 'water-down' the Torah's narratives into Jewish fairy tales. The Torah text tells of brothers killing each other (literally), incest, and rape. This week is about our bodies, and it is not pretty. Our discomfort with this week's parasha is that the Torah has 'guts' to say (out loud) that life is messy, there is illness and decay and death. There are times when we (or our loved ones) are outside the camp. Together with that pain, we must remember that there is also recovery and healing and compassion.

 

Shabbat Shalom

BDS