PARSHA THEMES
Eitan Mayer
Parsha Themes Archive
PARASHAT TAZRIA
UH . . . SHOULD WE STOP AND ASK SOMEBODY?
When you’re on the road, there are two different aspects to being lost:
1) You know in which direction you’re heading, but you don’t know exactly where you are at the moment. At many of the points along the way to your destination, you have no idea where you are -- you just keep following the signs to the place you want to go. There are hours of traveling in which you have not the faintest idea what towns you are passing through, no knowledge of the people there, no awareness of the significant landmarks you are passing. In terms of where you are, you are “lost”; in terms of where you’re headed, you’re not lost at all.
2) You know where you are, but not where you’re headed. When you pass through a town, you have a clear sense of where you are in relation to other towns, in relation to the important historical sites in the area, perhaps also in relation to the important natural features of the area. You are completely lost from the “destination” perspective: you have no idea where you want to be. But you are not at all lost from the “current location” perspective.
There same two aspects of being lost apply to our progress through the text of the Torah:
1) Not knowing where we are: we may be “lost” in and confused by the swirling details of halakha with which Sefer VaYikra (Leviticus) is filled -- korbanot (sacrifices), purity, holiness, strange diseases, priestly halakhot, etc. -- but we know even now that we are headed for a nice chunk of more of this kind of material and that when the Sefer ends, we will return to narrative in Sefer BeMidbar (Numbers). We may be unfamiliar with the territory around us, but we know where we are headed.
2) Not knowing where we’re headed: we may have no idea of the order of topics ahead on the biblical “road,” we may not be thinking much about our destination, and we may have no concept of the large-scale structure of the Torah or of Sefer VaYikra, but we are not “lost” in the sense of our having a good grasp of where we currently are: the meaning of the texts we are currently passing through.
In order for us not to be “lost,” we need to be looking not just at the numbers of the perakim (chapters) to see when this highway comes to an end and Sefer BeMidbar begins, but also at the lay of the land around us. What is the general topic of the part of Sefer VaYikra which we are currently learning? Right now, we are deep into the thick of a large section of Sefer VaYikra which focuses on tahara (purity) and tum’a (impurity). The basic breakdown of this tahara section is as follows:
With this “local map” in mind, we turn to tzara’at.
TZARA’AT: THE BIBLICAL PRESCRIPTION:
Before we discuss what is behind tzara’at -- why people get it and what it is supposed to mean to them -- we need to first summarize what the Torah tells us about diagnosing and responding to tzara’at. The Torah describes a particular regimen to treat tzara’at. This regimen splits into several stages:
1) EXAMINATION BY THE KOHEN: a person who believes he or she may have tzara’at comes to a kohen (priest), who examines the “lesion.” The Torah devotes a huge amount of detail to describing what tzara’at looks like so that the kohen can diagnose whether the lesion is benign (spiritually benign, that is) or malignant. Discolorations, scars, burns, boils, and other eruptions on the skin are all candidates for tzara’at suspicion. Sometimes it is unclear at first sight if a lesion is tzara’at, so the “patient” is “quarantined” for a short period and then examined again.
2) DECLARATION OF STATUS: once the lesion has been examined, or once the quarantine, if prescribed, is over, the kohen is ready to declare whether the lesion is tzara’at, and therefore tamei (ritually impure), or “benign” and therefore tahor (ritually pure). If the person is tahor, he or she returns to normal life. If the lesion turns out to be tzara’at, the kohen declares the person officially tamei.
3) REACTION BY THE METZORA (person stricken with tzara’at): The Torah prescribes the following procedure in 13:45-46 for one who is definitively diagnosed with tzara’at:
“The person stricken with tzara’at, who has the lesion -- his clothing should be torn, his head should be unwrapped, he should wrap upon his moustache, and “Tamei, tamei!” he shall cry out. All of the days that the lesion remains upon him, he shall be impure; he is tamei, he shall sit alone; outside the camp shall be his dwelling.”
It is important for us to pay careful attention to the behavior of the metzora at the moment he learns of his unfortunate status. It appears that the model for the behavior of the metzora is the paradigm of avelut, mourning. A mourner is required to perform “keria,” ripping his or her clothing, and “periat rosh,” loosening the hair, as we know from other contexts in the Torah. But what does covering one’s mustache have to do with anything?
A look at Yehezkel 24:17 shows that among the many symbolic acts of avelut listed there is this act -- literally, “covering the moustache.” It is likely that the meaning of the gesture is not literally to cover the moustache, but to drape a hood or cowl over one’s head and hide most of one’s face from the world -- the hood should extend over the face all the way until the upper lip, the moustache.
The next two elements of the behavior of the metzora point to a somewhat different theme than avelut: while crying out “Tamei! Tamei!”, warning others to avoid him, he makes his way out of the camp to solitary life until he is healed. These are not acts of avelut; they are acts which shame and isolate the metzora.
We will try to make meaning of this behavior as we go on.
4) TREATING THE DISEASE: scour the Torah from top to bottom, and surprisingly, you will find that it prescribes no treatment at all for tzara’at! The Torah goes straight from the lengthy description of the varieties of tzara’at (13:1-44) to the brief piece we just read about the banishment of the metzora (13:45-46). The Torah then discusses tzara’at on clothing, and then moves straight to dealing with what to do when the metzora is already healed (perek 14). But where is the healing process itself? There seems to be a huge gap between chapter 13 -- the disease and the rejection of the metzora from human life -- and chapter 14, where he is already healed and is brought back into the community. So, while I have counted “treating the disease” as a stage, it is completely absent in the Torah. This is certainly an anomaly. Why spend so much time on the disease only to fall silent about its therapy?
One interesting confirmation of the fact that the healing process really is not the point here is the fact that the words “tamei” and “tahor” appear at least 30 times each in perakim 13-14, while “nirpa,” “healed,” appears only four times.
5) RESTORING THE HEALED METZORA TO THE COMMUNITY: once he or she has been healed, the metzora is examined again by the kohen, who then conducts an elaborate set of rituals which purify the metzora of tum’a and allow him or her to return to the community.
BUT WHAT IS IT?
Now we are more ready to ask the basic question: what is tzara’at? Clearly, it is a skin disease, but it is difficult to identify it with a disease known to modern medical science. One thing that should be clear is that it is not “leprosy”! This mistake is an old one, first made by John of Damascus, an Arab doctor of the ninth century, who mistakenly took the Gtranslation of tzara’at, “lepra,” to mean “leprosy,” when in fact the Greek word for leprosy is something like “elephas.” Just about all translations have followed John of Damascus’s mistake.
What may be more attractive is the suggestion that tzara’at is not one disease only, it is a group of different diseases which the Torah refers to by one name since they all have the same effect: they signal impurity and set in motion a complex process of isolation and then, upon healing, purification. But again, most of the diseases which seem to reflect what the Torah describes -- such as psoriasis, perhaps, and some types of fungal infection -- seem not to fit the bill from another perspective, and that is that the Torah prescribes one-week waiting periods to see if a suspected infection is actually tzara’at, while these diseases usually do not change at all within a week’s time, so waiting a week would show nothing.
We are left with the possibility that tzara’at either does not appear nowadays, or that it does appear but is not recognized. But no matter what disease we identify it with, a nagging question remains: why is the Torah so concerned about tzara’at? In terms of the sheer number of pesukim, there is more information in the Torah about tzara’at than there is about Shabbat! Why does the Torah care about this disease? What about cancer, heart disease, tuberculosis, black plague, AIDS, hemorrhagic fever, smallpox?
One strategy to look for an answer is to take a look at the places where people in Tanakh get tzara’at and try to identify what the circumstances are.
FAMOUS CASES OF TZARA’AT:
1) MIRIAM’S TZARA’AT: The most famous case of tzara’at is certainly that of Miryam, in BeMidbar 12:1-15. Miryam speaks negatively about Moshe to her other brother, Aharon. Hashem, eavesdropping on her carping, is incensed. He angrily reprimands Miryam for her temerity and strikes her with tzara’at. Aharon turns to Moshe to beg him to pray for his sister’s recovery:
“Please, master, do not hold against us the sin we have been foolishly done and in which we have sinned. Let her not be like a corpse, who, when he emerges from his mother’s womb, half of his flesh is consumed!”
Aharon begs for mercy, but he also offers an important characterization of the appearance of tzara’at: someone with tzara’at looks dead -- specifically, like a stillborn baby! The rampant peeling of skin which takes place as the infection attacks the skin reminds Aharon of the appearance of a still-born baby, as medical sources indicate that the skin of still-born babies peels profusely and spontaneously.
Aharon, then, offers another connection between tzara’at and death: not only does the metzora engage in practices normally associated with mourning, as we saw above, but there even seems to be a corpse here: the metzora himself! The bereaved and the decedent are the same person; the metzora mourns his own death. Keep this connection in mind as we gather more information.
2) MOSHE’S TZARA’AT: in Shemot 4:1-7, Moshe is stricken (very briefly) with tzara’at. Commanded by Hashem to announce to Bnei Yisrael that Hashem has recalled His promises to redeem them, Moshe balks, insisting that Bnei Yisrael will not believe him. Hashem becomes impatient with Moshe and offers him several miracles with which to convince the ostensibly doubting Bnei Yisrael. First Hashem turns Moshe’s staff into a serpent, one frightening enough to make Moshe turn and run. The second sign is that Moshe’s hand is momentarily afflicted with tzara’at. Besides being impressive miracles, both of these signs also punish Moshe: he has doubted Bnei Yisrael’s faith, asserting that they will reject him, and has also refused Hashem’s command to attempt to lead them. In response, Hashem slaps him on the wrist.
3) GEHAZI’S TZARA’AT: Gehazi, the servant of Elisha (the prophet), suffers tzara’at when he lies to Elisha (Melakhim II:5); here, the tzara’at is explicitly directed against Gehazi by Elisha’s curse.
4) Azaryahu, a king of Judah, suffers tzara’at, ostensibly for not removing the private altars on which the people were sacrificing to idols (Melakhim II:15).
5) Uzziyahu, another king, suffers tzara’at when he attempts to usurp the kohenic function of burning the ketoret (incense) on the mizbe’ah in the Mikdash (Divrei Ha-Yamim II:26). (Some believe that Azaryahu and Uzziyahu were one and the same person.)
IMPLICATIONS:
We can extract three general ideas from these cases:
1) Tzara’at seems to be a punishment: in all of the cases above, it follows sin.
2) Tzara’at can be a punishment for interpersonal sins and for sins against Hashem.
3) Tzara’at is connected in some way with death.
TZARA’AT AND DEATH:
Let’s review for a moment. What indications do we have of connections between death and tzara’at?
1) The metzora is commanded to behave as a mourner, as if someone has died.
2) Aharon pleads that Miryam not remain as a “dead person,” stricken by tzara’at (Hazal -- Nida 64b -- also say that a metzora is considered as if dead).
But there are also other connections:
3) A corpse communicates tum’a not just to one who touches or carries it, but even to one who is under the same roof as the corpse (“be-ohel,” or, more specifically in the case of metzora, “be-moshavo”). (This is why kohanim never go to funeral parlors, except if the deceased is an immediate family member.) This characteristic of communicating tum’a even by sharing a roof is found in no category of tum’a besides the met (corpse) -- and metzora!
4) The purification ritual: in Parashat Metzora, we learn of the elaborate ritual for purifying a metzora once he has been healed of his tzara’at:
VAYIKRA 14:4-7 --
The kohen shall command to take for the one who is to be purified (i.e., the former metzora) two wild, tahor (=kosher) birds, cedar wood, red thread, and hyssop. The priest shall command that one of the birds be slaughtered in an earthen vessel over live water. He shall take the living bird, the cedar wood, the red thread, and the hyssop, and dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird that was slaughtered above the live water. He shall sprinkle upon the one who is to be purified from tzara’at seven times, and purify him . . . .
Note that the ritual involves cedar, hyssop, red thread, fresh water, and the blood of an animal. The mixture is sprinkled on the metzora to purify him.
In Sefer BeMidbar, we learn of another elaborate ritual: the process by which the kohen purifies a person who has contracted tum’at met, corpse impurity. This is familiar to many of us as the ritual in which the ashes of the Para Aduma (“reddish cow”) are used:
BEMIDBAR 19:6, 17-19 --
The kohen shall take cedar wood, hyssop, and red thread, and throw them into the midst of the burning of the cow (i.e., the reddish cow, which had been slaughtered and whose blood had then been burned with its flesh to ashes) . . . . They shall take, for the tamei person, from the ashes of the burning of the hattat (as discussed in previous shiurim, the Torah refers to the Para Aduma as a “hattat”) and place fresh water into it in a container. A pure person should take hyssop, dip it into the water, and sprinkle it . . . [on the impure person].
Here again, we have a purification ritual (removal of tum’a) which requires the blood of an animal, mixed with fresh water, cedar wood, hyssop, and red thread, where the mixture is poured onto the tamei person. What we see, then, is that the purification ritual for a metzora is strikingly similar to the purification ritual for someone who has touched a corpse.
AN INSTALLMENT RITUAL?
One other ritual which the healed metzora must undergo, besides bringing various sacrifices, is a ritual in which the kohen takes blood from the asham sacrifice offered by the former metzora, and puts some of it on the right earlobe, right thumb, and right large toe of the former metzora. The same is done with oil brought by the former metzora.
This very unusual ritual should remind us of a similar ritual we encountered just a few weeks ago in reading Parashat Tzav: when Aharon and his sons entethe seven-day period during which they are transformed into kohanim (and during which the inauguration of the entire Mishkan takes place), Moshe performs the exact same ritual on them!
1) Just as Moshe anoints the Klei Mishkan (Mishkan “furniture”) to inaugurate it and sanctify it, so he does to the kohanim;
2) Just as the corners of the Mizbe’ah (altar) are anointed because the extremities represent the whole, so are the “corners” of the kohanim anointed because their extremities represent the whole (in case you are wondering how earlobes are “extremities,” remember that the Torah refers to the area at the ear as the “corner” of the head, which must not be shaved; this is why everyone refers to the hair of this area as “pe’ot,” “corners”).
But what meaning does the ritual have for the healed metzora?
ANOMALIES ---> THEME?
Let us recount all of the anomalies or latent themes we have encountered in tzara’at:
1) Parallels to (or aspects of) death:
a) Mourning behaviors
b) Aharon’s characterization of tzara’at as having the appearance of death
c) Tum’a is communicated via “ohel” by only two types of tum’a: tzara’at and corpses
d) The remarkably similar rituals for purifying a metzora and a tamei met
2) A close parallel to the sanctification ritual of the kohanim.
3) The fact that no healing process is prescribed or even discussed by the Torah.
DEATH AND REBIRTH:
Putting these all together yields the following picture: tzara’at is not a medical issue, it is a spiritual issue. This explains why the kohen is so prominent in diagnosing and purifying the metzora, instead of the doctor. It also explains why the Torah is so focused on this particular disease: the Torah is not concerned with the proper treatment of diseases, but with the treatment of this particular malady, which, as we have seen, arrives as a punishment for sin. There is no prescription for a cure because the cure is not the kohen’s responsibility -- it is that of the metzora himself! His isolation outside the camp serves the dual function of punishing and creating an opportunity for him to do some serious, undisturbed soul-searching. Indeed, he may NEVER be healed if he does not do teshuva; he might remain forever caught between the condemning diagnosis of perek 13 and the redemptive post-healing rituals of perek 14.
Tzara’at looks like death. It is a personal message from Hashem that He is deeply unhappy with one’s behavior; in a sense, it is the physical manifestation of catastrophic spiritual decay. Hashem communicates with us not only by sending prophets, but by sending lesions which expose our internal, spiritual “death” to ourselves and all the world. It should be no shock that there is mourning, for someone has truly “died”! The mourner and the deceased are the same person, as the metzora mourns his own spiritual death/decay. He still lives, physically, although signs of death are apparent; and, like a corpse, his tum’a can be communicated merely by sharing the same roof.
The process of healing is one in which the metzora rids himself of the signs of death by re-creating himself spiritually. His time in banishment forces him to make the choice between continued decay and radical rejuvenation. If he chooses the latter, he becomes, to borrow a phrase from another religion, a “born again” Jew. He was dead -- there was even mourning for him! But, having done teshuva and thereby rid himself of the tzara’at lesions, he now he is alive once again. Removing the powerful tum’a incurred by his temporary “death” requires a ritual almost exactly duplicating the ritual for removing the tum’a caused by contact with a real corpse. Of course, the irony is that here, the corpse itself is being purified as it comes back to life!
But this step is not enough. Tum’a’s usual opposite is tahara, purity; but in order to re-enter the community from which he had been banished, the metzora needs more than simply purity. The community, after all, is not just alive, it is also kadosh, holy -- it is not just a community of people, it is Bnei Yisrael, Hashem’s “Am segula,” his “goy kadosh,” the holy nation. To rejoin the people, the metzora must also be re-sanctified, rededicated to Hashem as a member of His chosen people. In the same way that the earlobe/thumb/toe ritual raises Aharon and his sons from the kedusha level of all of Bnei Yisrael to the higher kedusha of kohanim, the same ritual raises the metzora from the kedusha of all people to the higher kedusha of a member of Kelal Yisrael. He is then ready to rejoin the community of Bnei Yisrael.
Shabbat shalom,
Eitan
Comments: please address all comments to eitan@juno.com
Archive: http://victorian.fortunecity.com/brutalist/608, believe that URL or not!
Subscribing: send a message to listproc@vjlists.com, leaving the “subject” line blank. In the body of the message, write, SUBSCRIBE PARSHA-THEMES your name
Unsubscribing: same as above, but substitute UNSUBSCRIBE