Between Life and Death—Matters of Health

Between Life and Death—Matters of Health

D’var Torah for Parashat Tazria/Metzora

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

As a teaching, the Torah almost at once begins with failures.  Adam and Eve fail to teach their children morals; Cain fails to control his anger and frustration; Noah fails to advocate for the world around him and for the fellow created-beings that he is one of.

How else could the Torah also teach about the proper and right choices that humans can make?

It’s all about error and correction.

Even 3000 years ago, when stories of the Torah began to be told and retold, human beings were aware of their frailties, both spiritual and physical.  How to overcome these innate frailties became the chief concern of the Torah.

Moral choices are tough enough.  What this week’s double portion, Tazria/Metzora (Leviticus 12:1—15:33), deals with is the ones you can’t do much about to begin with:  the physical failures of the body, the moments in one’s existence when life hangs on the balance.

Nature is only orderly when it works.  When it doesn’t, it’s a mess.

Triumphing over disorder is Godly, the Torah teaches.  And it is also what makes the human being so heroic.  In attempting to be Godlike, humans learn to overcome weakness and illness. It is not only important, it’s a holy thing to try to regain one’s strength.

Because of the frank way in which the Torah speaks of the human body, along with all its possible functions and malfunctions, nobody wants this double portion as his or her bar/bat mitzvah portion.  And yet its impact on Judaism and civilization as a whole has been—and continues to be—enormous. 

The diagnostics described in the Torah may be primitive, but the process of isolation, observation and examination that the priest has to follow has become the foundation of modern science itself.  It’s no wonder that medicine and Judaism have been so closely intertwined through the centuries.  Healing and caretaking, the Torah teaches, are Divine.

Overcoming the illness begins with diagnosis.  It’s a process that may take weeks, and sometimes also involve radical treatment.  A person may be excluded from the community—though never abandoned!  A garment (yes, clothing can become infected!) sometimes must be burned.  And a house—think mold—has to be fixed; sometimes as little as taking out and replacing stone or two and re-plastering is enough.  Other times, the whole house must be demolished; even its dust must be taken to a place where it can’t infect other people’s homes.

Caretaking and nurturing doesn’t stop with the physical.  The early Rabbis (1^st through 6^th centuries) taught that verbally maligning and spreading malicious gossip about others is as bad as any infectious disease.  Not only our homes and clothes—even the words we use to communicate with one another-- can become diseased.  Words can create; words can heal.  Words, it turns out, can also hurt you.

A further lesson that can be learned from this double portion is that it isn’t enough just to declare a person healthy again. Following recovery, reintegration into the community is just as important.  Ritual and communal celebration marked the occasion then as today.

Not in the least irrelevant, the book of Leviticus is all about connecting humanity with God.  Holiness is a thread that extends throughout all existence.  The patterns are infinite.  But sometimes, for any number of reasons, the thread breaks and the design disappears.  At such moments it is important—so important that we label it “holy”—to repair the damage, to reweave the fabric.  We do so not by instinct, but rather by observation and skill, two abilities that we humans can hone to near perfection.

Tazria/Metzora teach that health and holiness—science and religion—aren’t incompatible.  In fact, they are inseparable.  Overcoming failure and frailty is the main lesson of the Torah.  Built into the human system, failure and success are intertwined.  How we deal with both is what can make us great.  In fact, nearly Divine.

As the Yiddish proverb goes: Abi gesundt.  You should only be healthy, everything else will be there too.

©2012 by Boaz D. Heilman