Body and Soul: Tazri'a

Body and Soul

D’var Torah for Parashat Tazri’a

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

Tazri'a (Lev. 12:1-13:59), this week's Torah portion, is an anthropologist's delight.  It takes a person back to the earliest tribal times, describing rituals that precede books, rules and civilization.  Child bearing, circumcision... family purity regulations and relationship taboos...   These are some of the details that this portion addresses.

And then there's the whole second half of the portion, dealing with a mysterious illness so dreaded and misunderstood that it required repeated observation and examination by no less than the priest himself.

Ancient translations suggest that this illness is leprosy.

Misunderstood until even most recent times (see how it’s treated by Hollywood in the movie Ben Hur), leprosy was a disease that caused a person to be cast out of the camp.  Totally at the mercy of the elements, the only company this person would ever have for the rest of life would be other lepers, all equally miserable, dejected, rejected and hopeless.

That this was the case in ancient days is more than probable.

Which is why this portion is in the Torah to begin with.  It couldn’t remain so.  Not for a people that sanctifies life and sees healing as a religious commandment.

Up until this portion, the laws of the Torah regulated our relationship with one another and with God under ordinary conditions.  At times we do well; other times, not so well.  So we learn about justice, about compassion, about consequences and about repairing damages.  The Torah even teaches us how to take care of our souls.  The guilt that sometimes gnaws inside us, the feelings of hopelessness that sometimes envelop us, even the surges of joy that make us want to burst out in song—we learn to share these even as we realize that beyond mere existence, our ability to reflect on the meaning of our existence is one of God’s greatest gifts to us.

So now the Torah turns our attention to the peculiar and extraordinary, to the challenges and failures that our physical bodies are subject to.  Having learned to create and maintain sanctuaries to God, we focus on the temple that houses our soul, precious gift of God that it is.  We are only well insofar as our bodies and souls are healthy, and both have this habit of falling apart…

Tazri’a, even as it addresses difficult health issues, doesn’t stop with minutely detailed description of any number of revolting and frightening skin ailments.  It carries with it important instructions for taking care of the ill.

Without a doubt, the knowledge of medicine in ancient days was limited to what could be observed by the naked eye.  It was the priest’s duty to examine—over and over—the infected person.  Any suspicious change could harbor danger to the entire community.

Contagion has always been a fact of life, no less today when we know about germs and viruses than in ancient days.

In tribal societies, taking care of the ill always fell to the closest relatives, but also to the medicine man or woman—the one who knew about the magical healing powers of herbs.  The Torah takes the magic out of this procedure as it hands the responsibility of examining and healing the patient to the priest.  In his duties we see the beginning of real medicine, based on the scientific method—rational, observable, repeatable.  The large number of Jewish physicians throughout time and all over the world is evidence to the seriousness with which we internalized the lessons of Tazri’a.

It’s interesting that the Torah does not associate tzara’at—this dread skin disease—with punishment from God.  Though it is probable that, at the time of the writing of this portion, illness was often seen as the hand of God, in this portion this kind of association is not made.  That task of interpretation was left to the Rabbis, the scholars who looked at this portion hundreds of years after it was written, scratched their beards and heads (hoping the flakes they saw in their hands weren’t the beginning of something terrible) and remained mystified as to what in heaven’s name the writers of this portion had in mind.

So, using a linguists game, they associated tzara’at, the name of this dread disease, with the sin of slander (motzi sheim ra’).

From a physical disease, they turned it into a social and spiritual disease.  Just as leprosy isolated an individual and made him or her feel unwanted, rejected by humanity, so does slander.  And whereas leprosy (or Hansen’s Disease as it is known today) is eminently curable with treatment (and not quite so contagious as ancient peoples feared), not so malicious gossip.  It requires much more a much more difficult course of treatment, is highly contagious, and it often kills.

Even if leprosy isn’t directly the consequence of slander, the physical and spiritual effects are similar enough.  This fact did not escape the deeply probing eyes of the ancient priests and then, somewhat later, the Rabbis.

And so the mitzvah that the Rabbis draw from this parasha is that we must eliminate both kinds of this malignancy, the physical as well as the spiritual/social.  Isolation of the slanderer is the first step (equal measure to the mockery and isolation brought upon the object of the slander).  Repeated examination, carried out by the wrongdoer as well as by an objective judge, must determine how honest and thorough is the repentance.  Only then is forgiveness possible.

At the end of Tazri’a, a ritual is described in which the now-healed individual is welcomed back into the community.  It involves two birds; one is killed and sacrificed.  The other is set free to fly, free to resume its life and lifesong.  Hopefully, a similar ritual is performed if and when forgiveness is granted to the slanderer.  Some part of us dies at each moment, with each wrong that we do or is done to us.  But something new is born as well, a more healthy person and a more wholesome society. 

Holiness is difficult to maintain in a physical world.  Perfection is not given to us—only the power to heal, to correct wrongs, to rebuild relationships, and to strive even harder to do things right the next time around.

Kein y’hi ratzon—may this be God’s will.

© 2014 by Boaz D. Heilman