Rituals of Liberation: Metzora
By Rabbi Boaz D.
Heilman
April 15, 2016
After humans and dogs, I think the living creatures I am
most fascinated by are birds. Even as a
child, walking home from school I would often imagine sprouting wings. The way home would be so much shorter and
more interesting, I thought.
I am not the only one, of course, who has thought about growing
wings and flying. If this were so there
would be no jets or spaceships today; no Greek myths of men flying free from rocky
prison islands; no Biblical parables of ravens that fail in their mission and
doves that succeed.
In ancient religious practices, birds were often offered as
sacrifice. In the Torah, when a person couldn’t
afford a bull or a ram, a humble pigeon or turtledove would suffice.
This week’s Torah portion, Metzora (Leviticus 14:1-15:33), describes a ritual that involves
not one but rather two birds. One is slaughtered, the other is set free.
Metzora is one of
two parshiyot, or Torah portions,
that deal with highly contagious skin diseases.
The portions depict a time when little was known about science. All people knew was what they could see and observe
with the naked eye.
This primitive level of medicine, thank God, is no longer
practiced. What hasn’t changed however,
is the fear. Ignorance still leads to
fear, and there is still much we don’t understand. Tazria
and Metzora reflect our instinctive
fear of disease and its carriers. In ancient days, the sick were thus relegated
to an area outside the camp area, where they wouldn’t be able to interact with
the uninfected.
There were reasons for this fear. Debilitating, disfiguring and sometimes fatal,
disease weakens not only the affected individual but also the rest of the
community.
The term metzora
refers to a person afflicted with a skin disease that at one point was
translated as leprosy (today known as Hanson’s Disease). However, tzara’at,
the name used by the Torah, probably refers to a much wider range of
symptoms. By the 2nd century
already, the Rabbis dismissed the medical value of these portions and turned
their attention instead to other syndromes that tear communities apart—slander,
gossip and hearsay.
Parashat Metzora describes
the ritual of welcoming back a metzora,
a person who had previously been diagnosed as leprous, was sent out to the sick
colony, but subsequently was pronounced healed and allowed to reenter the
community.
There was much reason to celebrate this moment. We all remember what it felt like to return
to school after a few days at home with the flu, or that mixture of compassion and
admiration with which we were welcomed when we arrived with a thick cast on a
broken arm or leg. How much more so then,
for a person who had struggled with the specter of death itself? He or she would be received as one returning
from the dead. Grief would turn to joy, and
prayers of supplication to thanksgiving.
All promises and vows made to God now came due, payable with sacrifice
and celebration.
The Torah calls for a ritual that involves cedar wood, a
string of crimson linen or silk, some fragrant herbs, and two birds. Over a stream of flowing water, one of the
birds was slaughtered. Its mate,
however, was spared. The priest would
dip the living bird in some of the blood of the slaughtered bird, and then set
it free.
Watching the bird soar must have been a thrilling moment. Its euphoric flight symbolized our restored strength, our freedom to reenter our homes, to
rejoin our family and larger social circles.
At that moment we truly understood that we were given another chance at
life; that our existence was meaningful again; that we could be important—or at
least useful—once again.
At the same time however, an indelible memory of the illness
remained. Just like the bird that was
dipped in blood before being set free, so was the individual, though pronounced
healed, now branded with the mark of mortality.
It was a warning. It was a notice
reminding us that, although we were free, we were not without obligation. With memory comes responsibility: Towards those still sick, towards the needy,
the weak and the dispossessed.
These two portions in the Torah—Tazria and Metzora—are probably
the chief reason why there have always been—and still are—so many Jewish
doctors. The mitzvah—the commandment—of healing the sick is deeply imbedded
within us.
But there is more to this mitzvah than just the medical work that it entails. The Rabbis
teach that Metzora holds yet another
important lesson. It’s about gossip,
ostracizing and bullying. How quick we
are to criticize and judge others! We
look at the color of a person’s skin or at other individual characteristics, and
we immediately judge: Who may be
included among us, who must be excluded and shunned. We see differences and we turn them into signs
of shame. We ostracize the foreigner,
heap disdain on the less educated. And
we have too little patience for people whose opinions and views are different
from ours.
These are all human characteristics. We are social creatures, members of larger groups. We restrict membership in these groups to people
we know and can trust. There’s safety in
that—and in a terrifying world, full of uncertainty, that’s a good thing.
But the bird that we set free reminds us of those very
things that we fear—and yet which play an important part in life. Freedom means being open to think new thoughts,
to question old systems and look for new answers. Permitting mystery into our
lives enables us to look for solutions.
Uncertainty and even doubt can lead us to hope and faith. And getting to know the stranger can
lead to greater reliance and trust, and to a broadening of narrow horizons.
The Torah’s medical knowledge may have been scant and
primitive, but its larger lesson is that if wholeness is to be restored to a
broken society, there must be acceptance of differences and imperfections.
It is barely coincidental that we read this portion on the
Shabbat prior to the holiday of Passover, the holiday of our people’s
liberation from Egyptian bondage. Like
the freed bird of the Ritual of the Metzora,
we too were set free, the blood on our doorposts reminding us not only of our
mortality but also of our obligations.
At one point in the Passover Seder, we are instructed to dip
a finger into our cups of wine and remove one drop for each of the Egyptian
Plagues. As we do so, we remind
ourselves not only of our own abundant share of blessings, but also of the
suffering that is still so prevalent in our world. We are not permitted to lick our finger at
the end; we must always feel compassion, even for those who had not-so-long-ago
oppressed us, and certainly for the innocent among them.
Today, we live in a time and place where we are free to
wonder, to explore and to discover. We
are free to use our imagination, to create new worlds of knowledge and
wisdom. But at the same time, we must
not forget our obligations. That is the
significance of the middle matzah, the one we break during the Seder meal. While hiding one half for the children to
find at the end of the evening, the half that remains in our hands reminds us
of what yet remains to be done. It’s a
broken world we live in, and it is up to us to mend it.
As a people, we were set free from bondage, but not from the
moral responsibilities imposed on us by our faith and history. That is the lesson of Metzora; that is the lesson of Passover.
A happy and sweet Festival of Freedom to all, and Shabbat
shalom.
© 2016 by Boaz D. Heilman
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