Physical and Social Illnesses
D’var Torah for Tazria-Metzora
By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman
April 19, 2023
Of the entire Torah, hardly any section is any more obsolete than this week’s double portion, Tazria-Metzora (“Conception-Leprosy,” Leviticus 12:1—15:33). Almost as soon as these portions were committed to parchment, their particulars became generalized and expanded.
Not that the subject matter isn’t important. Both portions deal with health issues that have been of the utmost concern forever—and are still so today. Conception and childbirth are at the core of the many rifts that are tearing our society apart today, and the COVID-19 virus with all its variants continues to cause if not actual panic, then at least foreboding and apprehension.
However, the skin disorders that the Torah portions discuss are so vague that any course of clinical observation and treatment became impossible from the very start. Tzara’at, the name given by the Torah to the skin disease that it attempts to describe, was mistranslated into Greek as lepra, giving rise to the misconception that it was leprosy, or as it is known today, Hansen’s disease. Yet even by the time of the earliest commentaries on the portion, the disease was explained as midrash—allegory—rather than literally.
Whatever the disease was, its symptoms were not restricted to the human body. Tzara’at could be found in clothing; it could also appear on house walls, both within and on the outside. The treatment varied as widely as the symptoms—from exclusion from any social interaction to the tearing apart and rebuilding of homes, and burning any object found within such a “diseased” house.
Based on linguistic tweaking, the rabbinic explanation was that the cause of the disease was gossip and slander. The disease turned from a physical sickness into a social one.
Today we would be justified in expanding these vices to also include bigotry and prejudice.
The “spots” and “discolorations” that we observe on one another may be real or imagined; but when we use them to judge one another, what are actually doing is spreading a disease that can be fatal both to ourselves and to others. When we belittle others because of the color of their skin or for any other physical feature that doesn’t fit a trendy social image, we cause irreparable damage not only to the other person, but also to ourselves and, by extension, our entire social system.
The allegorical explanation of these Torah portions is quite different from their original meaning and intent. Sickness—understood since the dawn of awareness as a form of divine punishment—is given a new explanation: it is caused and spread by us through ignorance and malice.
© 2023 by Boaz D. Heilman
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