Leviticus Cycle Five Metzorah

Metzorah

This week we continue with where we left off. The subject is what to do about leprosy.  And since there are very few recorded cases in the time period of Torah…according to the rabbis… this is really about lashon harah (painful words).

Metzorah is the second parasha that deals with this. The first is Tazria.  They both follow Shemini, the parasha in which Nadav and Abihu die and we are served-up the kashrut laws.  I’m giving a big picture here. But there’s a super-sized one as well.

Here it is.

We are putting the mishkan together.  This is our main focus.  God is giving Moses instructions and we are listening as best we can. Of course we are messing up quite a bit…but it never  gets in the way of the building of the mishkan. As Rashi has pointed out, Torah is non-linear so the action of the gilded calf (for example) could have happened at a later date. In any case, the mishkan- instructions are specific. We learn how it can satisfy its purpose. It is, after all, the place where God can dwell among us, a home for the Shechinah. How do we approach God? Come closer? It seems that we do so through offerings, the korbanot.  A huge amount of space is given to details of korbanot as soon as the mishkan is built correctly (as inspected by Moses).

Then it is time for the consecration of the mishkan…in other words the act of making it holy for God. And Nadav and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, in a famous quest for greater enlightenment, try to offer incense on the animal altar and get zapped.  They go to a high and holy place which must be a party… I’m looking forward to crashing it myself one day…but they also die and their father is sent into a state of silent shock and their brothers have to carry their charcoaled remains outside of the mishkan.  They don’t volunteer for that job.  Of course, Nadav and Abihu had seen the Shechinah earlier. Let me remind you, they climb to the top of Mt Sinai and  sit on a sapphire stone and get to have this ultimate experience with the prophet. Many of us as young adults are fortunate to have similar experiences to a lesser degree. We hang with those who have already paid their dues. Writers. Artists. Actors. Poets. We get to share ultimate visions with them.

 

In any case, while consecrating the mishkan Nadav and Abihu naturally  want to bring the whole experience to earth. Not just a part of it.

 What they also think is this:  This copper altar sacrifice, this God-in-the-fire, this is just a beginning.  And they want to ride that wave as high as it will get them.  And they do want to take the community with them.  After all, as it says in midrash, they want to place love on top of love.

Please note: They could always have gone into the woods or the desert and done their offering privately.  What’s important here is they were doing it for the community. Alan Watts writes a lot about the power of singularity and how it raises up the community.

To continue, they take incense from the incense altar and try to bring this to the animal altar.

There’s a small problem though.  The people are capable of animal altar experiences. This Shehcinah- on- the-mountain and all the incense-in-the-world…this is not yet accessible. The people in other words think they are at the pinnacle of God-intensity with the animal altar sacrifices. And please don’t get me wrong, it is a good place. It is good they are thinking this way.  But they don’t have any tools to access the incense altar. It’s beyond-possibility. And Nadav and Abihu know more and want to bring it all out, open it all up, reveal the whole phenomenal scene.

So the schism is too great and they get burned alive.

Here’s a small tangent. The kabbalists have a theory called reshimu. In general, it’s the essence of God here on earth. It’s what we don’t say and don’t reveal.

It’s important for two reasons. First, we can’t express God in words. Some things just can’t be said. Some offerings won’t embrace the very depths of our love. Best just to let the offering of that deepest level happen intuitively.  Second, if leaders open up their hearts and show all…and these are people who have studied Torah and hang out with the prophets on Shabbat way high in the hills for hours at a time….then maybe the people (because of their copper altar offerings) will feel they are qualified  to open up and show all to the same extent.

And, ah, the junk that can fly if we all just show all whenever we feel like it. The nastiness. The selfishness. The painful actions, however subtle. The self righteous behavior.  The abominable things that may come out, all kind of diseases…however frightening…in the name of God. Small pretentious comments…long strange silences…strange offerings….this is what we will find. No doubt.

So without trying to bring closure to the deaths here, I must say, from that death-scene forward it seems Torah goes OCD with procedures that revolve around cleanliness.  What goes into us must be clean and what comes out must be clean.  That’s because the last thing we want is a diseased mishkan. To be sure, the Shechinah wouldn’t want to make her bed there.

As it says in Torah… the people should be separated from their uncleanliness…so they will not die on account of their uncleanliness….. if they defile the sanctuary which is in their midst.

So given Tazriah-Metzorah  what we first need to accept is how one action, one expression of open-heart for God, one attempt on even the part of two teens, can  rock the whole universe. 

The lesson? Opening our hearts is not the same as showing all.  Therefore, it is our responsibility to show self-restraint and not all if we aren’t enlightened like Nadav and Abihu…and not only that…but to observe any tiny bits of damage in our surroundings…our houses and clothing and other people… and in ourselves.  And do something about it.

It goes beyond speech. This leprosy is in our actions, our glances, the movement of our bodies, the way we run from intimacy, make excuses, hold our head, laugh or cry. It’s in our emails. As the sage Resh Lakish quotes from Psalm LXIII…One who slanders makes his sin reach unto heaven. They have set their mouths against the heaven and their tongue walketh through the earth. 

What I think (as well) is that it’s copper altar stuff. We’ve made the animal sacrifice and we think we know the Shechinah. And so we act that way…with actions and words that raise us above others either in subtle ways or directly. But we haven’t seen the whole shimmering-pulse-of- racing-sparks-and-glowing-core-light of Hashem (like Nadav and Abihu). As we may or may not intue, there is much more.

I’d like to finish this with a small story. When I was young I became very ill.  One night I had that well known near-death visual . There was large pillar of light. It was brilliant and held a promise of such beauty I was overjoyed. I was floated into it higher and higher towards this round peep-hole and heard music.  I think I was about to enter a whole new dimension when I realized I couldn’t. My parents would miss me. I would hurt them.

When I landed my fever (I found out later) had dropped. But there was a problem. It was the middle of the night and I was nine years old and ants…little tiny biting busy ants…were on every inch of tangible reality. The sheets. The walls. The desk. Each piece of wool on the shag carpet. Each strand of my own hair. My fingernails. My lips. My eyes. My tongue. Only the air was clean of ants. I was delirious of course. Hallucinating.  But the material world was suddenly revealed in a strange new way.

I went hysterical crying. My father and sister came rushing in. And my father not knowing what to do pretended to crush the ants. I still have this memory of him stomping on them and wiping them from my skin and pillow. He was making a metaphoric sacrifice on the copper altar. And I kept crying.

Not so much because I was scared. But because I knew that the copper altar wasn't enough.  That no matter how hard my father tried he would never be able to kill the ants. None of us could that moment.  In fact, his efforts were only making them worse.  Not even my father could erase this new vision I had of the shadow on earth, the evil ant kingdom. Not even his determination and firm focus and belief.

My mother called the doctor and what he said was simple: Tell her that the ants aren’t there. Read a book to her. Talk about something else.

Of course, they gave me cold compresses and aspirin as well. And the ants went away.

I think there’s a lesson here that has very much to do with Metzorah. If we get close to the heights…either ourselves or through the experiences of others…the crash to earth will certainly be hard. The way to deal with it is this: Accept what is there (the ants or the boils or the scars) and check on the situation two or three times and do what is necessary but do not validate their existence through  uninterrupted focus. We must move on.  What we see is very much what’s in our eyes. If we clean them (with incense for example) it’s fascinating how the leprosy…in our house or on our clothes or in us…will just fade.

Here’s more. People who are unkind to us or disrespectful….those who act selfishly and don’t know it or speak condescendingly….it is best to separate  from the disease for a while  and give their actions a chance to fade. Focus on our own vision elsewhere.  Clean our own eyes. Have faith that this person will be doing the same.  Focus on love.  It works like ancient mystical rites. It’s our present day hyssop bush and little birds.  It’s the silence of healing.