Leviticus Cycle 6 Tazria

 The Real Stuff

Tazria can be a difficult parasha. It’s the real stuff, no rainbow. It’s all about leprosy, or as our rabbis say lashon harah (gossip). Clearly,  it’s the grime (the grime of the era) served straight up,  stamped in our sacred writings, on the same parchment as the Holy of Holies  and we have to swallow it as does Ezekiel.  We have to know it.

To make it even more shocking, there isn’t any way to really sing it.  Seek as you might, there’s no  Shir Ha-tzara’at  in our sacred writings.  There also isn’t a story wrapped around it, any embellishment or intimate drama, a bad guy or a good guy, a hot headed race to the finish line, a  love-clash, a sex-scene, a flood, a mountain, a cool cow or even a scolding.  The whole thing is metaphor, one extended monstrous metaphor. Therefore there isn’t any way to even metaphor it.  As some of us poets might know, you can’t metaphor a metaphor. 

One could argue that a great Torah-leprosy story  stars Miriam. But as we know Miriam isn’t mentioned here. Even more, the priests are protagonists but they don’t speak. For example, when a priest decides that a man is leprous we don’t see the word omer.  The victim isn’t even mentioned. We see for example: v’timaoh hakohen. Literally: And tamay the priest. We make sense out of this by translating it as: The priest declares him tamay. But it isn’t nearly that personal. I mean the intimacy of conversation is sliced out. 

Note:  While many translations hint that tamay means unclean I don’t agree. It’s more of an other-worldliness, an inability to connect on an earth-level. Here it’s placed on the sick, the physically sick, the spiritually undoubtedly crudely in-your-face subtly sick even in the pretense of health. In other places of Torah though tamay does not mean sick. We are simply in a subset of a greater idea. And that’s fine. But it needs to be said.

Finally, we can shine this grime up fine. But we know it's just a shine. We know that people can go real low. They can stoop lower than the insects that crawl on their bellies. They can set poison to relationships, to whole villages, to our water and to our minds. They can sell us their poison all wrapped up like chocolate and diamonds. We can become it, follow its lead because grime can be chic. We can fill our minds with so many toxins that even the kindest among us can’t scrape it all out with prescriptions of compassion and seclusion.

Yes, this grime spreads from skin cell to skin cell, from one false smile to the next, from human to human, from human to his clothing. It bores its way through the animate and inanimate. This is what we need to deal with while we are human. Good thing to know.

Let’s change the subject for a moment. I heard something that fascinated me recently. My daughter was talking to me about her classes at the University of Oregon. She was telling me how the Natives, before the onset of great contagions like Manifest Destiny, did not know about contagious diseases. In other words (and my daughter gets high grades) it seems that diseases among the Natives were not contagious until the White Man arrived. To them, infectious diseases were wildly strange. It was as if one man had a wound and it would spread to the skin of another man.

  

How horrifying to suddenly be faced with physical contagions. How horrifying to suddenly be faced with spiritual ones.  We are not all that different from the Natives these days. What we’ve done to them we are doing to ourselves, slowly, painfully, with often horrific results.

There’s hope here though. By taking the intimate story and personal drama out of the parasha, we are (as Heschel notes in God in Search of Man) in the realm of philosophy. And no doubt, philosophy..and the parasha… allow us to move in two directions. We create our boundaries. By noting our excruciating sensitivity (and the channels of water, air and blood) we can transmit beauty instead of an existential nausea.

Think of that!

Focusing on the beauty of birth and seeing how to spread life is an option. It’s certainly much more fulfilling than seeing how to avoid the spread of spiritual death. 

But it all does spread, that’s the message, even beyond our dreams and nightmares, even beyond our culture, our seed, our personalities, our beings and our souls. 

We need to discern and choose therefore what to pass around. And it can be real and joyous, amazingly sensual and vibrant, fecund and alive. All it takes is Torah-focus, exact vision, practice, decision and sometimes the ability to pull back, take the story out of the human, even to take the human out of the human. There is nothing wrong or insensitive about this. It allows us to swallow the message, to know it.  It’s powerful.  It’s the sweat-filled and grueling construction of an important path…the path to Hashem.