Taharah and Tumah --Inside and Outside, Life and Death Parshat Tazria (and Metzora)

Struggling With Stigma: Making Sense of the Metzora

As Robert Alter notes,there is a single verb that focuses the major themes of Leviticus divide (hivdil).Leviticus focus on maintaining a stark divide between life and death is likely the key to understanding the laws governing the

metzora (one aflicted with tzaraat).

Bible scholar Tikva Frymer-Kensky explains that “if the disease was at all similar to modern leprosy, its affect in an advanced state was similar to the decomposition of a corpse… The afflicted individual, like one who has been in contact with a corpse, might have been considered to be in a no-man’s land between two realms which must be kept rigidly apart.” When Miriam is afflicted with leprosy after speaking ill of her brother Moses, Aaron asks Moses to pray on her behalf, tellingly pleading that their sister “not be as one dead, who emerges from his mother’s womb with half his flesh eaten away” (Numbers 12:12). For Leviticus, then, the metzora quite literally looks like death; the living dead conflate categories and blur boundaries—and are thus considered impure. ( http://mechonhadar.s3.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/CJLIParashatTazriaMetzora5775.pdf)

"Those Who Turn AwayTheir Faces " Rachel Adler

Societies dread invasion, disintegration, and inundation, hence the extremities and borders of our nations, and our bodies are loci of concern, places where integrity might be breached and order over-thrown… Human skin is a long continuous boundary that demarcates the most basic of borders, the border between the human body and the world outside it. Breaches in the skin [such as those of צרעת] are attacks on the body’s wholeness. They leave the raw flesh vulnerable to the external world or display flesh taken over by externalities…

Rachel Adler, “Those Who Turn Away Their Faces,” in Healing Through the Jewish Imagination, William Cutter ed (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2007), p. 145.

"Leakage of life-force"

"Types of mildew or mold in fabrics that cause erosion and destruction were yet another manifestation of the same leakage of life-force that is the source of all impurity in P and are therefore also "tzaraat". From the Jewish Study Bible, comment on Leviticus, Chapter 13, verses 47-58.

"Atonement Had to Be Done"

[Leviticus] “uses the simple idea of covering to build up a series of analogies for atonement from the skin covering the body, to the garment covering the skin, to the house covering the garment, and finally to the tabernacle: in each case, when something has happened to spoil the covering, atonement has to be done.”

Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999), pp. 53-54.

Strong’s Definitions

כָּפַר kâphar, kaw-far'; a primitive root; to cover (specifically with bitumen); figuratively, to expiate or condone, to placate or cancel:—appease, make (an atonement, cleanse, disannul, forgive, be merciful, pacify, pardon, purge (away), put off, (make) reconcile(-liation).

https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/h3722/kjv/wlc/0-1/

There was once a man who lived in New Orleans. A city that is like no other place in this country. Now, this man's name was Big Lunch, and folks called him that because he was known for always coming around midday and asking for whatever food people had to spare. He put that food in his pockets, in his coat, in his pants, and when that food went bad, he didn't mind. You could smell this man coming around even when he was blocks away because he never bathed. And of course, over time all that food and dirt began to crust and that crust caked over his skin. Somehow or other, Big Lunch got into an accident, and when they got him to the hospital, they washed him. They washed all of his dirt and crust off. All of it. But as days passed, instead of getting better, Big Lunch began to get sicker, sicker, until finally one day he took his last breath and died. "Because," she said, looking intently at me with a smile that had nothing to do with anything funny, "those people didn't know that all of that crust was what had been keeping him alive."

A story told by Toni Morrison and quoted in "The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison", The New York Times Magazine, April 8, 2015

"To send it away for Azazel into the wilderness" — according to the plain sense of the verse, to send it away alive to the goats that are in the wilderness, as we find with the birds of the leper: "And he shall let go the living bird into the open field," to purify him of his impurity. So too here, in order to purify Israel of their sins, he sends [the goat] into the wilderness, it being a place for the grazing of animals, as it is written: "And he led the flock to the farthest end of the wilderness" (Shemot 3:1).

Rashbam on Leviticus 16:10

Samuel ben Meir (Troyes, c. 1085 – c. 1158), after his death known as the "Rashbam", a Hebrew acronym for RAbbi SHmuel Ben Meir, was a leading French Tosafist and grandson of Shlomo Yitzhaki, "Rashi". (Wikipedia)

"Into the open field" alludes to the birds of the field, that he would send off the living bird that had been dipped into the blood of the slaughtered bird to the birds of the field, which are a class of destructive forces lower in standing than the angel of the wilderness that would take a bribe on Yom Kippur. [That bird] would carry away the sins of the leper in the same manner as the goat that was sent to Azazel to the wilderness.

Rabbeinu Bahya

Bahya ben Asher ibn Halawa (בחיי בן אשר אבן חלואה‎‎, 1255–1340) was a rabbi and scholar of Judaism, best known as a commentator on the Hebrew Bible.

How is the Kohen Effective?

"How, then, is the kohen helpful to the person who discovers a disturbing discoloration on his/her skin? Let’s circle back to Ted Kaptchuk, the professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Later in the Hidden Brain episode that I mentioned before, the host explored the therapeutic effect of placebos even when the patient is told in advance that he/she will only be receiving a placebo, describing a study involving patients suffering with IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, a very painful chronic affliction.

'It was an open-label placebo trial – instead of deception, patients would receive what Ted has called radical honesty. The study was based on an insight – the placebo effect wasn't just about the pills; it was about an edifice of drama, rituals, and the trust between patients like Linda and their doctors. Even though Linda was disappointed to get a placebo, she followed her doctor's orders.

“I just took them and went about my day. I said, this is not going to work if it's a sugar pill. And it wasn't till the fourth day I realized I wasn't sick anymore. I said, this can't be.”

Starting on that fourth day, the pain that Linda had suffered through for a decade vanished."

Sermon on Tazria, by Asher-Chaim Shalman

Anthropological Perspectives

From, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge Classics), First copyright 1966.

by Mary Douglas

…...but Van Gennep had more sociological insight. He saw society as a house with rooms and corridors in which passage from one to another is dangerous. Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others. The danger is controlled by ritual which precisely separates him from his old status, segregates him for a time and then publicly declares his entry to his new status. Not only is transition itself dangerous, but also the rituals of segregation are the most dangerous phase of the rites. It seems that if a person has no place in the social system and is therefore a marginal being, all precaution against danger must come from others. He cannot help his abnormal situation. This is roughly how we ourselves regard marginal people in a secular, not a ritual context. Social workers in our society, concerned with the after-care of ex-prisoners, report a difficulty of resettling them in steady jobs, a difficulty which comes from the attitude of society at large. A man who has spent any time ‘inside’ is put permanently ‘outside’ the ordinary social system. With no rite of aggregation which can definitively assign him to a new position he remains in the margins, with other people who are similar credited with unreliability, unteachability, and all the wrong social attitudes. The same goes for persons who have entered institutions for the treatment of mental disease. So long as they stay at home their peculiar behaviour is accepted. Once they have been formal]y classified as abnormal, the very same behaviour is counted intolerable. A report on a Canadian project in ‘95 to change the attitude to mental ill-health suggests that there is a threshold of tolerance marked by entry to a mental hospital. If a person has never moved out of society into this marginal state, any of his eccentricities are comfortably tolerated by his neighbours. Behaviour which a psychologist would class at once as pathological is commonly dismissed as ‘Just a quirk’.

Resources:

Prof. Rabbi Wendy Zierler, The Skin of the Metzora and the Heart of the Messiah

https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-skin-of-the-metzora-and-the-heart-of-the-messiah

Rabbi Dr. Shai Held, Struggling With Stigma: Making Sense of the Metzora

https://www.academia.edu/21697468/Struggling_With_Stigma_Making_Sense_of_the_Metzora

Shalman, Asher Chaim,

It Grows on Me – But Not Literally, Sermon to be delivered at Rose Crown Minyan, Tazri'a, April 13, 2024