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Share(1) What are we to make of all of these skin afflictions? Why do you think the Torah discusses skin afflictions in such depth and not other types of diseases? After all, many of these skin afflictions are not particularly contagious when other types of diseases are.
(2) The isolation in this parsha was meant to be a time of introspection for the person with the skin affliction because the affliction was purportedly caused by lashon hara. (Hebrew: לשון הרע; "evil tongue") is the halakhic term for speech about a person or persons that is negative or harmful to them, even though it is true.
(3) How will you as your synagogue leader .....????
(4) What do you think is the significance is of separating for seven days and then potentially seven more days?
Abigail Pogrebin on the podcast Parsha in Progress, episode 41: The directives are so particular, they're so specific, and that's what we're experiencing right now every day. "This is how to wash your hands thoroughly. This is how to separate and sterilize your groceries. This is how long the virus lives on a box or on cardboard." And also this is a reminder, whether or not our ancestors knew what was coming, that in a certain way, it never dies: the idea of plagues, of pandemics, of infection, of someone being a leper or diseased. It's the minutiae of the sterilization: "In order to come back, here are the things you need to do."
Now picture the same word or phrase written in large letters across your forehead for all the world to see - in fact, this word or phrase, this blemish across your forehead, is the first thing people notice about you.
How would other people react to your blemish? Would it change how they treat you? What do you think you would need to do to clear your skin?
Exerpt taken from Parashat Tazria: Body and soul - The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com)Parashat Tazria: Body and soul
Understandably many find the Passover story inspiring and the details of ritual purity due to skin ailments uninspiring in the extreme.
By DAVID WOLPE
Passover itself embodies the spiritual liberation of the physical self. Even more poignantly, the story of the liberation is paired with the regular Torah reading for the week, which may be the most insistently corporeal in the entire Torah – Tazria. At the same time that we contemplate God’s freeing the nation from Egypt and the promise of a new life, we are worrying about diagnosing a discolored spot that appears on the skin of a possibly diseased individual.
Understandably many find the Passover story inspiring and the details of ritual purity due to skin ailments uninspiring in the extreme. Yet there is in the combination of the two stories an important understanding about life that engages us to this day.
Freud famously said that “much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” It wasn’t that Freud thought happiness was impossible, at least for a stretch, but that the conditions of life were such that happiness could never be a permanent condition of existing. There will always be difficulties, presented both by the external world and by one’s own psychodynamics, that will make perfect happiness a chimera.
A religious tradition – or any regimen for that matter – which promises certain bliss is certain to disappoint. It is based on the fraudulent assumption that the natural state of human beings is unalloyed happiness. But we are creatures of struggle, the world a place of mixed blessings, and alongside joy is frustration, disappointment and death. This is not a pessimistic view of the world, but a clear-eyed one.
The naive might read the Passover story as though God was liberating the Jewish people to a perfect life. They had been slaves, and now miraculous freedom would make them forever happy. We begin to suspect that is not the case when the Israelites complain on their own, lamenting the lack of meat, the conditions of the desert, the absence of Moses when up the mountain. Still, there remains a part of us that is rooting for the ideal.
Along comes Tazria, with granularly described blights and an almost clinical approach to illness. The joining of Tazria with Shabbat Hahodesh is the Torah’s way of announcing to us: You see, you are never free from the everyday mishaps and pains of life. You cannot escape the constraints of having a body by elevating your soul. This is the reality with which we all live.
You do not leave Egypt for Eden; you leave Egypt to live a life of meaning and purpose, which includes suffering and pain, both of the body and spirit.
Yet we treat the pains of this world as best we can, creating ever more meaning and love, and believe that ultimately there is the promise of goodness, of liberation and of a time when the anguish of this world will be no more. ■
The writer is Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and the author of David the Divided Heart.