What is remarkable about the event when the Commandments were given is that it was a revelation to an entire people. Until now God had only revealed His Essence and Will to a chosen few. Noah, Abraham, Hagar, Sarah, Jacob, Isaac and others were the pre-Sinai recipients of the Word of God. They were singled out.
After the Sinai experience revelation was again restricted to individuals. Moses, Manoah, Hannah, Solomon and many prophets heard God. Throughout the long epochs from then until our day, never again were a people given the Message, only individuals.
One of the cited reasons for the mass revelation was that no one could proclaim that they alone were privy to the legislation of God. No person could assert they were singled out as special by the Holy One, blessed be He. Every participant at Sinai was equal. With this simple understanding of the greatest event in history will unfold the highest ideal for humanity.
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Tazria is a skin ailment. Some Sages declared that the skin disease came because the person was flawed. They had sinned through the words they spoke. The telltale mark on their flesh was an outward punishment of the malicious slander they spread. Only atonement could wash that mark away. Other commentators told that it was simply a disease that needed to be diagnosed, quarantined and cured. Perhaps it was neither. Perhaps it was both.
What is most telling from the Text is that when a person was seen to have the affliction people would cry out, tameh!, tameh!. "Unclean!" "Unclean!"
What humiliation! Not only did they suffer the embarrassment of a visible disease but it was trumpeted throughout the people. There was no hiding from their shame now.
The Talmud also questions why Tameh! would be shouted by neighbors. It reveals that the word Tameh! was the signal to pray for the person that was marked by the skin disease. People were moved by the announcement to come out of their homes, their workplaces and pray for the person that was wracked by emotional pain. In other words, they were not shunned or turned out. People were moved to action on their behalf.
Is this human behavior? Do people really act this way? If it were true there would be no leper colonies. If people behaved this way at public gatherings people would make as much conversation with the one-footed man as the well-coiffed debutante. Do they?
Elsewhere in the Talmud there is a fascinating and insightful discussion about good and bad prayers. What makes one worthy and another unworthy? In a dramatic example they give the following case: A person is coming home and they see flames leaping out of a house. Immediately they fear the worst and they utter a prayer, May it not be my house burning!
That is a vain and awful prayer, the Talmud tells. Why? we may wonder. Is that not a normal reaction? Would not most people say a similar prayer? Please let the house not be mine!
The Talmud instructs us it is indeed a reckless and vain prayer. In essence the prayer contains the undercurrent that it would be better if it were the blazing house of someone else. Not mine. The prayer wishes the pain be placed on another person. We are deliberately told to not say a prayer that insinuates another to suffer.
Somewhere deep in our minds is the belief that if another person loses, we win. Where our brother fails we succeed. While we may overtly pity the entrepreneur that flounders and drowns many of us thank God it was not us.... Now there is a better chance we have to succeed with less competition!
The message of Sinai is that we all stand together. Sinai seeks to change that mindset. When a single limb of the body is injured the body as a whole suffers.
In one of the most emotionally laden tales I have ever read about the Shoah, a father begged his rabbi to tell him what to do. It was erev Rosh Hashanna 1944 when hundreds of young boys were rounded up by the Nazis to be taken to the furnace the next day at Auschwitz. Many men found that their only sons were taken from them. One man went to a rabbi and told him that he had the ability to save his son from the murderers. They both understood he Nazis were determined to murder a specific number of Jews. If his son were saved another would die in his place. What should I do? he cried to his teacher. 1
What would Judaism teach? How would it instruct us to make a decision?
May God protect all His people, it should never happen again, and yet we are faced with similar quandaries every day. How we choose to slander and malign others for their apparent deficits happens countless times each day. If we decide to cut off lashon hara, idle chatter about people or ruthless slander, that will have an impact on the way we view ourselves and the way we see others.
Perhaps the deep lesson of the Torah is that every person is tameh and needs our concern. As broken creatures the worst thing we can ever do is break another one of the creations of God.
1 Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Meisels in Medkadshay HaShem
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D'var Aher:
TAZRIA
This week’s Torah reading is about decay of the body, but from from ordinary processes. Something is obviously wrong and a disease has taken hold of a person. We have been ill or have relatives who have been stricken with disease. Sometimes there are cures for the ailment; sometimes there is only palliative care.
We do everything we can live pain free and disease free. People have practiced medicines since the inception of humankind to free us from all kinds of afflictions.
The Torah approaches this subject from a different perspective. Although the question is never formally articulated, underlying the text is, “What do you learn from pain?”
Nothing in life should pass us without allowing us an opportunity to grow from that experience. Good and bad are both powerful teachers. In this sense there are two kinds of healing, one, which is physical and other, takes place on a far deeper level. I have seen many times when a disease enfolds a person and they cry out in dismay, “What did I do to deserve this?” It is a query that knows that nothing we did brought this affliction on. We are not guilty of infusing our body with the disease and yet here we are. Here it is. The spiritual healing that can happen afterward is acceptance and learning to live with, or die from, the disease.
But the Torah pushes us in a nuanced direction. It asks us to look at what our tongue has done. Have we spoken ill of people? Has our mouth caused psychic lacerations on acquaintances? Has our acerbic language been as devastating as cancer?
Torah is asking us to redirect our energies away from feeling sorry for ourselves and redirect them outward to heal ourselves and become a source of healing to others.
Disease does not always have a cure but it always has gifts tucked inside.
The Torah that we study, learn, teach our children and has been handed to us through the generations knows that we are potentially much better than we are. That is why we “turn it over, turn it over because everything is in it. And grow old in it” *
Pirkay Avot 5:22
1 comment:
Out of this I can hear the exchange between the human and God:
Human: Why me?
God: So, who else?
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