Community Torah Corner, May 2, 2025

This week we read the double portion of Tazria-Metzora. It has as its focus ritual purity and impurity, categories that we don’t really use anymore. When we say clean and unclean, we are thinking about dirt and when we wash our hands it is with soap.  But the Torah has a different concern, things that would allow us to connect to God via the communal sacred space – Mishkan or later the Temple.  One had to be in a state of ritual purity in order to enter the sacred space.  Our ancestors were concerned with transference of ritual contamination and so they isolated people who were ritually impure lest they spread it.  The ritual washing of the hands we still do before making motzi harkens back to this time, as well as the traditional washing after visiting a cemetery.

 

The parshiyot examine childbirth.  We can think of sacred places as one way of connecting to God. Then transformative experiences, like childbirth, are an alternative path to connecting with God that does not require a special location or rituals.  And so, in the language of our ancestors, such a person was ritually impure and stayed away from the sacred space because they simply had no need for it.

 

The parshiyot also looked at ritual impurity connected to skin ailments. A skin ailment that was contagious had to be isolated.  What’s more, the early rabbis saw in the skin ailment a physical manifestation of a spiritual blemish.  They make this leap based on the story in the parsha where God punishes Miriam with a skin ailment because she spoke out against Moshe’s wife.  So, the rabbis deduced that slander and gossip would lead to skin ailments. Many are familiar with midrashic adage that the name Metzora can be parsed to be motzi shem ra – spreading lies about someone. But the rabbis were not just concerned about lies; they were also concerned about sharing anything negative about a person, even if it was true. So, our tradition prohibits gossip and talebearing, except where sharing something negative about someone will protect someone else. Judaism is always balancing competing values to try and help direct us to do the right thing.  

 

So, before you open your mouth to say something about someone, stop and ask yourself – Is this negative? Does the other person need to know? And perhaps choose not to say anything at all.