D’Var Torah for Shabbat of Tazria-Metzora from Rabbi Douglas Kohn
Dear Friends,
This is that despised week in the Torah-reading year when we encounter the two portions which address leprosy – Parshiyot Tazria/Metzora – the bane of every Bar or Bat Mitzvah mother’s scheduling worries. “Don’t let MY child get that Torah portion, and have to discuss skin eruptions and plagues of illness from the bema!”
Fitting, hunh?
However, when we open the second portion and look at its opening verse, we read the following verse, “This shall be the ritual for a leper at the time of being purified…” The Torah then goes on to describe the detailed eight-day ritual, including bringing birds and herbs for a sacrifice, shaving the hair off the person to be purified, washing clothes, and then sprinkling blood from a sacrificial animal on the right earlobe, the right thumb and the right big toe.
At first glance, the ritual seems archaic and purely superstitious. And, it may have been. There is nothing at all curative about the procedure. It just signals the end of one condition – unclean – and the readmission of one with another condition: clean.
But, there is something more compelling to be learned: this ritual came at the end of a protracted period when the person had been segregated outside the camp for a period of a week or two. The person had been quarantined, and then was deemed clean, and ready for readmission to the community. Sound familiar?
The teaching is not that people become ill or defiled, and need to be isolated, but that a community and individuals need to design rituals of readmission, to demonstrate that the dangerous period has concluded. Just as we demarcate the moment when Shabbat begins – with lighting candles – and so too we mark when it concludes – with Havdalah – so too it is vital to ritualize such periods in other communal events, such as when a person is deemed ill and must be quarantined, and then readmitted.
Our local, state and national conversation right now is beginning to focus on just that process: how do we readmit one another into our social intimacy? How do we open up not simply a dormant economy, but more importantly, our arms and ourselves to bring one another back into our presence?
Torah would have us create defined, special rituals which reopen our community. I don’t quite know what those rituals would be, today, but I am beginning to imagine and ponder. We probably won’t be sacrificing a lamb… but… who knows?
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Douglas Kohn
Dear Friends,
This is that despised week in the Torah-reading year when we encounter the two portions which address leprosy – Parshiyot Tazria/Metzora – the bane of every Bar or Bat Mitzvah mother’s scheduling worries. “Don’t let MY child get that Torah portion, and have to discuss skin eruptions and plagues of illness from the bema!”
Fitting, hunh?
However, when we open the second portion and look at its opening verse, we read the following verse, “This shall be the ritual for a leper at the time of being purified…” The Torah then goes on to describe the detailed eight-day ritual, including bringing birds and herbs for a sacrifice, shaving the hair off the person to be purified, washing clothes, and then sprinkling blood from a sacrificial animal on the right earlobe, the right thumb and the right big toe.
At first glance, the ritual seems archaic and purely superstitious. And, it may have been. There is nothing at all curative about the procedure. It just signals the end of one condition – unclean – and the readmission of one with another condition: clean.
But, there is something more compelling to be learned: this ritual came at the end of a protracted period when the person had been segregated outside the camp for a period of a week or two. The person had been quarantined, and then was deemed clean, and ready for readmission to the community. Sound familiar?
The teaching is not that people become ill or defiled, and need to be isolated, but that a community and individuals need to design rituals of readmission, to demonstrate that the dangerous period has concluded. Just as we demarcate the moment when Shabbat begins – with lighting candles – and so too we mark when it concludes – with Havdalah – so too it is vital to ritualize such periods in other communal events, such as when a person is deemed ill and must be quarantined, and then readmitted.
Our local, state and national conversation right now is beginning to focus on just that process: how do we readmit one another into our social intimacy? How do we open up not simply a dormant economy, but more importantly, our arms and ourselves to bring one another back into our presence?
Torah would have us create defined, special rituals which reopen our community. I don’t quite know what those rituals would be, today, but I am beginning to imagine and ponder. We probably won’t be sacrificing a lamb… but… who knows?
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Douglas Kohn
