Parashat Tazria–Metzora (Leviticus 12–15)
All, or Nothing at All
In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of baseball, and my thoughts are turning today to Ernie Banks, the Cubs’ great Hall of Famer, who used to say, “Let's play two today!”
Why am I thinking about Ernie Banks? Because somewhere in our Jewish past there must have been a Rabbi Ernie who said, “Let's read two this week. Let's not just read Parashat Tazria; let's read Metzora also.”
The reason that Rabbi Ernie said we should read two this week is because the Jewish year sometimes has an extra leap month added to it, to reconcile l2 lunar months, lasting about 354 days, to the solar year of 365 days. A Jewish leap year has 13 months, and you potentially need 54 separate readings to be able to have one Torah reading each week.
In a non-leap year, with only 12 months, you have to double up and sometimes combine two readings into one week. When a holiday falls on the Sabbath, calling for a special festival reading, that’s another regular reading that must be rescheduled — and come what may the entire Torah must be read, in sequence, in the course of a year. (Alternate systems have existed throughout history and still do.)
The bottom line is that this week and for three of the next four weeks we're playing doubleheaders on Saturday, as they used to do in the big leagues, so we can reach Parashat Bemidbar, the beginning of the book of Numbers, before the holiday of Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks (“Pentecost”).
The names of this week’s pair of readings, Tazria and Metzora, look and sound somewhat similar; Tazria comes from the root זרע z-r-ayin, referring to seeds and sowing, while Metzora comes from צרע tz-r-ayin, conventionally translated into English as having to do with lepers and leprosy. For now, I’m going to keep that same terminology, though the medical people tell us that this biblical affliction is not the leprosy of history, now called Hansen's disease. Instead, I want to talk about “purity.”
When you are a leper (in the Leviticus sense) who examines you? Not a doctor, but a priest. You may want to suggest that the priests were the people who served as the medical specialists in those days, and that may be true. But there is something more going on here than just a medical specialty. This week, we’re going to look at one aspect of biblical “leprosy” that seems, at first glance, extremely puzzling:
Lev 13:10 If the priest sees a white swelling on the skin … 11 the priest classifies him as tamei.
I’ve left out some of the clinical details; what I want to talk about this week is that word טָמֵא tamei — and about what happens in vv. 12–13: If the “leprosy” covers his entire skin, from head to foot, wherever the priest can see …
13 … he classifies the affliction as tahor. He has turned entirely white. He is tahor.
The NJPS translates the Hebrew word tamei as “unclean” and the Hebrew word tahor as “clean.” But this is not an issue of dirt. As you may know, these same two words, tamei and tahor, are used for an entire biblical system of what is sometimes also called “ritual purity.” This quality determines whether something, or someone, is permitted or forbidden to come in contact with things and places that are holy.
Now, it's easy enough to understand that if a person has some sort of strange looking discoloration on his body, you might be tempted to try to keep that person away from the center of holiness, assuming, as indeed they apparently did, that God was striking this person with some strange affliction. He had better stay away from the Temple or the Tabernacle until he was cured of the affliction.
But how can it be, if the affliction spreads to cover the person completely, that the person is to be considered ritually clean? It would seem that he is 100% ritually unclean. But that, in fact, is the kicker. It is precisely the 100% that makes the person clean.
I’m using these words clean and unclean rather casually; the other set of English words used to translate tamei and tahor are impure and pure. Even more than clean and unclean, these are words that also have potential moral implications, so sometimes people are a bit leery of using them nowadays.
Hebrew tahor, like English pure, can have a neutral, technical nuance. Two dozen times in Exodus (and three times in Chronicles) we find the expression זָהָב טָהוֹר zahav tahor ‘pure gold’. All but the last of these — the gold that overlays Solomon’s ivory throne in 2 Chr 9:17 — refer to the gold used in the Tabernacle or Temple: pure gold, 100% gold. Not 18 karat gold, which is only three quarters gold, 75%, but 24 karat gold. Admittedly, according to the World Gold Council, “in practice, there is likely to be a very slight impurity in any gold, and it can only be refined to a fineness level of 999.9 parts per thousand.” As we used to say, that is close enough for folk music.
The gold used for the Tabernacle, though, has no admixture, and neither does the leper of Leviticus 13 when the leprosy has spread completely across his body. It is not the leprosy itself that makes him unclean; it's the mixture of his leprosy and his regular skin.
The idea of mixture left the priests very uncomfortable. In Parashat Kedoshim (the nightcap of next week's Torah doubleheader), Lev 19:19 will prohibit the following three actions:
interbreeding two species of animals
sowing two kinds of seeds together
wearing shaatnez, cloth made of two kinds of material
The linsey-woolsey so beloved of early European settlers in America was totally, totally not kosher according to the book of Leviticus. (Hard to believe Cotton Mather wouldn’t have read this book, but perhaps he didn’t.) Even Deuteronomy, which has a more socially conscious perspective and looks on the priestly system with something of a jaundiced eye, has these laws:
Deut 22:9 You shall not sow your vineyard with two species … 10 You shall not plow with an ox and an ass together. 11You shall not wear shaatnez, cloth combining wool and linen.
Biblical religion does not like mixing. Mixing leaves you unbalanced. As my physical therapist wife could tell you, if you are unbalanced you are in great danger of falling. The next thing you know, you have cracked your skull and it’s all over.
Looking at the human body from a contemporary perspective, we have skin and an immune system that are meant to keep the stuff that isn't us from mixing with the stuff that is us. That, I think, is the essence of what the biblical system of ritual “purity” is meant to ensure as well. You do not want unholiness coming into contact with holiness. When things are mixed it's dangerous. When the leprosy spreads completely across the skin of the affected person, we may not know what he is, but whatever it is, he is 100% that. There’s no mixture there, so we can handle it. It’s easy for human psychology to deal with. There are many other obvious examples of this kind which I will leave to you to think about.
It may seem a bit strange for me to be making this point in a week when we have two readings mixed together, but in fact the original separation between these parashot is somewhat artificial to begin with. Next week, we’ll look at two chapters that were deliberately separated by the Bible itself and try to figure out why.