Leaving and Returning: A Drash for Tazria-Metzora

© Trisha Arlin

This week we are reading a double portion, Tazria Metzora.  Both of these parshiot are primarily concerned with a kind of uncleaness, a lack of purity, that manifests itself as skin disease.    This disease has been incorrectly called leprosy,  but it's actually rather mysterious, especially since it can also attack clothes and buildings.   The source of the disease was traditionally often thought to be gossip, lashon hara, evil tongue, harmful speech..  If you gossiped it would first attack your home, like mold, and if you kept gossiping, then it would stain your clothes, and if you still kept gossiping then it would painfully attack your skin.  Can you imagine if that existed now, with facebook and the internet?  The whole world would have skin disease.  But back then, if you got it, according to the Torah, you would then need to be isolated for a period of time until the disease went away.   This was perhaps as a quarantine, to keep otherse safe from your disease, or perhaps to keep you away from the source of your illness, the people about whom you could not stop gossiping.

Okay, that was then, this is now.  What does it mean to be unclean or diseased now?  We understand the logical scientific causes of germs and cancer and trauma now, and we know a lot about how to treat them, but what about the isolation of illness?  Have you ever been ill and found yourself losing contact with friends and family?  Maybe because they were afraid or uncomfortable or felt helpless in the face of your pain, or maybe you became depressed and/or too tired for the effort to be social?  Did you feel shunted aside, or quarantined, or were you the one doing the quarantining?  Did your pain send you outside the camp?

And what if going outside the camp could help you, like it helped the gosspiers stopped gossiping.  What if you looked upon that separation as a holy separation.  The word kadosh means separation, we separate Shabbat from the rest of the week and make it holy.  How can we do the same for ourselves?

Rabbi Shefa Gold writes in her book Torah Journeys:

"There are many times in life when it may be necessary to seculde oneself for a time....Someone...might need to separate himself from the community for a time in order to pay close attention to inner changes which are the causes of outer confusion.  At a time of inner growth, it might feel like your life has become too small.  There is a chafing, an irritability and it is time to leave the camp.  ...The spiritual challenge of Tazria/Metzora is to know when to swparate yourself from the community and know how to return."

One way make this holy separation, to leave, to go outside the camp, and then to return is through rituals that are full of meaning, familiar and repeatable.  In this weeks torah portion, they are animal sacrifices, in our lives they are songs we sing, the special days of a Bar or Bat Mitzvah, when light the shabbas candles, a wedding, , a bris, a funeral, all of these set us apart and give us time to think about our experiences, work our way through the birthday, or a day of rest, or the joy of birth or a new couple, or the loss of a loved one.  Or there's a holiday, we've just had a slew of them.

And we are in the middle of what feels to me like the ultimate in separating out, the Counting of the Omer, when we count from the second night of Passover for 49 days, seven weeks to Shavuot, when we celebrate the receiving of the Torah.  I am counting the omer the year, for only the second time in my life, and each night when I do the count, each and every time, after I say the blessing for the omer, I wonder, why am I doing this ridiculous thing? What spiritual purpose could this acknowledgement of how many days I've been counting serve?  Some will say, it is like a child counts down with anticipation  until his birthday, we are counting down towards the receiving of the Torah.  Others say it's a leftover from the Temple days, when we used this count to know when to harvest certain grains.  But I have the calendar on my phone to tell me when it's Shavuot, and I can barely keep one potted plant in my kitchen alive, let alone a field of wheat or barley or whatever.

And yet this simple counting has become one of the most profound things I do.  For me it's a holy discipline, to note each day, to keep each day separate with it's own count, to not let one day of those forty nine days meld into another.  Each day when I start the count I leave the camp and step outside of myself.  And when I'm finished with the count I step back into the day.  And knowing I'm doing this ritual with millions of other Jews around the world gives me great comfort, especially if I'm having a bad day. 

Most of the time, the way that I both separate from and rejoin the camp is through prayer.  Sometimes that's in community, usually but not always at shul or other Jerwish settings, sometimes that's in the writing and sharing of my own prayers with that community and sometimes, its in the writing ofpersonal prayers that are for my eyes and heart only.

So I'd like to offer this prayer to you tonight, for all those in physical or emotional pain, for all those who feel outside the camp:

I need to say a Healing Prayer.
But I can't do it.
I don't have the soothing words.
I’m in pain
Right now
And it's been going on for a while
And it looks like it's going to last longer than it takes to say any prayer.
So instead
I will say

A Pain Prayer. 

Blessed One-ness,
A friend died suddenly
And I miss her.
I lost my job
And my despair is showing.
I don't have a partner
And I'm lonely
I'm losing my home
And I will never be comfortable again
My child is sick
And I in dread of what awaits him.
I’m old
And I don’t recognize my body any more.
I’m injured
And I'm becoming my pain.

Did I name any of your sorrows?

 What was solid is porous,
What was secure is scary,
And everyone wants to hurry me through my grief.
It will be so much better, they say, when this is over:
You will be transformed!

Yes, I say, but into what?
Yes, I say, but I’m not there now!
Yes, I say, but please, let me mourn first. 

Refa’aynu Adonai V’Nayrafay
Heal us God, and we shall be healed.
Can this be true?
Elohai neshama sh’natata’bi,
The soul placed within me is pure and cannot be lost.

So where is that pure soul?
Where is that healing of the body, mind and spirit?
Is it in the music?
Is it in my friends?
Is it in prayer? 

So I listen to the music
And I am transported away from the hurt.
I look around at my community
And I am taken care of.
I recite the Shma
And I speak to God.

Baruch atah Adonai
Brucha at Shechina

Bringing connection when there is separation,

Remembering joy even when we cannot.

We are blessed to be part of this holy wholeness

Even if we understand so little of it.

We are blessed to have received so much love,

Even when it is lost.
And we pray for the strength to perceive the blessings

Even when it hurts so much.

Ruach HaOlam, 
Breath of the Universe,
I guess this is a healing prayer after all.

   

Amen. 

Tazria - Separation

I was randomly assigned to do this drash for my community, Kolot Chayeinu, and it turned out to be both the best and the worst parsha for me to contemplate right now, as I am in the process of cleaning up and out of my home of 22 years so I can sell it not out of choice but out of necessity. This cleaning is both a burden and a purification, and it begins a separation that in the end will be helpful and maybe even fantastic but that right now is very sad for me. But sometimes the body must be taken care of before the spirit so it can approach the metaphorical mishkan. So--

Tazria is short and divided into three sections, all of which are about how to purify something or someone when you or it is tameh, that is, impure and unclean.

The first part is about the customs necessary to a woman after she has given birth. The second, and longest section, is about how the high priest must diagnose that someone has a skin disease of some kind, when one’s skin is tame, impure, commonly translated as leprosy but sounding more like really bad psoriasis that also makes your skin turn white. The third part is about how cloth or leather can become unclean or has become impure, which in the translation I read sounds like the cloth has gotten a disease, an affliction, which sounds absurd, but which the rabbis interpreted to mean some kind of mold or fungus.

And then of course, in all instances there are rituals for making the impure, pure, the unclean, clean.

In the parsha, unclean appears to be anything that touches body fluids, anything that oozed and it is assumed that these fluids were associated with death and anything that touched anything associated with death could not approach the Mishkan and thus could not receive expiation through temple sacrifice, through the cult practices of the Mishkan and later, the temple.

To my modern ears, at first glance this all appears rather ridiculous. A woman has a baby and that makes her unclean? Be fruitful and multiply? How do you multiply without childbirth? I reject that utterly. And, it turns out, the rabbis did, too.

Nehama Leibowitz sums up their thinking,
“The new life within her, the mother, made her deeply conscious of the greatness of the Creator and at the same time of her insignificance and the dust, ashes and impurity of man’s origins and for this reason she brought a sin-offering.
I can accept that. She is mindful of how awesome and spectacular the birth was, and she places herself, humbly in that continuum.

In the second case, that of the skin disease, the rabbis decided that the sufferer must have been guilty of the sin of gossip, lashon hara, the evil tongue (a sin with which I more than intimately acquainted with, that and a life long mild case of psoriasis…). This sin can be so destructive that the sinner must be marked by God with skin disease, declared unclean and separated out, forced to live in a tent outside the community. And you don’t need to guess when the gossiper has repented, you’ll know when the skin heals.

More significant to me, is that all three prescribed rituals to clean the unclean, the ones for having had a child, for having a skin disease and for having moldy clothes, all demand, at some point, the separation from the community of the impure component—the recent mother, the afflicted sufferer, the disgusting cloth.

Why must they separate from the community?

Modern commentators talk a lot about Shabbat when they write about this parsha. The separation that each act of ritual cleansing demands is not unlike the separation of Shabbat from the rest of the week. Shabbat separates us from time, from the past with all our mistakes and the future with the likelihood of many more. The bloody necessities of birth, the sad disabilities of illness, the inevitability of decay and death, those are behind or in front of us but they are not now. Today, on Shabbat, I am in community and conversation with God however I understand that today. Today on Shabbat, sadness, stasis, spiritual desolation, depression, alienation and death are put aside and I am kadosh.

Rabbi Shefa Gold writes,
Often, a person's growth happens on the inside before it manifests in the outer world. The spiritual challenge lies in navigating this awkward time of dissonance between inner and outer. During this time the two realities must be reconciled. It is an uncomfortable time because there is a tendency to resist change and that resistance can manifest in the physical body. Retreat time is required in order to attend to and integrate the inner changes. The spiritual challenge of Tazria/Metzora is to know when to separate yourself from the community and to know how to return.

There is no absolute purity. Today, on Shabbat, there is only the process of seeking purity, of seeking wholeness. That is what tefillah, Gemilut Hasidim v’tikkun olam are, I think. Through prayer and acts of loving kindness and repair of the world we seek and sometimes attain connection. Together we welcome new lives, wash our soiled clothes and comfort each other in times of affliction. The word Shalom means Hello, Good-bye, Peace and it also mean whole, complete.

So, I wish you all a full, whole, repairing, sanctifying, expiated completed and peaceful Shabbat. Shabbat Shalom.