Dvar Torah: Tazria/Shabbat Ha'Chodesh - God's Warning Signs

Parshat Tazria-Hachodesh

5774/2014

As I watch the preview for Noah, the new film about the famous family from the Book of Genesis that escapes alone from the destruction of the world, I can think of only one thing:  the actors in this movie look like they really are getting wet and cold. 

This story, while it is a story of utter destruction and a miraculous escape, is also a story about what is not supposed to happen again.  God promises that the world will go on, and God will not destroy the world again no matter how people think and act in the world, for good, evil, or somewhere in between.

Is God’s promise true?

While the world as we know it has not been destroyed in our lifetimes, or the lifetimes of our great grandparents, parts of the world have experienced war.  Post World War photos whether of nature, towns, or people certainly suggest a sense of large-scale loss, areas once populated with beautiful buildings now nothing more than a wasteland.  Nuclear weapons have the power to obliterate countries from the map.  Environmental degradation impacts the lives of animals and human beings all over the world. 

God may not destroy the world again, but sometimes it feels that we just might succeed doing it ourselves.

The promise not to bring a cataclysm like Noah’s flood does not mean, though, that God abandons humanity to a dismal fate.  We find in the way the Rabbis read our parsha, parshat Tazria, that God is still here, dropping hints to us, helping us to raise our awareness, giving us warning signs that we need to repair what is broken, and, on the other side of the coin, to celebrate what is good, what is right, and hopeful.

For the next two Shabbatot, we will study the ways that the ancient kohanim, the priests, acting like doctors of today, inspected, evaluated, and prescribed a response to an ailment called tza’ra’at.

We don’t know what tza’ra’at is.  We cannot identify it in modern medical literature.

It is peculiar because it also affects clothing and houses, and according to the Torah – it affects people, clothing, and houses in that order, or so it seems.

That’s not how the Midrash later read these passages.  They imagined that the order was completely reversed, even according to the order the Torah describes.  Tza’ra’at affects houses first, clothing next, and then the person last.  They discovered this in the story of Job whose misfortunes proceed just this way.

Why does God start with the house?

As a gentle warning from God that we are going astray and need to adjust our course.

If we do not do teshuvah, reconcile, change our ways, tza’ra’at will affect our clothing.

And in the end, God forbid, it will appear on our skin.

This is clearly a metaphor – a spiritual metaphor – a sign that starts outside of ourselves, a note of caution we feel inside, in our conscience, that may move closer and closer until it is so present and powerful that we can no longer avoid it.

A story to illustrate this point.

I was working on a school project with a colleague, a project about the meaning of Passover.  Her feeling is that the Seder is supposed to help us feel freedom, to feel we are part of the Exodus, but that she hasn’t felt that.  So there’s a structure, the Seder, something outside us that’s supposed to work in a certain way, over time maybe we also feel more and more that we’re not achieving that sense of feeling and connection, and eventually each of us feels just the opposite of free, locked into a pattern we cannot escape.

And thinking about this particular issue helps me figure out why the Torah starts with the person first – each of us has the gifts, the creativity, and the power to recast, reclaim, and reenergize any idea, any project that we care about, even the ancient Seder that we will observe in just a couple of weeks.

If we feel there is a warning sign in the world about something significant to who we are and what we believe, there is no better time than at the feast of freedom, to being the response.

The Seder is a relatively easy target, something that we can plan ourselves.  Let’s see the signs in the Seder itself and respond:  Are we really fulfilling the call of ‘All who are hungry let them come and eat?’ Are we using this time to remind ourselves what freedom is and to consider how we can help others to be more free?  Are we just going through the Seder motions – or are we telling the story in a way that engages us? 

But let’s not stop there – or we just might begin to feel as cold, soaked, and uncomfortable  as the characters in the Noah story even on the driest and warmest of spring days.

Shabbat Shalom

Shemini: Something to say?

Dvar Torah:  Shemini

Something to say?

Malaysia airlines flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8.  Now, thirteen days later, there are no significant developments in the search, only a few potential clues. 

The silence in this case is overwhelming.  Satellite images show signs of a few pieces of floating debris.  Air and ship crew look out windows, watch radar, and lower buoys into the water.  Shrines and vigils appear in different forms.  There was silence in the way that the authorities in Malaysia were lax in checking passports.  Silence as different countries in the region seemed to be napping when it came to regular surveillance.  Except for the anguished cries of family members pleading for information, there is a great deal of silence – silence that is a reminder for us here in the US of another day, not 13 days ago, but 13 years ago.

Far from the tragic events of 9/11 and the disappearance of hundreds on a commercial airplane, we contend with silence.  Silence is increasingly difficult to find.  The cell phone buzzes even when the ringer is off.  The town siren wails.  The radio blares.  It is difficult to find a moment or place of real silence, not just the absence of sound but silence as an opportunity to think deeply, to process, to hear what our hearts are saying.

Our ancestor Aharon, Aaron, brother to Moshe, first of the high priest of Israel becomes silent after flames from heaven consume his two sons Nadav and Avihu at the altar.  Putting aside for a moment why they suffer this fate, Aaron’s reaction is, “Vayidom Aharon,” and Aaron was silent. 

Aaron receives praise for his silence.  Rashi explains that Aaron then merits God speaking to him directly, but Rabbi Lipman of Radomsk once told the Rebbe of Kotzk that King David received a greater reward since at the time of David’s suffering he was not silent.  As we say every morning in Psalm 30, “Le’ma’an yezamercha chavod velo yidom!”  “That we will sing Your glory and not be silent!”  Even at a time of pain and suffering, David was able to sing to God.  And let’s not forget the immortal words from Kohelet, “There is a time for everything….a time to be quiet and a time to speak.”

Notice here that David’s choice to break the silence does not come as a result of discomfort.  We’ve all been there.  It’s the elevator, or the car ride, when a silence falls and we need to break the apparent discomfort of the silence with something, anything.  With David, he breaks the silence with something significant, praise to the Source of Life.

For all the silence that we need in our lives – silence from constant connection and communication, silence from the bombardment we get from breaking news that too soon turns out to be incorrect, silence from all the distractions that lead us away from our priorities and what is most important to us.  For all the silence we need, we also need to learn, and relearn, when and how to speak and speak up. 

While I respect Aaron’s moment of silent shock, I do not accept that he had nothing to say.  In our postmodern world, I cannot accept that his mind was blank.  What did he want to say in that moment? 

What would have been constructive and helpful to say to God in that moment?  To say to Moses? To Miriam? 

And when we do speak and speak up, we know that not only the words we say but the way we say them is so significant.  How can we express real emotion without letting emotion take over?  How can we express ourselves thoughtfully and logically without separating ourselves from what makes us frail, human, and non-robotic?

When we stand with our ancestor Aaron in his moment of distress, we stand with our fellow human beings – friends and family of flight MH370 who stand in shocked silence, and wonder what we will say, what we will do, to transform silence into meaningful words – but not only words – in Hebrew the word for ‘word’ also means thing, action, idea.  We see that when our machines, and other powers, fail or when evil people use machines and human powers to inflict pain on people, words alone cannot repair the damage, but words and actions together just might bring healing. 

Shabbat Shalom.