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
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