This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary Rosh Yeshviah Rabbi Jonah Rank, has been sponsored anonymously.
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In the city of Lenexa, Kansas—formerly known as the ‘Spinach Capital of the World’—one particular house broke a new world record when, over the course of half a year, 2,055 brown recluse spiders were either removed from or killed inside the house. These arachnids carry necrotic venom, and hundreds of medical diagnoses out of California have blamed the brown recluse spider for alarming bites that have maddened patients and physicians alike. The entomologist Rick Vetter has, however, questioned this specific form of arachnophobia; after all, that family in Lenexa’s famously infested house was never bitten once, and there are no brown recluse spider populations in California.
Human beings are inclined to discover phenomena we do not understand and, amidst our confusion, invent new kinds of fears. These sorts of anxieties appear in our very own Torah, which, in the words of the earliest generations of rabbis, “spoke in the language of human beings” (dibberah torah kilshon beney adam, “דברה תורה כלשון בני אדם;” see, for example, Sifra 4:8:1 on Leviticus 20:2). Therefore, the Book of Leviticus—with its concern for purity, well-being, and wholeness in all parts of life—was bewildered by physical ailments.
When we read in the Torah this week about tzara’at (צרעת, usually translated as “leprosy”), we encounter the residue of a civilization frightened by the very image of people bearing some mostly harmless shiny or scaly skin disease, almost certainly due to no fault of their own. Although modern dermatologists do not declare that uneven skin tones result from the private moral lapses of the patient, our spiritual ancestors found no other plausible explanation for why skin discolorations suddenly occur. For all their medical needs, the ancient Israelites placed their faith in God and in the finest family of medical practitioners they knew, Aaron the High Priest and his priestly sons—even though none of these men had any medical training.
The treatment for tzara’at often involved bathing, shaving, haircutting, sacrifices, quarantines, and several visits to Aaron or a different priest. The Ukrainian commentator Rabbi Me’ir Leybush ben Yechi’el Mikh’ael Wisser (1809–1879) took great interest in Leviticus 13:3, where God’s prescription includes two phrases that, on the surface, feel redundant: Why would God order both “that the priest should see” (vera’ah hakkohen, וְרָאָ֣ה הַכֹּהֵ֣ן) and, almost identically, “that the priest should see the patient” (vera’ahu hakkohen, וְרָאָ֥הוּ הַכֹּהֵ֖ן)? Rabbi Wisser—usually called by the Hebrew acronym Malbim—contrasted against God the priest who needed to look twice at the patient. God, on the other hand, at the end of the sixth day of creation, only needed to look once to declare, “this is very good” (vehinneh tov me’od, “וְהִנֵּה־ט֖וֹב מְאֹ֑ד”). (See Genesis 1:31.) God’s macroscope and ability to see the totality of the universe might allow God to make grand statements, but with the two human eyes of the ancient priest, what right did he have to make so bold a statement as to declare the purity or the impurity of their fellow human being? At the very least, they would have to look twice before exhibiting such chutzpah.
Nearly a century before Rabbi Wisser was born, there arose the charismatic mystic and Galician Chasidic leader Rabbi Elimelekh of Lizhensk (1717–1787). Throughout his teachings, Rabbi Elimelekh preached that Jews should attach themselves to a tzaddik (“צדיק”)—literally, “a righteous person”—a religious leader who could serve as an intermediary between God and the common Jew. He believed that a person of such spiritual magnitude would improve the life of all those who hunger for more direct contact with the Divine. When he noticed that the Torah orders that the priest must look at the person infected with tzara’at, Rabbi Elimelekh may have imagined himself as Aaron the High Priest, discovering and healing the weaknesses in the seeker who had come forth:
וראהו הכהן וטמא אותו, רצה לומר יראהו ויבינהו את הפגם הגדול שגרם בכל זאת ויורהו דרכי התשובה.
[Where Leviticus 13:3 states,] “the priest should see him and declare him impure,” the Torah meant to teach that the priest would see him and understand him, along with the great [moral] blemish that caused all of this. He would show him the pathways to repentance. (See No’am Elimelekh on Tazri’a.)
In Rabbi Elimelekh’s understanding, the problem was never the skin condition itself but what had been lying underneath. The person afflicted with tzara’at needed to stop being seen for the visible condition for which they had been wrongfully ostracized. They needed someone with Aaron’s patience, someone who could examine the invisible problem.
The Torah’s teachings about tzara’at have troubled Jews for as long as we have been reading these passages. As per Genesis 1:26, we are all created in God’s image, so, it would be sacrilege to judge someone for the colors or conditions of their skin. So too, however, we do a disservice to the Torah if we opt to read its words only at its surface level. In fact, it seems very clear that part of the reason we read about tzara’at is to learn how we react to teachings that run contrary to the core messages of our religion. Malbim urged us to think twice and to look twice—if not more times—before we go so far as to cast aside anyone in our lives. Rabbi Elimelekh argued that a spiritual leader must be prepared not just to treat a symptom but to learn how to care for the mental wellbeing of the patient or the penitent.
In the absence of sacrifices today, the treatment of tzara’at has become less a reality and more a memory of the past. Yet, even if certain details about tzara’at and its rituals have faded from our memory, one lesson has grown much clearer with time: Tzara’at does not prove the moral shortcoming of the afflicted, yet our responses to tzara’at or the physical appearances of those around us might say something about us.
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