April 23, 2009
From time to time, we encounter new strains of a virus, or even an entirely new disease, that science is helpless to control. Imagine what it must have been like in ancient times when almost every illness was like that. Tsara’at (usually translated as leprosy, but including a much greater range of ailments that present symptoms on the skin) is the Bible’s prime example. No wonder it is labeled a plague; plagues are diseases we cannot cure.
They are also diseases that spread. Suspected cases of tsara’at were, therefore, referred to the priest for diagnosis. But diagnosis and containment were all he could do. He ordered quarantine — not medical help; he had none to offer. He just waited to see what would happen.
Our rabbis knew almost as little about disease as their biblical forebears. They too had no control over diseases like tsara’at. So when the rabbis dealt with our parsha, they deftly changed the subject to something they did have control over: slander, motsi shem ra (in Hebrew) — from a somewhat far-out word play on m’tsora, the parsha’s title — even holding that tsara’at was punishment for speaking ill of people.
Behind that interpretation, perhaps, is the commonality of quarantine. People with a plague are put in isolation. Slander too makes people pariahs. We avoid the carrier of contagious disease, and, equally, we stay clear of people with sullied reputations. Victims of slander and of leprosy end up outside the camp.
The truly interesting thing is not how the rabbis arrived at slander as their topic, but the fact that they did. Did the rabbis really think that m’tsora meant motsi shem ra, or that slander was the cause of skin disease? Or were they just seeking an excuse to exchange “beyond our control” for “what we can do something about”? Judaism is practical that way. Lo hamidrash ha’ikar ela hama’aseh. It is concrete action, not hypothetical interpretation of Torah that matters in the end.
Rav Soloveitchik defines this as the attitude of “halachic man.” “Halachic man,” he says, “approaches existential space with an a priori yardstick, with fixed laws and principles, precepts that were revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai: the imaginary bridging of a spatial gap less than three handbreadths; the imaginary vertical extension, upward or downward, of a partition; the imaginary vertical extension of a roof downward to the ground; the bent wall; the measurement of four square cubits, 10 handbreadths, etc., etc. He perceives space by means of these laws just like the mathematician who gazes at existential space by means of the ideal geometric space.”
I am not, by Soloveitchik’s standards, “halachic.” I do not accept the entire Torah as unchangeable “precepts that were revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai,” and, therefore, eternally binding on me. But I am not on that account oblivious to the profundity of Halacha, much less the philosophy behind it. This Jewish way of measuring reality by what God would want us to do with it is the attitude toward life that gives us medical advances, scientific breakthroughs, and charitable campaigns. It looks askance at ascetic withdrawal from the world, philosophical intellectualizing with no eye to practical consequences, and the infamous luftmensch attitude of the shtetl — the Yiddish equivalent of living “in the clouds” with no commitment to concretizing human thought in action.
This is not to say that Jews are intellectually moribund or uninterested in theory. The legal system exists for its own sake, a mirror of God’s own mind. Halachic Man or Woman seeks halachic understanding of everything, therefore, even of sacrifice, as in our sedra, where (in theory, at least) we might well undertake action, were we able. Halacha is the Jewish equivalent of a Platonic ideal universe — not the real one that confronts us at any given moment, but the world transformed by human agency. If the rabbis preferred discussing motsi shem ra over curing tsara’at, it was because medical cures were not even theoretically imaginable, whereas a remedy for slander is available here and now. The goal is action, if not immediately, then at least in theory. The world exists to be acted upon.
From Tazri’a/Metzora, I learn the lesson of avoiding slander, but more, I learn the need to invest my entire being in measuring the world by at least the outward limits of what might some day be possible. The universe is given to us by God; but we give it back, with our own activity engraved upon it. We are twin signatories in the artwork of creation, and it is we who have the final say in constructing it according to God’s plan.
Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, cofounder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He is the coeditor, with David Arnow, of My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Jewish Lights).
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