Recent news items:
•
Globally: The National Academy of Sciences’
National Research Council is releasing a booklet this month.
It explains that global climate change is radically reshaping the Arctic which,
in turn, will produce more intense snow, heat, and rain; rising sea levels; and
amplified global warming due to the thawing of the permafrost.[1]
•
Across the ocean: As many as 900 migrants packed onto a
ship that capsized off the cost of
•
In the Middle East: ISIS continues its murderous rampage,
cutting a brutally bloody swath through Iraq. For the first time, Daesh[3] carried
out a suicide bombing in Afghanistan that killed at least 33 and wounded more than 100.
•
Close to home: Freddie Gray, 25, died in Shock Trauma a
week after his arrest by Baltimore police, who refused to say why they stopped
Gray. It appears that he suffered a broken vertebra while in police custody,
lapsed into a coma, died, was resuscitated, underwent surgery but finally died.
Meanwhile, we open the Torah to a
lengthy and detailed discussion of the ancient taboos of tum’ah (ritual
impurity) and taharah (ritual purity). It’s hard to find two Torah portions
more concerned with the gritty side of and the baser side of the human
corporeality than Tazria and Metzora. Etz Hayyim delicately notes that, “After the
previous chapter’s
discussions of how food entering our bodies can make us ritually impure [i.e.
the laws of kashrut in Parshat Shemini], the Torah now discusses how that which
comes out of our bodies can do the same.”[4] What has
any of this to do with the world we inhabit and the challenges we face
in the 21st century?
For those unfamiliar with Tazria and
Metzora, here is a brief survey: Tazria opens with laws concerning the impurity
imparted by childbirth, tzara’at (skin afflictions evident
both on human bodies and houses), seminal emission, and menstruation. We are
told the procedure for restoring ritual purity, which generally involves a
period of quarantine (for tzara’at), emersion in a mikveh, and
a sacrifice. It is important to point out that none of this is related in any
way to cleanliness and hygiene as we understand them. It’s about
being in an invisible and intangible state of ritual purity. Etz Hayyim points
out that, arguably, “no
concept is less accessible to the modern reader” than
tum’ah. It is certainly difficult to access the concept, but the
question I wish to pose is: Is it irrelevant? Do Tazria and Metzora have any
wisdom to impart in an age of characterized not only by remarkable scientific
discoveries and technological progress, but also plagued by the horrors in the
daily headlines?
The S’fat Emet (Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter of
Ger, 1847-1905) provides a commentary that bridges what strikes many in the
21st century as an inward and obsessive concern with ritual purity and a more
outward-looking, worldly concern with what is happening around us and among us
today. The Gerer rebbe begins not by citing our parashah, but instead by citing
a classical midrash (Bereishit Rabbah 1:54-55) that opens with a verse
from Psalm 139:5. The verse is: אָחוֹר וָקֶדֶם צַרְתָּנִי
וַתָּשֶׁת עָלַי כַּפֶּכָה “You
formed me backward and forward, and You placed Your hand upon me.” The
midrash from Bereishit Rabbah offers R. Yochanan’s
interpretation of this verse: “If a person is
righteous, he will enjoy two worlds, for it says, You formed me backward
and forward but if not, he will have to account for it, for it says,
and You placed Your hands upon me.”[5] It
certainly sounds like R. Yochanan is speaking about this world, and the
world-to-come, but the S’fat
Emet writes:
All of creation
is in need of Tikkun (correction, repair, redemption), as Scripture
says, אֲשֶׁר-בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים
לַעֲשׂוֹת which God created to do
(Genesis 2:3). The human was created last in deed [i.e., on the
sixth day, after everything else in the world had been created], but first in
the order of Tikkun, because it is through humanity that Creation and Tikkun
are joined together. That is what the Sages meant by noting [Tosefta Sanhedrin,
ch. 8] that humans were created last [on the sixth day, just before the advent
of the first sabbath], so that they could enter shabbat immediately [upon being
created], since shabbat is about Tikkun. “Backward” refers
to the weekdays, the days when we work to repair/redeem those things of this
world that are not yet repaired, and through this we afterward come to merit
shabbat, which is the “forward,” the time for thought and Tikkun/redemption.
The human being is the one who links and connects all [the aspects of] Creation
together. That is why the human contains the lowest corporeality of all
physicality and [also] a spirit that surpasses all [the rest of Creation]. כִּי בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים עָשָׂה אֶת-הָאָדָם [God] created humanity in the divine image (Genesis
9:6).
What has any of this to do with
Tazria-Metzora? And what has it to do with the state of the world in which we
find ourselves living?
The S’fat Emet alludes to polar human
tendencies: our baser animalistic physical instincts, activities, and
proclivities on the one hand, and our loftier spiritual capacity on the other.
Human beings, alone in all creation, embody both. Only human beings are capable
of comprehending the unity of all Creation, all being, on all levels, from the
base corporeal level to the vaulted spiritual level. The process of undergoing
ritual purification from tum’ah (ritual impurity)—from the
lowly aspects of our corporeality as described in Tazria/Metzora—parallels
the process of raising and repairing (tikkun) the various elements of
this world in need of redemption that we are called upon to labor to redeem six
days a week. When we succeed, we can experience the joy of shabbat, “the time
for thought and Tikkun/redemption,”—the spiritual reward of our labor. Just
as Torah describes people going from tum’ah (a state
of ritual impurity) to taharah (a state of ritual purity), so does our
week go from six days of purifying “the things of this world that are not
yet repaired” by doing mitzvot, to “the time
of thought and Tikkun/redemption” that
is shabbat. Just as an individual can go from tum’ah to taharah,
so too can we transform our world, bit by bit, from the tum’ah of
injustice, greed, violence, and cruelty to the taharah-vision of a world
redeemed.
At the outset, the Gerer Rebbe makes
clear that people, and people alone in all of Creation, are capable for
coupling Creation (the baser elements of physicality, deriving from our
experience as embodied beings) and Tikkun (spiritual redemption, our capacity
to see beyond “what
is” to “what ought to be”). We
might be inclined to identify Creation/Tikkun with the Body/Soul dichotomy, but
just as the S’fat
Emet resisted going down the path of the this-world/world-to-come
dichotomy, I have the sense that this is
not what the S’fat
Emet has in mind. To the contrary. I
think the Gerer rebbe’s
intention is to tell us that the aspects of “Creation” and “Tikkun” are
inseparably fused in the realm of ultimate reality and only people have the
capacity to comprehend the unity of the universe. Our lives should reflect
this: We should live in such a way that we don’t try to wrench them apart and focus
on only one at the expense of the other. Living in and of the world without a
vision of what it ought to be, or living in a spiritual bubble without
participating fully in the physical world, is only half-living.
This has enormous implications for
our mindset toward life and the universe and, indeed, everything we do: how we
spend our time and resources, what causes we promote, with whom we engage. In
particular, our attention to the use of earth’s resources and how we live in
relationship to the global environment, and the tragic social injustices at
home and abroad. How do we in our lives inadvertently and unintentionally
contribute to the problems and injustice that surround us, and how can we, in
our lives, affect a measure of Tikkun? The
Psalmist reminds us that as small as we may feel at times, in God’s eyes our
potential is enormous:
מָה-אֱנוֹשׁ כִּי-תִזְכְּרֶנּוּ; וּבֶן-אָדָם, כִּי תִפְקְדֶנּוּ
וַתְּחַסְּרֵהוּ מְּעַט, מֵאֱלֹהִים; וְכָבוֹד וְהָדָר תְּעַטְּרֵהוּ
What is humanity that You are mindful of them?
וַתְּחַסְּרֵהוּ מְּעַט, מֵאֱלֹהִים; וְכָבוֹד וְהָדָר תְּעַטְּרֵהוּ
What is humanity that You are mindful of them?
What
are human beings that you think of them?
Yet
You have made them but little lower than the angels,
and
have crowned them with glory and honor.
[2] Meanwhile, another ship crashed near the Greek island of
Rhodes. Altogether, it is estimated that ~1,100 people drowned this week in the
Mediterranean Sea.
[3] DAESH is the acronym for al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq
al-Sham, which means the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Daesh is a name
commonly used by its enemies because it sounds similar to the Arabic words Daes
("one who crushes something underfoot") and Dahes ("one who sows
discord”).
[4] Etz Hayyim Torah and Commentary, JPS and the Rabbinical
Assembly, p. 649.
[5] The midrash goes on to describe the primordial human God
created: a hermaphrodite that God separated into two separate beings, female
and male. The S’fat Emet writes only about R. Yochanan’s interpretation.
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