In the
Wilderness, the Israelites live in tents, but when they enter the Land of
Israel they will build houses to live in. When that happens, Torah says, they
may experience a plague of tzara’at on their houses. Tzara’at, as
we saw in last week’s parashah (Leviticus chapter 13), encompasses a number of
skin afflictions that convey ritually impurity and necessitate quarantine
outside the encampment. This includes rashes, swellings, and eruptive
discoloration. But a house with tzara’at? Torah’s description sounds
like something straight out of a Steven King horror book waiting for Steven
Spielberg to make the flick:
When you enter the land of Canaan
that I give you as a possession, and I inflict an eruptive plague upon a house
in the land you possess, the owner of the house shall come and tell the priest,
saying, “Something like a plague has appeared upon my house.” The priest shall
order the house cleared before the
priest enters to examine the plague, so that nothing in the house may become
impure; after that the priest shall enter to examine the house. If, when he
examines the plague, the plague in the walls of the house is found to consist
of greenish or reddish streaks that appear to go deep into the wall, the priest
shall come out of the house to the entrance of the house, and close up the
house for seven days. On the seventh day the priest shall return. If he sees
that the plague has spread on the walls of the house, the priest shall order
the stones with the plague in them to be pulled out and cast outside the city
into an impure place. The house shall be scraped inside all around, and the
coating that is scraped off shall be dumped outside the city in an impure
place. They shall take other stones and replace those stones with them, and take
other coating and plaster the house. (Leviticus 14:34–42)
What is
going on here? What are the greenish or reddish streaks? We might suppose
mildew or mold, but they don’t fit Torah’s description.
No one seems to know what this house plague is. In the world of Jewish
interpretation, most fall into one of two categories: p’shat and d’rash.[1] P’shat is an interpretation that considers
the contextual, or direct, meaning of the text, and D’rash is an
interpretation that seeks to explain the metaphorical meaning for our lives.
Another useful and similar set of terms are those employed by academic biblical
scholars: exegesis and eisegesis. Exegesis is a critical interpretation of a
text that seeks to explain the meaning of the text solely in its context, while
eisegesis introduces the interpreter’s assumptions, agendas, and biases into
the explanation of the text. In the absence of clear p’shat, when we are
unable to say much exegetically, interpreters resort to d’rash and
eisegesis. Who has ever seen a house contract a skin disease? Given that there
is no corollary to experience, commentators have free rein to explain what
Torah means to teach us. As a result, we find a wide range of divergent
interpretations. In the end, perhaps they say more about those who offer the
explanations than they do about the Torah itself.
Let’s
begin with Talmud. BT Horayyot 10a tells us this is a good news
announcement. R. Chiyya asks: Really? How is this good news? R. Shimon b.
Yochai explains that the moment the Canaanites learned that the Israelites were
coming, they ran home and hid their gold behind the walls in
their homes. When the Israelites came to inhabit their houses, God brought the
plague so they would have to tear down the walls, exposing the treasure hidden
behind them. R. Shimon b. Yochai’s imagined scene is problematic on many
levels, from historical (there is no evidence of a conquest of the Land of
Israel as the Bible describes it) to ethical (taking people’s homes). This
perspective is echoed by Rashi (11th century, Province) and the anonymous Sefer
ha-Chinuch (13th century, Spain), which explains: “God brought tzara’at to
a few houses when [the Israelites] conquered the Land for the benefit [of the
Jews] so they would destroy those houses and discover the treasure hidden by
the Amorites.”
Midrash
moves in an entirely different direction, beginning with the rabbinic
understanding that tzara’at in people is divine punishment for lashon ha-ra
(gossip and tale-bearing). In others words, immoral behavior can be manifest in
physical disease. The house plague works similarly. Leviticus Rabbah,
taking a queue from the words, “I inflict,” explains that the plague is Divine
punishment for sinful behavior; the cure is repentance:
The diseases which infect a person
first appear in the house. If he repents, only the infected stones must be
pulled out; if not ,the entire house must be destroyed. They also infect his
clothes. If he repents, they need to be laundered; if not, they must be burned.
Then they afflict his body. If he repents; he will be purified; if not, he must
sit alone. (Leviticus Rabbah 17)
Nachmanides
follows much the same line, but adds that the plague in question occurs only in
the Land of Israel because that is where “God dwells.”:
[The affliction of clothing] is not
natural and does not exist in the world, and the same is true of plague in
houses. However, when the Israelites are wholly devoted to God, whose spirit
will be upon them at all times to keep their bodies, their clothing, and their
houses looking well, but when sin and iniquity occur in one of them ugliness
will appear in his flesh or his clothing or his house to show him that God has
forsaken him... See then, that this does not happen except in the Land, which
is God's inheritance: When you enter the Land… which I give you as a
possession (Leviticus 14:34) and ...this [plague] will never occur except
in the chosen Land where the presence of God dwells.
The “cure”
for the house is specified by Torah:
To purify the house, he shall take
two birds, cedar wood, crimson stuff, and hyssop. He shall slaughter the one
bird over fresh water in an earthen vessel. He shall take the cedar wood, the
hyssop, the crimson stuff, and the live bird, and dip them in the blood of the
slaughtered bird and the fresh water, and sprinkle on the house seven times.
Having purified the house with the blood of the bird, the fresh water, the live
bird, the cedar wood, the hyssop, and the crimson stuff, he shall set the live
bird free outside the city in the open country, Thus he shall make expiation
for the house, and it shall be pure. (Leviticus 14:49–53)
Curiously,
the cure for tzara’at of the house is virtually identical to the
purification of a person, except that while oil and blood from the sacrifice
are sprinkled on a person, water and blood are sprinkled on a house. This
reinforces the sense that tzara’at that plagues a house derives from
immorality just as tzara’at that afflicts one’s person is the physical
manifestation of immoral behavior.
Everyone
is struggling to explain a phenomenon described by Torah which has no analog in
the world we know. The result is a broad range of interpretations—call them d’rash
or eisegesis—of this especially recondite text. R. Shimon bar Yochai chose a
triumphalist explanation that paints Canaanites negatively and Jews as the
deserving conquerers. The Talmud, written in the shadow of the Destruction of
the Second Temple and all the devastation the Roman cataclysm entailed, is
deeply concerned with Jewish humiliation, loss of power and sovereignty, and
the possibility of regaining hegemony in the Land of Israel. R. Shimon bar
Yochai’s d’rash gives voice to these negative feelings of resentment and
the desire for revenge. Yet, at the same time, there is another stream of
thought working its way through Talmud, and found in midrash and later
commentaries. Understanding that the Temple would not be rebuilt any time soon,
many rabbis and commentators hunkered down for the long haul and fixed their
focus on the internal spirit and psyche of the Jew living in the Diaspora and
the needs of a community in Exile awaiting the Messiah. They asked: How do we
strengthen the moral fiber of the Jewish community and encourage people to live
lives of honesty and integrity, in covenant with God? These questions led to a
different understanding of the house plague passage, one that exhorted people to grow
ethically.
Today,
while we are privileged to have a thriving State of Israel and Jewish
sovereignty in the Land of Israel, our focus is still on moral teaching. Hence Etz
Hayim comments: “A home is a family’s private refuge. Thus a home afflicted
by plague represents the breakdown of the social values that kept a family safe
and united. It was a cause for concern if the problems of society at large had
come to infect the home. Most commentators suggest that the antisocial behavior
that brought the plague to the house was selfishness, a blindness to the needs
of others.”[2]
Each
time we face a text and it says, Darsheini! (“Explain me!”) we have
options and therefore responsibility for the meaning we find in the text.
History is riddled with painful examples of the horrible interpretations of
biblical verses and passages, wrenched out of context to justify the genocide
of Native Americans, the enslavement of black Africans, and child abuse, and to
condemn homosexuals.[3]
Certainly
we can explore through sacred text our human experiences of disappointment,
confusion, anger, frustration, envy, and all the rest, but in the end, will we
privilege and affirm our negative emotions, or will we explore the
possibilities and promise of ethical growth, love, joy, awe, empathy,
responsibility? The house plague of tzara’at was, in the end, purified.
The goal of Torah is to work that same magic on us through study and
interpretation. Bit by bit, we purify our souls and improve ourselves.
© Rabbi Amy
Scheinerman
[1] Traditionally, the
four modes of interpretation, known by their acronym PaRDeS, are: Pshat (contextual
meaning), Remez
(hidden or allegorical meaning), D’rash
(seeking meaning and application), and Sod
(secret, spiritual, or prophetic meaning).
