Metzora: “Hallelujah to the ache”
This week’s Torah portion, Metzorah, offers us valuable insight for navigating the challenges and joys of living in bodies prone to breaking down.1
Metzorah forms a unit with its predecessor, Tazria. Like much of VaYikra, both parshiot discuss sources of impurity. The sources of impurity these particular parshiot deal with are largely ones related to the body, with a particular focus on skin disease, called tzara’at.2
I am certainly not advocating that we understand disease as the Torah does. Rather, I hope that by understanding how the Torah conceptualizes bodily vulnerability, we might gain some insight into how to live with the uncertainty of our own vulnerable bodies.
At first glance, the text might appear offensive. Why should tzara’at make someone “impure”? Shouldn’t people suffering from illness be cared for?
Some of us may be familiar with the rabbinic tradition, which conceptualizes tzara’at as a punishment for lashon harah, slander.3 Many of us, particularly those of us who have experienced various illnesses, would rebel against the notion that illness is in any way a form of divine punishment.
Unlike the later tradition, though, VaYikra itself does not appear to think that those suffering tzara’at should be castigated or that tzara’at constitutes any sort of punishment.
The Jewish Study Bible clarifies that when VaYikra uses the term “impure,” it does not connote anything
demonic… [n]either is it the same as modern notions of dirt or filth, or of infection. Rather, [impurity] is a simple fact of life, a part of nature… These phenomena are not necessarily bad… there is nothing sinful about [them]… and there is no evil in [them]. (Opening note to Chs. 12-15)
If tzara’at is a natural part of life and not evil, then why does VaYikra consider it “impure”?
As the Jewish Study Bible clarifies, VaYikra considers tzara’at “impure” because it sees it as a
manifestation of the gradual escape of life… [with] death itself having begun to consume the body… [It is] [t]his “leakage” of life… that creates impurity” (Opening note to v. 13:1-14:57.).
Impurity, in this case, is morally neutral and simply generated by proximity to death. But if the impurity of tzara’at is simply the morally neutral result of proximity to death, why does the text care about that impurity at all?
For the book of VaYikra, impurity is a quasi-physical substance that gets “attracted” to the Tabernacle. Regardless of its origin, should enough of it accumulate, God will no longer be able to reside within the Israelite camp.
Accordingly, tzara’at requires a set of rituals – which constitute the opening passages of our Torah portion – for purifying both the person in question as well as the Tabernacle.
Again, this purification has no moral valence, and has no relationship to sin or repentance; it is simply the process through which the impurity generated by an encounter with death is rectified.
Though the primary function of the cleansing is to prevent that buildup of impurity, we can also imagine these rituals as ways of moving through the intermittent confrontations with vulnerability, illness, mortality, and death that weave in and out of our lives.
The Torah knows that we brush up against death time and again; rather than ignoring such encounters, it provides guidance for how to navigate them.
Even if we don’t subscribe to the Torah’s understanding of the connection between illness, death, and impurity, I think that there is something refreshing about these chapters’ concern with mortality.
We live in a society and culture that does its best to forget that we are vulnerable – an endless array of supplements, diet and exercise programs, and lifestyle books encourage us to believe that if we can just do everything right, we’ll be safe. Covid, of course, has upended that a little bit – we know well that in spite of our best efforts, we can still get sick – but even still, we constantly crave the surety of knowing that we’re fully protected against whatever is coming and often feel ashamed when we become ill.
Clearly, we should take precautions, especially with Covid! But like the Israelites, we also need a way of acknowledging and confronting the fact that in spite of our best laid plans, we’ll all come face to face with illness, vulnerability, and mortality. In the words of disability activist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “[M]ost of us will move in and out of disability in our lifetimes, whether we do so through illness, an injury or merely the process of aging” (“Becoming Disabled,” The New York Times).
It’s certainly tempting to imagine that ignoring our vulnerabilities might make us happier. Having experienced a range of physical injuries over the last decade, I’ve spent a lot of time perfecting the art of pretending that my body’s challenges don’t exist. Often, I assumed that if I just acted as if my body were OK, I’d feel better about it. But more often than not, ignoring my pains, aches, strains, and pops not only made my injuries worse, but also made me feel emotionally worse: I was pretending that I had a different body – a perfect, unblemished, unbroken body – which I could only do by ignoring the body that I actually did have.
What’s the alternative? What does it look like to acknowledge – or even embrace – our vulnerability, and what benefits might there be to doing so?
In Midrash Aseret HaDibrot, a small 10th century midrash on the Ten Commandments, the angels speak to the Torah itself, and tell the Torah that instead of being given to people, the Torah should be given to angels. People, after all, are fallible, but angels are divine beings. In response, the Torah mocks the angels, saying,
Why do you need Torah? Did you leave Egypt? Were you enslaved to Pharoah? Do you eat and drink? Do you have impurity? Why do you want the Torah? You have no need for the Torah! (Otzar Midrashim, Midrash Aseret HaDibrot 1:18)
The Torah isn’t given to people in spite of our humanness. Rather, it’s because we’re human – because we eat and drink, because we experience hardship, that we encounter death – that we get to have the Torah, a book that is just as concerned with spirituality as it is with the muck and mire of the body. Or, to put it more accurately, a book that believes that the muck and mire of the body is one of the most critical spiritual arenas.
A similar midrash makes an additional argument as to why humans are better candidates than angels for receiving the Torah: because angels do no physical labor, they have no need of Shabbat (Ein Yaakov 9:15).4 Commenting on that midrash, Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, a popular 20th century mystic and theologian, explains that unlike angels,
Humans, through their creative talents, complete and perfect existence… as partners with God in the creation of the world. This human ability to create… is expressed… through humans’ bodily actions. (Ein Ayah on Ein Yaakov 9:15; ch. 9. pp. 100)
Angels might be perfect and divine – they may never get sick, never die, never suffer, never deal with the thousand humiliations of having a body that will sooner or later fall apart – but that means that they also cannot participate in the gritty, embodied work of repairing the world.
It is through our bodies – our artful, achy, beautiful, broken, capable, constricted, divine, and depleted bodies – that we partner with God in building a redeemed existence.
In the poem “I Sing the Body Electric; Especially When My Power Is Out,”5 Andrea Gibson celebrates the body’s susceptibility:
This is my body
My exhaustion pipe will never pass inspection
And still my lungs know how to breathe
Like a burning map…
Say this is my body
It is no ones but mine
This is my nervous system
My wanting blood
My half-tamed addictions…
Hallelujah to the ache
To the pull
To the fall
To the pain
Hallelujah To the grace
And the body
and every cell of us all.
Like Gibson, we all experience our pulls, falls, pains, and half-tamed addictions, but they are precisely what make us holy and make each of us worthy of a thousand hallelujahs.
In Shabbat shacharit, we tell God,
The limbs you appointed for us… and the tongue You have set in our mouth will thank, bless, [and] praise… You… all hearts will be in awe of you, and all innards and kidneys will sing your name, as it is written, ‘All my bones will say: God – who is like you?’ (Ps. 35:10)” (Nishmat Kol Chai).
May we and all the people of the earth merit the wisdom to perceive how all our sinews and stitches, our bones and bruises, are themselves the holiest prayers we can offer.
I am grateful to my friend Talia Kaplan for her helpful comments on the first draft of this d’var.
Tzara’at can also affect inanimate objects (e.g. clothes, buildings), but it is its form as a skin disease that is most relevant for this discussion.
See, for instance, b. Arachin 15b
The midrash in Ein Yaakov is based on b. Shabbat 88b. I have cited the former because it is the material R’ Kook on which R’ Kook is directly commenting.
Content warning: the full version of this poem includes discussions of violence and self-harm.