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A Leper a Mother Could Love

What is one to do with all this skin disease? Parashat Tazria, the locus classicus for tzara’at (usually, but very probably inaccurately, translated as “leprosy”), a disease that could cover the entire body with repulsive, oozing, hairy and perhaps disfiguring growths, pustules, welts etc. And not content to invoke misery upon the body of the sufferer, tzara’at could strike clothing and house, systematically rendering impure in the extreme every “container” within which a life might take refuge.

So it is more than a bit bizarre that the parashah opens with the laws of impurity of a birthing mother. “When a woman becomes fertile and bears a male…” Is there anything sweeter, more pure, than a newborn baby? The midrash in Vayikra Rabbah expresses amazement at the phenomenon: The mother is an av hatum’ah, capable of rendering impure other humans and vessels, yet the baby whose emergence invokes this impurity, is as pure as, well, the day he is born.

That image, however, belongs to an era before us crunchy-granola types took to shaping public images. The all-natural crowd insisted on displaying in birthing manuals and elsewhere the picture of a gooey scrunchball, bawling his lanuga-covered his head off. What’s so pure about that, we may ask?

So does Midrash Tanchuma. In interpreting a set of verses from Iyov as referring to the longings of Iyov for the time before troubles beset him, the Midrash has us looking, well before the invention of ultrasound, intrauterally at the developing fetus. “Like I was in the days of my horef”, says the verse. Winter, the period when seeds, watered by the percolating rains, prepare to sprout forth in spring. The rains splatter dirt, find the tiniest cracks in a sun-wearied roof, knead the soil into a muddy mess, aggravating everyone except the farmer. Slogging through his fields, drenched from head to toe, he thinks it’s the most marvelous thing!! For he knows that all that mud brings forth the earth’s bounty.

Likewise our little crying, seconds-old humanoid. “No one but a mother could love such a creature!” Precisely. “Because she sees what’s underneath all that goo!!” No! She sees the stuff of herself still covering that living part of her innermost depths and suddenly, the entire package is shining beauty, love and reconnection.

So it is, teaches the Midrash, with us sinners. Even though one may be filthy with transgressions, even when troubles and suffering heap their indignities upon one, when one wishes he was anywhere but in that situation, Hashem looks upon us, squawking in the puny enormity of our insuperable difficulties, irresistible urges no matter how foolish, trying to free ourselves and become re-entangled even as we break free, and Hashem sees all that seriousness, all that effort, all that straining to reach beyond, and Hashem is enraptured once again with His child/image/junior partner, and forgiveness and reconnection can be had.

Let every leper, no matter how intractable he perceives his case to be, recall, as the Torah recalls for him, that our original state is purity, connection, love, and our misdeeds and misconceptions are merely the gluey goo that brings a hand that soothes even as it scrubs behind the ears. For no tum’ah - no mass of mud and blood, acquired as we stumble up the road to the One, is too much for Momma Shechina to wipe away.

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