Skip to main content

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.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The One (People) Who Must Not Be Named

Just as Balak brings Bil’am to consider his enemy from various vantage point, likewise does Parashat Balak allow us to view ourselves from the vantage point of others. The main story in Balak is of a single piece, and Am Yisrael appear only as foils for the central story – the interaction of Bil’am with Hashem. What is curious is that not only does Am Yisrael not appear as a real character in the story, we don’t even get a mention. Every time Balak or Bil’am refer to Am Yisrael in the non-visionary passages, they employ indirection: “this people”, “my enemies”, but never Yisrael. It almost feels that they are avoiding speaking the name, one which Bil’am, at least, employs so beautifully in his prophetic speeches. Now, recalling that this story of the interaction of other nations with Am Yisrael is being told in the Torah, I think the message is this: Yisrael is our name in the context of our covenantal interactions with Hashem, just as Hashem’s real name is used only in the conte...
1 comment
Read more

My G-d, a Navaho?

--> Shabbat Shirah, it’s time to sing. Standing on the edge of a Red Sea that has returned to its roiling nature, drowning the fleeing, terrified Egyptian charioteers, Am Yisrael is ecstatic and, with Moshe, breaks into song. They sang in unison a song that welled up from a prophetic vision of redemption that, our sages tell us, outstripped even the visions of Yechezk’el and Isaiah, both of whom “saw” Hashem enthroned on high. The song so permeated the very fabric of being that it is introduced with the imperfect mood of the verb – Az Yashir Moshe… “Then Moshe will sing”, as though the song is every ringing in the background of our Jewishness. So what did they sing? Pure poetry, and therefore, as difficult to feel confident in parsing as it must be even to attempt to imagine what they were feeling at that moment. And yet, we reprise it every day in our morning prayers, as part of Pesukei D’Zimra. Every verse of this song is fit for deep reflection; I’ve chosen...
1 comment
Read more

The Mishkan as an Instance of Tzaddik

I was speaking last night with Yonatan Neril, a student at the yeshiva with a keen interest in exploring the nexus between Torah and environmental consciousness. We were discussing a seminar he will be giving, G-d willing, in the Bat Area in the next few months. He wanted to present Ya'akov Avinu as a model of environmental consciousness, focusing on two episodes of his life as depicted by the Midrash. The first is the famous image of Ya'acov at the Yabok, preparing for the encounter with Esav and, having crossed his family safely over the river, goes back for pachim ketanim , little flasks, seeming worthless given the danger hovering over Ya'acov, yet, as we are told, the righteous prize their few possessions, since they attest to the fact that they have studiously avoided theft. Variants of that Midrash tell us that the contents of those small vials was olive oil from the branch presented by the dove to Noach and preserved during all the intervening generations. The o...
Post a Comment
Read more