Unclean!

My father used to say, “Beauty may be only skin deep, but ugly goes straight to the bone.” Not at all an out-of-place sentiment for this week’s parsha, Tazria. With its comments on skin conditions and the variety of…hrm…fluids discharged from the body, Tazria is surely the bane of B’not Mitvah world-wide. Imagine being a 13 year-old girl (or boy, for that matter) reading publically about nasty skin! Stop, Tevel…enough digressing.

So in short, Tazria talks, among other things, about a skin condition called Tzarat; this is a skin-based expression of an internal, spiritual ailment. Whereas my dad’s comment takes ugly from the outside in, the Torah says ugly goes from the inside out. Tzarat is the Biblical “leprosy,” not to be confused with what we know as leprosy today.But don’t worry about Tzarat: One of the commentaries I read this weekend flat-out says that Tzarat is unknown in the modern world, not in the sense that we don’t know what Tzarat “really” was, but that people just don’t get Tzarat anymore.

This assertion seems a bit premature in its finality. Perhaps people don’t manifest spiritual unwellness on their skin, but certainly folks in the contemporary world express their emotions in their actions. For example, I was speaking with a friend yesterday about her weekend; she was animated and conversational, until she started recounting an uncomfortable exchange she had with someone. At that point, she crossed her arms across her chest, crossed her legs, and sort of folded into herself.

The clarity of this moment hit me like a blast: without even meaning to, she was protecting herself as she remembered this uncomfortable exchange! The incident had passed, but talking about it had clearly dredged up the emotions she felt during the confrontation. As I empathized with her, she slowly unfolded herself from her shell, and the conversation continued.

Ok, so it’s not Tzarat, but my friend showed as clear as day that she was carrying her stress with her. How many people do exactly the same thing? It was such an object lesson to me that we are so wrapped up in our emotions, and that’s easier than we think to allow them to come out.

Whereas in the Torah, the cure for Tzarat involved the kohanim and a period of exile, today’s ailments can be addressed with comforting and kind words. So my advice: take a moment today and offer a little empathy and support to the folks around you.

And Aaron was Silent...

I don’t know what to say about one of the central aspects of last week’s Parsha. Nadav and Avihu, sons of Aaron, having been newly invested as kohanim, fill their incense pans and enter the Mishkan unbidden; their pans are filled with "אש זרה" (aish zarah), a foreign fire, and they are instantly struck dead. The haftarah echoes the sidra with a similar story, one wherein a soldier named Uzah attempts to steady the Ark as one of the Ark bearers stumbles; Uzah, too, is instantly struck dead.

Do you want to guess how much the sages wrote about these two incidents? The answer (SPOILERS!) is, technically speaking: a lot. The justifications for the deaths suggest that Nadav and Avihu were drunk, or that they were actually more holy than Moses and Aaron, or that their sin was really one of delivering halachic decisions in the presence of Moses, or that their deaths somehow acted as the last sanctification of the Mishkan. Some of these discussions carry a measure of reasonableness for me, while others—the human sacrifice one, for example—just make no sense whatsoever.

Of course, there’s more to the story. Before the deaths of his sons, Aaron is about to make the first sacrifice on the altar, but when he gets up to approach the altar, he hesitates before going forward; Moses exhorts him on, saying, “Do not be afraid—you were chosen for this job!” Aaron moves forward and performs his function, and all is well. You can rest assured that many poskim point out the difference between Aaron’s bidden, thoroughly-instructed sacrifice and his son’s spontaneous, uncalled-for aish zarah.

For me, I don’t feel the need to try to justify what happened. I’m horrified by it, and I’m almost entirely uncomfortable with the incident; I cannot help but feel that this is one of those moments where the Torah cannot be taken literally, and even if the deaths are a metaphor, I’m still not sure I’d be comfortable with them. It leaves too much room for blaming the victims, and that’s not a road that I want to travel down at all.

And so I’m left feeling uncomfortable after reading this section of the parsha, and I think that the discomfort comes from an underlying realization: no matter how much I try to understand, no matter how much I think I know, God remains God. By that, I mean that God—infinite, omnipotent, ubiquitous—remains inscrutable to us. In Mishlei, the sage writes, “The fear of Hashem is the beginning of wisdom.” and I’ll admit that “fear” of God has always struck me as a strange way to express the relationship. My mom used to talk about this idea in terms of great respect, that fear is really a deep and abiding respect for God, and I think she was on to something. Respect, certainly, and if not fear, than at least a discomfort, one that comes from knowing that God remains inscrutable.

If there’s any comfort to be had from this inscrutability, I think it comes from the sense that I am not responsible for everything that happens in the universe. I’m not entitled to an explanation—in fact, not only am I not entitled to an explanation from the Eternal, I probably couldn’t even understand any explanation offered. Certainly this lack of knowing contributes to my discomfort with the incidents in the Torah and Haftarah, but perhaps I can learn only to be comfortable in my discomfort.