Parshiyyot Tazria-Metzora: On Looking Deeply

An old Yiddish joke tells of a Jewish immigrant to America who gets sick; his American-born son takes him to the doctor. The doctor examines him and says: “It’s a virus.” The son reports back to his father, in Yiddish, “He says it’s caused by ‘a virus’.” The father looks at the son and repeats quizzically: “Averus? [Yiddish for ‘sins’] -- I already knew that.”

In this joke, the father reveals an ancient perspective on illness: that physical maladies are a reflection of internal, spiritual problems. The rabbis explain the central issue in this week’s parshiyyot, tzara’at -- an on-the-surface ailment that can afflict one’s skin as well as one’s clothing and one’s home – in a similar way. Based on biblical clues like Miriam’s experience of tzara’at as a punishment for her slander of Moshe, the rabbis say that tzara’at is caused by sin – in particular, lashon hara¸ ill speech.

At work here is an understanding of sickness quite different from the Western medical model which generally focuses only on the physical aspects of a sickness. The sick person in these parshiyyot does not go to a doctor to be healed, but to a priest. Physical illness, says the Torah, may be a symptom of spiritual illness. Similarly, when we pray for a sick person, we pray for refu’at hanefesh verefu’at haguf, “healing of the soul and healing of the body.” The Torah takes a holistic approach, asserting the essential connectedness of body and soul.

It is a matter of looking beneath the surface. We tend to be very concrete in our thinking, seeing only the physical side of things. But, as the Netivot Shalom points out, it is the job of the priest to look “deeply;” he checks whether the skin-rash has penetrated the surface, is amok, “deep,” whether it is merely a physical rash, or rather a sign of some deeper internal malady.

Learning to look deeply, to see beyond the concrete, is what the Torah project is all about, according to many Hasidic masters. There is a famous midrash, cited by Rashi, that says that the reason the homes in the land of Israel were subject to tzara’at is so that the Israelites would knock them down and discover the treasures the Amorites had hidden within the walls. One Hasidic interpretation (Kedushat Levi) reads these treasures as our own internal sparks, caught inside our physical walls. External tzara’at may be a signpost of some internal trouble, but it may also be a sign that the true treasures are internal, that it is time to break down those external barriers and find what is inside.

Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Warsaw ghetto rebbe, wrote, before the war, a book called bnei machsahavah tovah (recently translated as “Conscious Community”) in which he outlines a strategy for training one’s mind to perceive God in the universe. What you see with your plain eyes, he says, is merely the outer form; one can learn to perceive the inner being of things, to feel God’s constant presence in the world.

This week we celebrate Yom HaAtzmau’t, Israel Independence Day. Such a miraculous occurrence as the existence of the State of Israel is a physical signpost pointing us to the existence of a deeper reality. May we learn to look deeply, like the priest, and see the treasures that lie beneath.