michutz lamachaneh<\/em>, \u201coutside the camp,\u201d the place where various types of people are placed there \u2013 \u201clepers\u201d and soldiers and others. By examining the experience of dislocation and decentering in Leviticus, and the rituals of reintegration, they hope to shed light on the experiences of people in hospitals, nursing homes, and military bases, all \u201coutside the camp\u201d locations.<\/p>\nThey ask, \u201cWhat can we learn from the Bible about our human propensity to orient ourselves to geography, time, and self, and to remain aware of the transcendent? How can our experiences of the metzora <\/em>[\u201cleper\u201d] and other biblical figures who spent time separated from the community at large help us understand the impact of losing one or more of the axes of orientation? How does a person transition from one state of being, or one understanding of self, to another?<\/p><\/p>\u201d<\/span>\nThey draw some of their founding assumptions from neuroscientific discoveries about the importance of mental mapping, the role of disorienting experiences in redrawing our brain maps, and the role of communal rituals and stories in enabling people to make safe passage through disturbing experiences. They pay particular attention to the mirroring work of certain neurons. They claim that \u201cWhether we play a game of tennis ourselves or watch someone else play, the same areas of the brain and the same neural pathways are engaged. This means that the brains of both the viewer and the player record and store the images and the muscular reactions.\u201d Mirror neurons affect both individual and communal experience: \u201cOn an individual level, our mirror neurons connect us to the people around us, allowing us to imitate their actions, to create relationship maps, and to imagine what is going on inside their minds. On a communal level, mirror neurons create what [Daniel] Siegel calls \u2018we-maps,\u2019 which \u2018enable us to look beyond our immediate and individually focused survival needs, and even beyond the present version of our relationship maps, to a vision of a larger and interconnected whole.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nHow does the Bible shed light on these experiences? In general, the authors point to the community-forming power of ritual: \u201critual and repetition are central mechanisms for teaching a social group\u2019s newest members its value system and behavioral and social norms. Religious rituals the world over provide multisensory experiences that engage mind and body, punctuated with times of quiet and introspection. Because they simultaneously engage many different regions of our brains, such religious activities can have the same impact as meditation but on a collective rather than an individual scale. Patrick McNamara uses the term \u2018de-centering\u2019 to describe this sense of being unbounded and of transcending the limits of ordinary experience. . . . the individual has entered a \u2018liminal state,\u2019 which is perhaps similar to what happened to the metzora <\/em>as he traveled from the camp to michutz lamachaneh<\/em>.<\/p><\/p>\u201d Ritual itself includes a moment of disturbing dislocation, which ultimately assists in forming people with new maps and a fresh sense of self-and-world.\n
Leviticus provides \u201cwe-maps\u201d for Israel that \u201cexplicated the roles and functions of each individual, family, and tribe, and they enabled each one of these entities to understand itself as a component of the larger whole.<\/p>
<\/p>\u201d Priests were at the heart of this system, and Wiener and Hirschmann rightly point out that this meant they were in the middle of the mess of life: \u201cThere was nothing rarefied about the priests\u2019 work. They oversaw rituals intended to manage life\u2019s messiness\u2014but these rituals were steeped in precisely that same messiness. The priests were in intimate contact with human and animal bodies; they conducted their work amid the blood and guts of sacrificial animals and the suppurating sores of undiagnosed skin conditions.<\/p>\u201d<\/span><\/span>\nMore specifically, the authors point to the central role of the priest in dealing with lepers. Lepers were judged lepers only by priests, could be pronounced clean only by priests, and were restored to Israel in a ritual that was conducted by the priest. They follow Mary Douglas in arguing that skin disease was a matter of boundaries, bodily and social-bodily: \u201cWhat was supposed to remain contained within the human body had emerged to mingle with the world beyond it. As the solid and bounded became fluid and mottled, the metzora<\/em>\u2019s skin eruptions called into question the essential nature of the human form and rendered him tamei <\/em>[unclean]. These eruptions also threatened the well-being of the \u2018body\u2019 of the community as a whole.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/span>Priests didn\u2019t heal, but they guided the leper through the experience of dissolution (bodily and communal) and renewal. Wiener and Hirschmann suggest that during the leper\u2019s exile from the camp, the priest visited him regularly to assess the state of his condition. In this way, the priest played the role of \u201cshepherd,\u201d which in Hebrew is punning related to the verb for \u201csee\u201d: The priest \u201csees\u201d and assesses; and as a \u201cseer\u201d he is also a shepherd, leading the excluded leper back toward the flock. Thus the priest also played a prophetic role, giving hope for a future self that would be restored to full participation in the life of Israel: \u201cThe metzora <\/em>was separated from the community and might have been experiencing steady loss of health and eventual death. Only the priest accompanied him on this journey.<\/p><\/p>\u201d In the ritual of purification, a bird is killed and another bird released, portraying the liberation of the leper.\n
As they summarize, \u201cIllness, the breakdown of the body, death, the breach of social norms, and going to war are all inevitable parts of life. Leviticus\u2019s mental maps offer a model for how we might navigate transitions between the known and the unknown, integrate new experiences, and create a livable future for ourselves.<\/p>
<\/p>\u201d\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Maps and Meanings by Nancy Wiener and Jo Hirschmann aims to apply insights drawn from the book of Leviticus to contemporary pastoral care. The authors lay out the Levitical mapping of reality, centered on the sanctuary, and then focus on the Levitical category of michutz lamachaneh, \u201coutside the camp,\u201d the place where various types of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,114],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bible-ot-leviticus","category-pastoral-theology"],"yoast_head":"\n
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