Parashat Tazria Leviticus 12:1-13:59
Chapter 13 of Leviticus lays out prescriptions for addressing tzara’at (often translated as “leprosy”) within the Israelite community. The priests are assigned responsibility for managing these outbreaks, suggesting an entirely different frame of understanding of human health. The scientific method of understanding biology and human physiology was several millennia away — concepts such as microorganisms, virality, and the immune system did not enter into their thinking. Instead, the chapter’s descriptions of diagnostic and treatment methods read more like superstition than medicine. Each time I return to this portion, I have to remind myself not to get caught up in condescension for these archaic practices. For the Israelites, physical health was a manifestation of spiritual health, and there was a causal connection between sin and sickness.
Taking my cues from 20th Century British anthropologist Mary Douglas, I understand Parashat Tazria to deal with questions of purity and impurity within the Israelite community as an interconnected matter of health and morality. By adopting this pre-modern frame of reference, contemporary readers like me can look past the superstitions to see a society attempting to protect itself by implementing a thorough protocol for rehabilitating lepers of their physical and spiritual maladies. For the biblical Israelities, skin lesions and sins were one and the same — physical health was a reflection of purity from sin. Based on this understanding, we can see how the Torah’s protocol for treating the sick is also a commentary on dealing with those who are unfit to participate in society. In the United States, this work falls, by and large, to the criminal justice system.
America’s criminal justice system is a complex structure of protocols and processes for apportioning guilt and responsibility, administering punishments and treatments, and rehabilitating people who have been deemed unfit for the community. Just as lepers were isolated from the rest of the community, assigned specific housing, and expected to clear a certain threshold before returning to the fold of society, so too does America’s legal system deal with those who break the law and other bounds of convention. Drawing this comparison helps a modern reader like me approach Parashat Tazria with a degree of humility.
How do I square my contemporary desire to reject and scorn the Torah’s superstitious twinning of health and legality with my own lived reality? It is well known that in many states in our country, the largest providers of mental health services — and in some instances, general healthcare — are prisons. By my reading, the leper who introduces impurity into the community is dealt with as a sinner to be redeemed, regardless of their character and conduct. So too in America with the convict who suffers from an addiction disorder or undiagnosed mental illness.
In every case, the systems we build to protect the safety of the collective from people who threaten it comes with a downside: edge cases, last resorts, and other people on the margins who get channeled into systems that, despite our stated intentions, too often dehumanize the people they are built to rehabilitate. But that is not the only reason they deserve our scrutiny: For me, ultimately, Tazria is a lesson in humility and the limits of certainty. The biblical authors were so certain they knew how to purify their community of leprosy and sin that they recorded it in their most sacred texts. Thousands of years later we are shocked at their ignorance — and if we allow ourselves to transform that shock into recognition and humility, we learn to approach the systems which structure our society with a healthy skepticism and a desire to perceive our unexamined assumptions.
Adam Zemel is the communications specialist for the marketing department of Hebrew College. He holds an MFA in Fiction from UCRiverside, and his nonfiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Daily Beast, Hey Alma, and elsewhere. This drash is adapted from his work as a contributing writer to the American Scripture Project.
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