Tazriah 5774

This week’s Torah reading, Tazriah, oozes, flakes, and sticks.  When a person’s skin has a swelling, discoloration, rash, or burn, he or she is to call the priest.  The priest will declare whether the person is “tameh/ritually unclean” or “tahor/ritually clean.”

We regularly use the categories of “unclean” and “clean” – unclean goes in the hamper, clean goes into the drawer.  But the categories of “ritually unclean” and “ritually clean” have ceased to have currency for us.  We’ve lost the vocabulary to describe spiritual health and un-well-ness.  Even so, we have an innate sense of when we need to restore our balance so that we can continue properly.

After a fight, we need to restore balance.  After witnessing a car crash, we need to offer thanks.  We wash our hands after handling meat, even if we were wearing gloves.  We know we shouldn’t leave the cemetery and head right to the preschool.  It’s not that we’re carrying contagion, but rather that the essence of one doesn’t mix with the essence of the other.  Human beings need to transition from one state to the other.  Through time and ritual, we become ritually pure once again.

These categories were very real for the ancients.  Perhaps they were more in touch with their spiritual states; perhaps they were obsessed with something that didn’t really exist.  We cannot know.  Modern life, with all its bells and whistles, makes awareness of our spiritual nature difficult.  And it is even harder to be aware when we lack words to describe it.

Unlike our biblical ancestors, we do not believe that disease is an expression of our spiritual states.  Even so, it behooves us to think of the bad energy we bring from one experience to the other, the spiritual baggage we carry with us.  It’s worth considering how to shed it.