Exclusion, Inclusion and Closure: Parshat Tazria-Metzora

This week’s double parsha tazria-metzora starts out with the impurity of a woman after giving birth:

For a boy “she shall remain in a state of blood purification for thirty-three days” and for a girl “she shall remain in a state of blood purification for sixty-six days” (Leviticus 12: 4-5). However, after bringing both a one-year-old lamb for a burnt offering, and a pigeon or a turtledove for a sin offering, the priest will sacrifice them and “and make expiation on her behalf and she shall then be pure from her flow of blood” (verses 6-7). And if she can’t afford a lamb, she can bring two pigeons, “one for a burnt offering and the other for a sin offering. The priest shall make expiation on her behalf, and she shall be pure” (vs. 8).

Why bring a sin offering for giving birth? As I was giving birth to my daughter, and first child, 57 years ago next week, I said never again! Obviously, most women forget these “vows”—otherwise, every woman would only have one child. Ibn Ezra, the 12th-century exegete, has an interesting take on this:

Some say that the reason a woman who gives birth brings a lamb for a burnt offering is that she may have had some unseemly thought because of her pain when giving birth. *A burnt offering is brought for unseemly thoughts. She might have blasphemed or wished evil upon her husband for causing her this pain. She brings a sin offering because she might have uttered some unseemly thing with her lips. 

WELCOMING THE IMPURE BACK INTO THE COMMUNITY

Impurity is not a permanent state. Even if it is caused by sin, straying thoughts (chet) or evil speech (lashon ha-rah) the woman does not stay in her impurity forever. She brings a burnt offering and goes back to her community and is welcomed.  And this is true as the parsha continues for those who have skin diseases and even leprosy—they are initially isolated, but then are returned to the community after being inspected by the priests, usually for seven days (in extreme cases even more), and they are pronounced pure. Often the clothing is burnt of washed carefully, but it is very rare that someone remains outside the community for a long time. Once again, the impure bring sacrifices of lambs for sin offerings and often undergo a ritual with oil and blood:

When the lamb of guilt offering has been slaughtered, the priest shall take some of the blood of the guilt offering and put it on the ridge of the right ear of the one being purified, on the thumb of the right hand, and on the big toe of the right foot. The priest shall then pour some of the oil into the palm of his own left hand, and with the finger of his right hand the priest shall sprinkle some of the oil that is in the palm of his left hand seven times before God (Leviticus 14: 25-27).

Even a house can be purified if God inflicts an eruptive plague upon it. The house does not have to be destroyed, unless the plague returns:

If the plague again breaks out in the house, after the stones have been pulled out and after the house has been scraped and re-plastered, the priest shall come to examine: if the plague has spread in the house, it is a malignant eruption in the house; it is impure. The house shall be torn down—its stones and timber and all the coating on the house—and taken to an impure place outside the city (Leviticus 14: 43-45). However, if the priest comes and sees that the plague has not spread in the house after the house was re-plastered, the priest shall pronounce the house pure, for the plague has healed (vs. 48).

It is clear from all this, that physical impurity, which for some reason is associated with sin, is not a permanent state. There is always hope and the ingathering of those who have succumbed to illness. No one remains an outsider or a pariah forever!

THE FOUR MALE LEPERS (2 Kings 7: 3-20)

This week’s haftarah was the one my husband chanted for his bar mitzvah—it was a favorite one of his, and this week in his memory, I will be chanting it.  The story is really a beautiful one, and can serve as a message for us today as we struggle with our existential crisis in Israel. And there are multiple crises: the ongoing war against Hamas; the fate of the hostages; famine in Gaza; our civil war. Yet from this story we learn that we can be both aggressive and compassionate at the same time that we have to defend ourselves. Even nature seems to be conspiring against us–or perhaps punishing us. We are now physically fighting for our land against the worst fire ever. (My youngest daughter’s in-laws have been evacuated from their home in the Jerusalem hills.)

BACKGROUND

The context for this story appears in 2 Kings 6 when the city of Samaria is besieged by Aram and there is a great famine in Samaria, where even a donkey’s head and doves’ dung are sold for extortionate prices. An anonymous woman sees the King of Israel and cries for help?

But what troubles you?” the king asked her. The woman answered, “That woman said to me, ‘Give up your son and we will eat him today; and tomorrow we’ll eat my son.’ So, we cooked my son and we ate him. The next day I said to her, ‘Give up your son and let’s eat him’; but she hid her son.”

It is a horrific choice and the king has no solution and he rents his clothes, as a sign of mourning. Instead of taking responsibility as a leader, he blames the prophet. Elisha’s response is to demonize the king:

“Do you see—that murderer has sent someone to cut off my head!” The messenger of the king blames God:

While he was still talking to them, the messenger came to him and said, “This calamity is from GOD. What more can I hope for from GOD?”

Does this all sound familiar? No one is taking responsibility.

But Elisha promises that God will solve everything:

“Hear the word of GOD. Thus, said GOD: This time tomorrow, a seah of choice flour shall sell for a shekel at the gate of Samaria, and two seahs of barley for a shekel.”

In other words, no more extortion; prices will go back to normal and there will be food again.  The king did not believe him and said to Elisha:

 “Even if GOD were to make windows in the sky, could this come to pass?” And Elisha told him with great hostility that, “You shall see it with your own eyes, but you shall not eat of it.”

THE HAFTARAH

And now the haftarah begins with the existential crisis of the four lepers:

There were four men, lepers, outside the gate. They said to one another, “Why should we sit here waiting for death? If we decide to go into the town, what with the famine in the town, we shall die there; and if we just sit here, still we die. Come, let us desert to the Aramean camp. If they let us live, we shall live; and if they put us to death, we shall but die” (2 Kings 7: 4).

They go to the camp and find that it is deserted and abandoned.  Their initial reaction is to look out for themselves:

When those lepers came to the edge of the camp, they went into one of the tents and ate and drank; then they carried off silver and gold and clothing from there and buried it. They came back and went into another tent, and they carried off what was there and buried it (verse 8).

These four lepers, the outcasts of society, who were not allowed into the Israelite camp, yet, of course knew of the dire situation in Samaria, experienced remorse:

Then they said to one another, “We are not doing right. This is a day of good news, and we are keeping silent! If we wait until the light of morning, we shall incur guilt. Come, let us go and inform the king’s palace.

To their credit, they did not wait and dither—they realized that the longer they waited, the more people would die of starvation in the besieged city. They told the gatekeepers the good news and word reached the King.  Instead of reaching out for this lifeline, and believing the good news, he rejected the solution:

The king rose in the night and said to his courtiers, “I will tell you what the Arameans have done to us. They know that we are starving, so they have gone out of camp and hidden in the fields, thinking: When they come out of the town, we will take them alive and get into the town” (verse 12).

The King’s distrust of the other, clearly contrasts with the altruism of the four lepers. Fortunately, there were some in the kingdom who were willing to stand up to this king, who, if we remember, answered the women by putting on sackcloth, rather than dealing with the problem.  So, instead of an orderly distribution of food, there was chaos. The starving people ran into the Aramean Camp and plundered it. The King’s aide who had been sarcastic to Elisha is trampled to death (verses 17-20). If we look at some of the scenes in Gaza today, we see something similar. There is chaos and disorder when there is no leadership. Tangential to the topic of ineffectual leaders whose self-interest causes chaos and destruction, we see a back story in the chapter after the haftarah. It relates how previous to the famine, Elisha had saved the rich woman who had been good to him and whose son he revived in 2 Kings 4. She now has returned from the land of the Philistines after the seven-year famine, and he helps her to get her land back. With his insider information, he had told her to leave the land and go with her family and wait until it would be safe to come back, because “GOD has decreed a seven-year famine upon the land, and it has already begun.” The best people can afford to leave, just like the many people who  have left the land of Israel today, because of the “situation”. Hopefully, like the woman of Shunem, they will come back before seven years.

Michael and I loved this haftarah and for his 83^rd birthday, when he celebrated his second bar mitzvah, he gave a sermon, where he compared the four compassionate lepers to President Roosevelt, who saved the American people from starvation during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, by initiating all sorts of social programs. The irony today is that so many of these social programs which saved the people then are now being dismantled by the new Republican President, who even more ironically, plans to run for a third term, just like his nemesis, the Democratic Roosevelt. The New York Times agrees with my assessment:

Through sheer force of will and brazen assertions of presidential power, Mr. Trump has done more to change the trajectory of the country in three months than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the notion of a first-100-days presidential yardstick. But where Roosevelt used his early weeks to build a new edifice, Mr. Trump has used his to tear it down. In effect, he is trying to repeal the liberal social compact and international system that Roosevelt constructed, “unwinding neoliberalism,” as one aide put it. 

And it goes without saying that here in Israel, terrible things are happening as well. There is a total breakdown in law and order. Witness what happened on the sacred day of our Memorial Day for Soldiers, Victims of Terror and those who fell and were murdered and kidnapped on October 7^th, 2024. Two days ago, a clearly organized right-wing mob of more than 200 rioters stormed a Ra’anana synagogue while they were screening an Israeli-Palestinian memorial event:

MK Gilad Kariv (Labor), a Reform rabbi who accompanied one of the injured people to the hospital for treatment, called the incident “an attempted pogrom.” The local head of the ruling Likud party branch warned that the disruption was just the “opening salvo” in a campaign.

I referred earlier to the irony of the American President backtracking on all the liberal gains, and voilà, here is a reader’s comment addressing this news article: The irony is too great to bear. This group of violent protesters believe themselves to be the defenders of Jews, all the while attacking a synagogue and its congregants. It’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic.

It looks like we are in the midst of a civil war. On a happier note, and to connect the beginning of this blog where I mentioned the birth of my first daughter, let me share with you a beautiful story, which ends with the birth of my second daughter.

CLOSURE:

I am always amazed at how, in this country, the circles are always being closed, and very often in a positive way.  We are together both in tragedy and in happy circumstances. When we came to Omer in 1974, our hosts were the founders of our synagogue, where my husband served as rabbi until 2005. I had taught their daughter at a Teacher’s Seminary in Jerusalem, and my husband officiated at the wedding of this daughter. The great grandson of this couple (and the grandson of their daughter) studied with my son-in-law to learn the Iraqi teamim (the musical notes) of the Torah reading. At the celebration, the father of the bar mitzvah boy, asked my son-in-law, if he had ever taught at a particular school. The answer was in the affirmative.  It turned out that there was a WhatsApp group from his class trying to track down the whereabouts of a beloved teacher, for whom they only remembered a first name. They found him in my son-in-law (who was also his teacher) and he is now reuniting with that class. What goes around comes around. Finally, I mentioned above that my husband officiated at the wedding. I was at the time more than nine months pregnant and a few days later gave birth to my second daughter who was born on October 9th 1975. The great grandparents were close friends of ours. Often, over the many years, they would host our group on Yom Ha’atzmaut, which we are celebrating today. How they would love this story!

Shabbat Shalom