The Voice

Tazria-Metzora (Leviticus 12:1)

“Do not be a false witness”

Imagine a city where your right to live there depended on one thing: you couldn’t speak badly about other people. The moment you gossiped or badmouthed someone, you’d be sent out of the city for a week—maybe longer, depending on how severe it was.

What kind of place would that be? Peaceful and positive? Or tense and oppressive?

In this week’s parsha, we encounter tzara’at—a mysterious skin affliction that forces a person to leave the camp until it heals. It’s often translated as leprosy, but the Talmud is very clear: it wasn’t a typical disease, and it wasn’t about contagion. The Talmud links tzara’at directly to lashon hara—negative speech. The most famous case is Miriam, who is struck with tzara’at after unnecessarily speaking negatively about Moses. And then something remarkable happens: the entire nation waits for her while she heals outside of the camp.

Why don’t we get tzara’at anymore?

At Sinai, each person heard God’s voice according to their own capacity. Meaning—God doesn’t impose more on a person than they’re able, or willing, to receive. Apparently, we would find being sent out of the community every time we gossiped unbearable.

But that doesn’t mean we have to rely only on Miriam’s memory. No! We still have something very tangible happen every time we speak or listen to gossip; our world gets a little darker: people become worse, and we become cynical. That change in our disposition is the “voice” I think we can still all hear, and it’s a constant reminder that for society to thrive, we can’t gossip.

Shabbat Shalom,