Parshat Tzaria 5768: What is Tzarat?

Moving from all the death of animals for food and death of offspring in industrial accidents of last week, this week we move into part two of the three part theme on biblical public health. We start with the procedure for a mother after giving birth, then discuss some gynecological problems. We then move into the beginning of a rather long two portion discussion of the issue of what in that text is called tzarat and at a later time would be translated leprosy.

The rabbis were pretty clear on the causes of the disease called tzarat. For them it was a spiritual punishment:

(i) Haughty eyes, (ii) A Iying tongue, and (iii) Hands that shed innocent blood; (iv) A heart that divises wicked thoughts, (v) Feet that are swift in running to evil; (vi) A false witness that breathes out lies, and (vii) He that sows discord among brethren. R. Johanan said: All these are punished by leprosy. [Leviticus Rabbah XVI: 1]

For ten things [i.e. sins] does leprosy come upon the world: (i) idol-worship, (ii) gross unchastity, (iii) bloodshed, (iv) the profanation of the Divine Name, (v) blasphemy of the Divine Name, (vi) robbing the public, (vii) usurping [a dignity] to which one has no right, (viii) overweening pride, (ix) evil speech, and (x) an evil eye. [Leviticus Rabbah XVII: 3]

Certain types of bad behavior, much of it socipopathic, caused tzarat. Also they note it is progressive in nature.

First they come upon [the fabric of] his house. If he repents, it requires the pulling out [of affected stones]; if not, it requires pulling down [the house]. Then they [i.e. the plagues] come upon one's clothes. If he repents, they require washing; if not, they require burning. Then they [i.e. the plagues] come upon his body. If he repents, he undergoes purification; if not, HE SHALL DWELL ALONE (XIII, 46). [Leviticus Rabbah XVII: 3]

The rabbis and the biblical text saw this as s spiritual and social problem. If a person changes and repents, the problem goes away. Part of the biblical text however has remained around for quite a long time:

All the days when the disease shall be in him he shall be unclean; he is unclean; he shall dwell alone; outside the camp shall his habitation be. [Leviticus 13:46]

In English translations, tzarat had been associated with leprosy for quite a long time. Part of tzarat is the quarantine of the individual. Such a commandment had led to the creation of leper colonies, places of isolation, often in the worst of conditions. But was tzarat really leprosy?

Leprosy, in modern nomenclature called Hansen’s disease is caused by a very interesting rod shaped bacteria Mycobacterium leprae. Mycobacteria have a very thick and strong cell wall made up of waxy configurations of fats and sugars, making them rather impervious to the most common ways of indentifying bacteria and some of the methods used to kill them. However, in 1873 Gerhard Hansen did isolate and indentify the causative organism. The disease affects the skin and nervous tissue, leading to a loss of feeling. It is a secondary effect of this loss of feeling that causes people to not notice other conditions and injuries which might cause loss of skin tissue, not the leprosy itself. The U.S. Centers of Disease control has as part of their case definition the following symptoms:

Tuberculoid: one or a few well-demarcated, hypopigmented [i.e. light colored], and anesthetic skin lesions, frequently with active, spreading edges and a clearing center; peripheral nerve swelling or thickening also may occur Lepromatous: a number of erythematous [i.e. reddish] papules and nodules or an infiltration of the face, hands, and feet with lesions in a bilateral and symmetrical distribution that progress to thickening of the skin Indeterminate: early lesions, usually hypopigmented macules, without developed tuberculoid or lepromatous features

In comparison to the CDC definition, Tzarat, unlike anything else in the biblical text has one of the most detailed, if not clinical descriptions:

3. And the priest shall look on the disease in the skin of the flesh; and if the hair in the plague has turned white, and the disease looks deeper than the skin of his flesh, it is a disease of leprosy; and the priest shall look on him, and pronounce him unclean. 4. If the bright spot is white in the skin of his flesh, and it looks not deeper than the skin, and the hair on it has not turned white; then the priest shall shut up him who has the disease for seven days; 5. And the priest shall look on him the seventh day; and, behold, if the disease appears to have stayed in place, and the disease has not spread over the skin; then the priest shall shut him up seven days more; 6. And the priest shall look on him again the seventh day; and, behold, if the disease is somewhat dark, and the disease did not spread in the skin, the priest shall pronounce him clean; it is a scab; and he shall wash his clothes, and be clean. 7. But if the scab spreads out in the skin, after that he has been seen by the priest for his cleansing, he shall be seen by the priest again; 8. And if the priest sees that, behold, the scab spreads in the skin, then the priest shall pronounce him unclean; it is a leprosy.

While a lot of these symptoms are similar, the CDC definition mentions nothing about hair, not does the Biblical one mention anything about losing feeling in the lesions or the papules (hard raised areas of skin). Indeed Leviticus notes the disease is going down into the flesh, not moving up.

Even more puzzling is that Tzarat does not just affect people, but also non living things, including completely inorganic things. First we have clothing (13:47-49) both of plant and animal materials, then in next week’s portion houses with tzarat growing in the bricks. (14:37) In both of these cases, the text mentions not white but red or green growths. This is not the behavior of bacteria, but something else: fungi.

To understand Tzarat as a mold is found in Leviticus 14. After a home owner reports the possibility of disease to a priest, the house is emptied of all its possessions, and then:

37. And he [i.e. the priest] shall look on the disease, and, behold, if the disease is in the walls of the house with depressions, greenish or reddish, which in look lower than the wall; 38. Then the priest shall go out of the house to the door of the house, and shut up the house seven days; 39. And the priest shall come again the seventh day, and shall look; and, behold, if the disease has spread over the walls of the house; 40. Then the priest shall command that they take away the stones in which the disease is, and they shall throw them into an unclean place outside the city; 41. And he shall cause the house to be scraped inside around, and they shall pour out the dust that they scraped outside the city into an unclean place; 42. And they shall take other stones, and put them in the place of those stones; and he shall take other mortar, and shall plaster the house. 43. And if the disease comes again, and break out in the house, after he has taken away the stones, and after he has scraped the house, and after it is plastered; 44. Then the priest shall come and look, and, behold, if the disease has spread in the house, it is a malignant leprosy in the house; it is unclean. 45. And he shall break down the house, its stones, and its timber, and all the mortar of the house; and he shall carry them out of the city into an unclean place. [Lev 14 37-45]

This is very close to the same guidelines the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has for the remediation of mold. Fungi can cause types of dermatitis which can be similar to the symptoms mentioned above, some can grow on inorganic substances like rock or plaster, not to mentions infect leather wool and linen equally.

The rabbinic pattern of Tzarat first showing in the house, then clothes then people may not be farfetched. As the rabbis of Midrash Rabbah were people living in the same region as their ancestors, they were exposed to the same building materials, clothes, and climatic conditions as their ancestors. In rainy seasons, the plaster used in building constriction may have gotten wet and wicked the moisture into the area between stone and plaster, where the mold began to grow. Form there other items, including clothing would be affected. At the same time as it was the rainy season, people stayed indoors more often. Transmission of skin contact or through moldy clothes is not outside the range of possibilities for mold which would cause symptoms similar to the ones described, including the loss of pigmentation not only in skin, but in the hair.

Under these circumstances, Isolation and proper disposal of contaminated materials is the proper approach to the problem. In Miriam’s bout with leprosy, God commands Moses to shut out Miriam from the camp seven days (Numbers 12:14), the same procedure for tzarat as mentioned in Leviticus. The isolation was outside the camp not just to prevent contamination of others, but also prevents the person from having further exposure to the original source of the problem. For similar reasons everything inside of the house needs to be removed to prevent re-infection of the house with exposed materials. As Leviticus 14:46-47 notes anyone entering a sick building needs to be considered exposed for the rest of the day, anyone eating or sleeping in a quarantined home needs to be washed down.

I’ve had problems with the health claims for kosher. Yet for tzarat I’m willing to make the health claim. Granted, there is a spiritual component, and as I wrote last year, the kind of psychopathic activities the Rabbis ascribe as Tzarat for a punishment provide us with a reason for isolating such individuals. As someone involved with environmental health, the procedures ands details in the mitzvot of tzarat point to a environmental health concern above all else. Sick building syndrome is a real threat. The slightest water damage can cause immense health damage. In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, we saw this on a horrible scale, not only among residents but among relief workers. After the flood waters receded, mold was everywhere, and the effects of mold were well. The Centers for Disease Control found that 54% of New Orleans police officers and 49% of the city’s Firefighters working at the disaster responding to the poll reported skin rashes for example (MMWR 4/28/06). No study I found has yet looked at long term effects, but based on evidence of earlier smaller flooding situations, they too may be devastating.

While Mycobacterium leprae may very well go extinct as a public heath issue within a decade according to the World Health Organization, molds and their mycotoxins never will. Tzarat will be around for quite a while I believe. Yet the reason for this and next week’s readings to be primarily a public health text in a spiritual text, outside of the rabbi’s insistence on lashon hara as its cause is still a mystery. We’ll look at that more next week when we discuss the other public health problem these texts discuss.

Parshat Shmini 5768: Tolerance

This week, we have three major parts of our portion; we continue the sacrifices started in last week’s portion. On the eighth day of sacrifices, everything goes so well fire from the Lord devours the sacrifices. But things then turn tragic. Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu offer alien fire and are fatally consumed by the fire of the Lord. The rest of the Leviticus 10 then gives the aftermath of this tragedy and a prohibition against priests making sacrifices while intoxicated. We end with the laws of prohibited and permitted animals for eating, the basis of the kosher laws. Those start in chapter 11 with

1. And the Lord spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying to them, 2. Speak to the people of Israel, saying, These are the beasts which you shall eat among all the beasts that are on the earth.

Much of what we’ve read from the book of Leviticus has been mitzvot that has been rather impractical in post temple times. In the next few chapters of Leviticus many mitzvot will deal with public health. This all starts with the backbone of the kosher dietary rules in Leviticus 11. Yet the connection between the sacrifices and what we eat was underlined by the rabbis:

The altar of wood three cubits high . . . . and he said to me, This is the table that is before the Lord(Ezek. 41:22) [Now the verse] opens with ‘altar’ and finishes with ‘table’? R. Johanan and R. Eleazar both explain that as long as the Temple stood, the altar atoned for Israel, but now a man's table atones for him.[Ber. 55a]

When I’m not studying Torah or writing this column, I spend my life as an Environmental Health Professional. Most people would call me a Health Inspector, and I have spent a lot of time walking through many restaurants pointing out all kinds of violations that could make customers sick. Unlike my government colleagues, I’m a private consultant, and people hire me to internally check stuff so the local heath department never finds it wrong. A couple of years ago while working at a large convention center, I was inspecting a glatt kosher food kiosk for a client. The orthodox owner of this kiosk, watched me inspect his neighboring kiosk, a barbecue pork place, and eyed my nervously as I stuck my thermometer into pulled pork. Walking up to him, I referred to my thermometer as a “treif-o-meter” and then asked for his thermometer so I could take the temperature of his hot dogs and make sure they were over 140°F. His initial suspicion of anyone messing with his food relaxed at the quirky comment. We had a wonderful conversation after he noted how much the local kosher certifying agency and I did a lot of the same stuff.

Kashrut and food safety have been interwoven parts of my life for years. In 2006, I gave a presentation at the national meetings of my professional association explaining to a standing room only crowd of Health inspector and public health officials spilling out into the hallway what Kosher is and how to inspect not only a kosher restaurant but also how to deal with many faith-based food issues. It was so popular, and it got recorded at a second presentation two days later, which also brought in a crowd. That video is still on my professional association’s bestseller list as of this writing. I’ve given that talk locally several times and still get calls for it once in a while. Health and Kosher seem to be related.

In his Guide to the Perplexed, Maimonides makes one of the first health claims for kosher. Indeed he claims that everybody knows one shouldn’t eat pork. Even though Maimonides was a royal physician in Islamic Egypt, he may not have been talking as a doctor but as a Jew living in Egypt during the crusades. Eating pork flagged you as a Christian and a possible enemy spy, and that would be unhealthy. I don’t think in terms of health when it comes to Kosher. I’ve always thought what we call today treif is the fourth category of contamination in public health, the other three being biological, chemical and physical. The biblical taamei, changed to Terefa by the Talmudic rabbis was more about our connection to the divine. As such that connection might change and the rules about that connection might change. Islam and Judaism both don’t eat pork, and require a very specific method of slaughter for permitted animals. Yet they differ on the details of the procedure. Kosher requires the process be blessed for an entire day’s work, before the Shochet starts his day of cutting. On the other hand, Halal requires each animal to have a blessing while facing Mecca.

But even among Jews there are debates and even conflicts about what is the proper procedure. In late 18th century one movement took a lot of fire from traditional jews due to its very stringent the slaughter procedures and inspections for meat. Usually thought to be a reforming movement in Eastern Europe, The Hasidic movement was more strict about kosher meat than other movements of the time. There is evidence that the Baal Shem Tov himself was a Shochet at one part of his life, and we do have his request for a responsa he wrote in the name of the village council. He requested a ruling on the issue if one type of lesion is considered kosher, which the local rabbi had permitted. He demanded the use of only extremely sharp knives, which brought the movement a lot of flack from traditional Jews.

Even in Talmudic times, there were debates about what was and wasn’t kosher. One of the most interesting is the ruling of R. Jose of the Galilee, who believed the prohibition of dairy and poultry was absurd, since the Torah states “in its mother’s milk” and fowl produces no milk. People in the Galilee who were taught by one of the students of R. Jose would therefore mix milk and poultry. As one should follow the custom of the locality it was permitted. [Shabbat 130a]

Modernity had led us into even more confusion and conflict when comes to Kosher. Since the late 18^th century, not only the Hasidim, but many other observant Jews have taken to intense stringencies, and not just for meat. Two examples include the prohibition of broccoli and raspberries, since it is very difficult to remove tiny insects from them. Similarly, some of the very observant in New York City do not use their tap water, since there is microscopic shellfish called copepods in the reservoir feeding the city which gets into the water supply.

This is not only true of orthodoxy. Some in the liberal side of Judaism are also finicky as to the sources of their food, which they have termed Eco-kosher. For some, that means organic. For others, that might mean the food was produced in places with good labor practices, and for others under environmentally friendly conditions. On some occasions, one can have all three of these, In others those three criteria might contradict each other.

What we are left with is confusion. From the non observant Jew who would drop dead before having a glass of milk with his cheeseburger to the strictly observant who would not even walk into a house that does not follow exactly the same rules they do, Kosher observance has hit a point where it has become a completely personal practice. I am just as guilty of this as anyone else. My version of kosher prohibits red meat, allows chicken, and following R. Jose of the Galilee I do allow myself dairy with poultry. I don’t eat any shellfish or fish without scales, only the permitted kosher seafood. I’m not very Eco-kosher. I for one really don’t care where my food is coming from; I’m too cynical and too much a food industry insider to believe anyone’s claim.

Today it is not whether you keep kosher but how you keep kosher. There too many ways to keep kosher. But with Passover approaching, the flip side of that coin is also approaching. While the level of observance of removing and banning Hametz from the house will again be a personal observance, the Passover Seder often is far from a small private event. A lot of people from many different observance levels, and sometimes even differing religions come to the Seder table. The question which has bothered me for quite a time is how does one address the needs of all of them. Since I don’t eat red meat, I have on occasions gone to Orthodox homes, and ate very little, since they were serving meat that meal. On the other hand, my fear of Tuberculosis, E. Coli, Salmonella and a variety of other diseases might keep me from eating at some eco-kosher homes that only drink raw milk.

While I’ve been a Heath inspector for quite a white for the last few months I’ve been more involved with quality control in stuff other than food. And that has gotten me thinking about one of the big issues in quality control: tolerances. Put another way, how stringent or how lenient does one have to be in order to have a successful product? One of the very reputable books I read startled me with a bit of wisdom I hadn’t thought of before: if you have too many defects, one thing to do is broaden your tolerances that a lot of what you are claiming as defects become acceptable product. That sounded rather alarming and a bit seedy at first glance. It definitely went against my Jewish sensibilities of putting fences around Torah, putting as many preventative measures a possible in place to prevent failure. There was more to this story. Much of industry tolerances were set as arbitrary numbers. There was no real reason why those tolerances existed. The product worked fine even at the broader tolerances. The problem is no one knows exactly when the product really did stop working with statistically valid data. Not knowing that they throw away a lot of good product for no reason.

Thinking about that and the stringencies many people put on the rules of Kosher, I’ve done some wondering. Instead of thinking about our personal tolerances, maybe we should think about what tolerances make for valid observance as part of a group, and what is an arbitrary restriction? Maybe another way to frame the question of how to keep kosher as a group is how does the group as a whole experience kosher? What makes this community find sacred in the experience of eating? The rabbis transferred sacrifices to the dining room table. Nowhere is this as apparent as Passover. The question that really needs to be answered before the kosher question is said very early in the Passover Seder – What makes this night different than any other night? What makes our eating into a sacred connection?

I have no real answer here, just a belief as a guy who keeps kosher to some extent. Liberals and conservatives both make my observance frustrating, and I lose the holiness in that frustration. What makes dining room table less sacred is amount of fussing and fighting among people over this. How can we stop the bickering between people over what to eat?

So what does everyone else think?

Vayikra 5768: Parables of Sin

This week we begin Vayikra, otherwise known as Leviticus, starts with the procedures for different types of sacrifices. We learn how we are to essentially deplete barnyards of animals for different types of sacrifices, some for transgressions, and others for thanksgiving. For vegetarians, we learn that only one type of plant material, grain, is burned while all others are not. First fruits are not to be burned according to the text, but part of the meal offering is. Different classes of sins are then enumerated.

During this week’s portion we read a line an entire chapter about classes of sins:

1. And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 2. Speak to the people of Israel, saying, If a soul shall sin through ignorance against any of the commandments of the Lord concerning things which ought not to be done, and shall do against any of them; [Leviticus 4:1-2]

Again mentioning the same topic, we read:

27. And if any one of the common people sins through ignorance, when he does something against any of the commandments of the Lord concerning things which ought not to be done, and is guilty; 28. Or if his sin, which he has sinned, comes to his knowledge; then he shall bring his offering, a kid of the goats, a female without blemish, for his sin which he has sinned.[Leviticus 4:27,28]

The rabbis in Leviticus Rabbah spend a great deal of time asking some fundamental theological questions including “Is it our bodies or our souls that sin?”

While researching what I wanted to do this week, a parable caught my eye. Parables are known throughout rabbinic literature from quite early times. Indeed there is even a formula for a parable. At its most general, the formula would be stated.

A parable. To what can this be compared to? This can be compared to a… so too can …

Variations of this formula omit parts of the above general form. Parables are ways of talking about a very esoteric idea in terms of very common things and concrete stories. One such parable about learning is found in the Perkei Avot:

Elisha b. Abuyah said: He who learns when a child, to what is he [to be] compared? — To ink written on a new writing sheet; and he who learns when an old man, unto what is he like? — To ink written on an erased writing sheet.

To use Elisha b. Abuyah’s parable to explain parables, those with experience in the world have stuff you cannot completely erase. Parables are for those who have those experiences. Parables use those marks left over from erasing to build onto the new learning.

In the one I found this week, the rabbis are expounding on the phrase from Ecclesiastes 6:7 Neither is the soul filled. The rabbis use a parable to explain this:

R. Levi said: It is like unto a townsman who has married a royal princess; even though he feeds her with all the dainties in the world, he does not fully discharge his obligation. Why?-Because she is a royal princess. So, too, however much a man does for his soul, he does not discharge his full obligation. Why?-Because it is from on high. [Leviticus Rabbah IV: 2]

What does fulfilling the soul have to do with sinning? In another well known parable, the rabbis compare the soul and the body to two guards of an orchard. The king who owns the orchard reasons that since one of these guards is blind and one lame, they cannot get at the fruit of his orchard, and thus be trusted to guard the fruit. Yet the fruit is eaten, and the king figures out that the lame man sat of the shoulders of the blind man and together they got the fruit. So too, the Rabbis conclude, does the soul and the body work together to sin. [Leviticus Rabbah IV: 5]

Yet there is a rebuttal also in parable. The body and soul are like two women: a daughter of a priest and a commoner. Both live in the same household and both do the same sin. The master of the house takes the daughter of the priest to task and not the commoner because the daughter of the priest knew better. So too is the body like the commoner and the soul the daughter of the priest, it knows a lot better than the body. [ibid.]

When I first read the parable about the townsman and the royal princess, it seems when it comes to sin, we cannot win. The divine origin of our souls actually makes us less than perfect. We should try our best to not to sin, but inevitably, due to the nature of the body and soul our efforts will fall short. Ironically, to deal with sin is one of the gifts from God.

After reading the other parables mentioned here, and I began to wonder. There is a body soul connection repeatedly mentioned in the other parables. The parable of the princess and the commoner may also fit this pattern. The princess is the soul, and the body the commoner. The story of the orchard guards charges that the body and the soul are both responsible for sin. The story of the two women charges the soul responsible for sin. The commoner and the princess may likewise be emphasizing the responsibility of the body, but with a twist.

In popular culture and in the dominant theological thought pervasive in our culture, we hear of “animal urges.” The physical is the root of all evil in this view. The soul, being of divine origin cannot sin. According to this view the urge to sin is in our physical requirements, one that some in the world of science have tried to confirm. If we deny the body, the soul’s purity will shine through goes the argument.

Yet the princess and the commoner point to something else, a failure to communicate. Commoners and royalty do not talk the same language. The Soul does have desires and demands, ones the body tries to accommodate, yet fails. The body just can’t understand them. The princess wants a five star meal, yet the commoner brings home hamburger, fries and a coke. What the princess really wants is outside the experience of the commoner, and thus he fails. Sin often comes about because the body desires to fulfill the desires of the soul. Yet often, the way the body uses experience and sensation are inadequate to the task, and thus, even with the best of intentions we end up sinning.

The soul yearns for love and relationship, both with our fellow human beings and with God. The body all too often redefines relationship and love into exclusively physical sensation. Sex and touch becomes the body’s response for the soul’s yearning. Often the physical become the only way to fulfill that need for relationship, but as Ecclesiastes 6:7 noted: All the labor of man is for his mouth, and yet the soul is not filled. It is never enough, and more of the same is added. Having five Big Macs instead of one is still not a five star meal. We get more ridiculous in our attempt to satisfy the soul. From wanting relationship and love, we might get into a downward spiral trying to satisfy that with promiscuity, adultery and pornography. It is all too often in the news that some seemingly upright person has a downfall due to such sin, be it sex, drugs or other activity.

We cannot avoid sin completely, but we can minimize it. The solution in my view is not conventional thinking, but as the parables above intimate, it is very Jewish thinking. The lame man’s and blind man’s real job was to keep other people from eating the King’s fruit. If someone else comes by to steal, the lame man and blind man alone are as powerless to stop them as individuals as they are to steal the fruit themselves. However, the lame man can see thieves, and can tell the blind man who to catch going over the fence into the orchard. If they can work together to steal fruit, so too can they work together to guard the fruit. Both sin and virtue in their case is the same solution: good communication between them.

The princess and the commoner need to communicate. The princess needs to say “I want to go the 5-star restaurant down the street with real waiters and have a candlelit dinner there and a wonderfully prepared five course meal!” The commoner has to actually listen to this, and then say “Where to? I’ll make the reservations”. We need to integrate our bodies and souls. Both have their needs and both need to serve the needs of the other, taking joy in fulfilling those needs. As in any good relationship there is communication, there is give and take.

As any newspaper on any day of the week will tell you in their own parables, denying one or the other often leads to disaster. Sin happens. But sin does not have to control us; we can control sin, making it a minimal part of our lives. Understanding that both the body and soul are responsible and that we keep both our bodies and souls holy and in sync with each other we control sin. To combat sin is not just a matter of doing and not doing. We must always remember the mind-body connection.

Parshat Behar Behukotai 5767: Quid pro quo?

Leviticus 25:1-27:34

In a double portion, finishing up the book of Leviticus this week we read:

1. You shall make no idols or graven image, nor erect a pillar, nor shall you set up any image of stone in your land, to bow down to it; for I am the Lord your God. 2. You shall keep my Sabbaths, and reverence my sanctuary; I am the Lord. 3. If you walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them; 4. Then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her produce, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit.[26:1-4]

While all the good things continue for a few verses, we then read these verses

14. But if you will not listen to me, and will not do all these commandments; 15. And if you shall despise my statutes, or if your soul loathes my judgments, so that you will not do all my commandments, but that you break my covenant; 16. I also will do this to you; I will appoint over you terror, consumption, and fever, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart; and you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it. [26: 14-16]

This will lead to progressively worsening conditions from famine to invasion to exile, until what remnant would be left of the Israelites would become paranoid exiles in foreign lands, afraid of the rustling of leaves.

Last week I put a footnote about Haya Im Shmoah, the reading from Deuteronomy 11 that is often omitted in liberal liturgy of the Shema. Haya Im Shmoah begins:

13. And it shall come to pass, if you shall give heed diligently to my commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, 14. That I will give you the rain of your land in its due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that you may gather in your grain, and your wine, and your oil. 15. And I will send grass in your fields for your cattle, that you may eat and be full. 16. Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and you turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them; 17. And then the Lord’s anger be kindled against you, and he closed the skies, that there should be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit; and lest you perish quickly from off the good land which the Lord gives you. [Deut. 11:13-17]

In both Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 11 there is a quid pro quo view of divine commandment and intervention. Do bad things and get bad. Do good things and get good. Some find this it a simple model of theodicy, the philosophy and theology of why bad things happen. There are preachers and rabbis who say that 9/11 or Katrina was a punishment for our misdeeds. For most however, this is simplistic and absurd, if not a heartless, painful way of describing such tragedies. So many people, not wanting to believe in such directness, reject such passages.

I’m not so sure rejection is wise. There are two issues that intrigue me about both passages I have a hard time ignoring. One is apparent only in the Hebrew. Unless one lives in the southern United States, in English “you” expresses both singular and plural. These sections are in the plural. They are addressed at a society as a whole. We as individuals cannot live to that expectation. We take the burden of all of society on our selves. We would need to be responsible for everything – and we can’t.

The specific transgression that causes the bad things is Idolatry. What is Idolatry? As we read repeatedly, Idols were physical objects which one bribed in order to get something in return. The Torah, given this understanding, makes another leap. Idolatry was not bribing a god at all but mere self absorption. Since there is nothing really there but a block of wood, the idol is a self delusion, a honoring of the Self instead of honoring the Creator of All.

Shabbat, the Sabbaticals and Jubilees we read about in this portion are about physical rest of people, economies and of course the land. They are also pauses from the regular grind to remind us we are in relationship with everything. In such pauses, we learn to be amazed at how wonderful and powerful such relationships are. Today it would be hard to find many people actually sacrificing to a wood or stone idol as a god. It is a different matter to think of self-absorption as idolatry. When we spend all of our time working or doing the stuff that matters to us personally and for our personal benefit only then we too are guilty of Idolatry.

Martin Buber believed we need to get away from the I-it experience of idolatry and move to the I-thou relationship, where the I was our perception of everything else. We hear repeatedly, from the first utterance at Sinai on, I am the Lord. There is a third possibility, I-I. We as limited beings are not everything, but instead part of an entire system of relationships, not one relationship, but infinite relationships with infinite things. God transcends these relationships. God created matter, but also created the relationships of all of these things. God is the entirety of those relationships. The first ‘I’ is the ‘I’ of I am the Lord, the entire system. That ‘I’ meets the ‘I’ of the limited human of I-Thou. I-I describes us as an integral and vital part of God. We are also an infinitely small part of God as well because everything else is too. As Heschel reminds us, we do carry two passages with us always, The world was made for my sake and I am but dust and ashes.

It was not because you were greater than any people that the Lord set His love upon you and chose you. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Israel, I love you because even when I bestow greatness upon you, you humble yourselves before me. I bestowed greatness upon Abraham, yet he said to Me, I am but dust and ashes;(Gen 18:27)[Chullin 89a]

To proclaim the greatness of the Holy One, blessed be He: If a man strikes many coins from one mold, they all resemble one another, but the Supreme King of Kings, The Holy One, Blessed Be He, fashioned every man in the stamp of the first man, and yet not one of them resembles his fellow. Therefore every single person is obliged to say: The world was created for my sake. [Sanh. 37a]

When we lose this perspective then we move into idolatry. We must remember we are integral to every other relationship, and yet be very humble about that role. If our deeds are for the Self only, we stop caring how we affect all other relationships. When we stop caring, we cause damage. Such damage is cumulative, first affecting us in small ways then bigger ones, until our entire world is destroyed. Each one of us has the potential to do this. If a lot of people do the same the damage is worse. In whole societies we see the damage.

Divine retribution is not quid pro quo. It is the consequence of our actions. We are responsible for everything, as God commanded humanity back in Genesis 2. We have a stewardship of our personal and professional relationships to our communal and environmental ones. Such stewardship requires us to do the right thing and have the right relationships. Each will affect the other. All too often we forget that. When I davven Haya Im Shmoah, or read a passage like this week’s I am reminded once again.

Parshat Emor 5767: How Do We Pray?

Leviticus 21:1-24:23

For the last two years of Parshat Emor, I wrote a rather startling sentence: I can't pray because I'm afraid of praying. At the time I wrote:

More accurately, I don't think of myself as praying, or having acceptable prayer towards God. My prayer ascends to heaven the very same way a brick does: not at all. In this weeks portion we are to learn that the offering to God must be perfect, without defects. And here I am unable to read the Hebrew prayer without flubbing every third word. I'll admit it's an improvement. Ten years ago I wouldn't have been able to do that since I couldn't read Hebrew. These words of our liturgy I cannot say perfectly, nor can I always have perfect intention, as my anxiety over my poor Hebrew reading skills overwhelms me. And somehow English doesn't work here; it's too much for me like giving a turtledove instead of an ox for sacrifice. That said I'm really good at faking it, I've been faking praying most of my life, though I feel like a fraud when I do.

In doing a lot of thinking about theology lately, I’ve been using the Song of Songs as a springboard. Thinking about Prayer, I am reminded of the following verse

Oh, my dove in concealment of the cliff in steep hiding places.
Show me your appearance let me listen to your voice
For your voice is sweet, and your appearance is beautiful. [Song of Songs 2:14]

While I have often looked at the Song in its literal sense, I also believe that it is underneath a theology, and since studying Heschel, I have come to put Heschel’s ideas of God in search of man to be the story within the Song of Songs. The song is an unrequited relationship between two very committed partners. The male protagonist, representing God, calls out to the hiding female, Israel, to listen to her voice, to talk to God, to pray.

But what is this thing called prayer? At its simplest it is talking to God. There is no one way to pray but a spectrum from personal prayer to liturgy said as Minyan. Yet in order to understand prayer I look to how I pray. I pray three ways: the liturgy in synagogue, the liturgy in private prayer, and my personal prayer to God. Each of these contains different elements of the idea of prayer.

Within prayer there is keva, the form of the prayer and kavvanah, the intention and passion of prayer. There is keva in a set liturgy, one solid enough I can pick up a prayer book and recite it out of the book. I don’t have to do anything other than recite it.

Yet intention is also important. Hasidism in particular elevated the idea of praying with intention, yet they were far from the first. Even the Talmudic rabbis saw the power of having deep intention while praying. The rabbis note:

One should not stand up to say tefillah [i.e. the amidah] save in a reverent frame of mind. The pious men of old used to wait an hour before praying in order that they might concentrate their thoughts upon their father in heaven. Even if a king greets him [while praying] he should not answer him: even if a snake is wound round his heel he should not break off [Brachot 30b].

In the Talmud, they explain this statement by claiming that one should pray like Hanna. Hanna was one of two wives of a man named Elkanah who was barren while her rival wife, Pennina was very fertile. After a stream of verbal abuse from Pennina, Hanna went to the Mishkan where Eli the high priest happened to be sitting and prayed:

10. And she was in bitterness of soul, and prayed to the Lord, and wept bitterly…13. And Hanna spoke in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard; therefore Eli thought that she was drunk. [I Sam 1]

Hanna’s apparent drunkenness was the ideal state of prayer, so intense the outside world does not exist. Her lips move, but no sound comes out of them so concentrating on the words and the connection with God. Hanna models Kavvanah. She has an intention. She also has attentiveness to God. She has a deep, intimate, connection with God. Yet this is an ideal state. In reality, it is rather difficult to do or sustain. This is where Keva, the form and structure, helps. It is like a man on a journey with a map. He must rely on landmarks found on his map to orient himself and find his path. Liturgy is our map. The prayers we recite daily, every Shabbat or on holidays act as markers to the higher state of kavvanah. Such markers exist because we can get lost easily.

When I am not in a synagogue, but there is a set time to pray such as Friday evening, I pray alone, yet follow the liturgy. Besides acting as a map, liturgy has other purposes in prayer. For some prayers, such as the Shema I am commanded to say them. Others, like L’cha Dodi or V’shamru on Friday Night, are integral for creating the sanctity of Shabbat. In their absence, my prayer would neither be special nor commemorate the time. But liturgy is also the comfort of having a common Jewish prayer. It can be compared to a single traveler making his way on the road. He may use the unknown rarely traveled back roads, or he may use the well-traveled Interstate. If the traveler gets stuck or is low on gas, he is more likely to find help on the Interstate than on those back roads, hopelessly lost. By praying the liturgy, I have the ability to learn the way to pray, and in times of crisis I have prayer readily available in the nearest Siddur.

Yet there are times that I do pray without liturgy. These are times when I am like the traveler who see the snow capped mountain in the distance – he needs no map because the destination is so awesome and clear that no one can miss it in the terrain. In deep emotional times, both sadness and joy, there is a time for prayer. Hanna prayed directly from the heart, without liturgy. Hanna’s prayer, however, was a prayer of petition, one that wanted God to do something. Heschel in his last interview before his death in 1972 stated:

First of all, let us not misunderstand the nature of prayer, particularly in the Jewish tradition. The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests. The primary purpose of is to praise to sing to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and Man cannot live without a song. Prayer may not save us, but prayer may make us worthy of being saved.

Although intense and a prayer of pure kavvanah, Hanna’s petitionary prayer takes a second seat to praise. The song of radical amazement with creation is the highest prayer. We see how incredible this world is that God made, and sing out in joy. Yet even here, I sometimes fall back on liturgy or the biblical text. Sometimes it is merely a heartfelt ma’aseh Breshit (blessed is God who makes creation) sometimes a part of a psalm comes to mind, often for me from eternity to eternity you are God (Psalm 90:2). But this type of prayer is the most intense. In some ways it is the easiest, in that it is from the heart. There are no liturgies to memorize. Our prayer can be our own words. Yet it is also the hardest. We all too often in our busy lives miss the radical amazement around us, and never pray. Even when we try, our heart is the least disciplined part of our psyche, as we read in the Shema, that your heart be not deceived, and you turn aside [Deut. 11:16]*. It often leads us astray from our goal, where we head towards that awesome mountain, yet turn off the path to say “how beautiful is this tree.”

Then there is third type of prayer, the one we do in community. This connects us with God in a very different sense than that of individual prayer. It is in the Perkei Avot which describes this best: When there are ten sitting together and occupying themselves with Torah, the Shechinah abides among them. [Avot 3:6] It is the ten people for a minyan. We are all minted from the same coin, yet each unique. But one coin does not make a currency. People in a Minyan create a collaborative effort, and as such some prayers, like the Kaddish can only be done in such a collaborative effort. We each add to the prayer experience of the other. Where Kavvanah might be difficult to achieve for an individual, it is not so difficult when created by community. The spirit of the heart increases in the environment of collaborative kavvanah, the orchestra is more than the violin soloist. You can also compare this to a candle. One candle might burn bright. Ten candles, even when they do not burn individually as bright as that first candle collectively light the room far more than the one candle. Prayer as community provides us with a support, to bring more kavvanah to our prayer.

However, if we prayed our own personal prayer in community it would be chaos. Here too the keva of liturgy provides us with a way of coordinating our kavvanah. When we pray the Shema together, we speak in one voice, coordinated, whole and with intention. The liturgy contains moments of personal prayer, such as the silent Amidah, punctuated with moments of communal prayer in its repetition. Thus we create a fluctuating prayer liturgy that increases both the communal and the personal. Such an experience creates an environment where our attention to prayer can be brought higher than our personal prayer alone.

Yet there are difficulties. Communal prayer can become dogmatic. It can then have the least amount of kavvanah, with route recitation of the words. There are schools of thought that so emphasize rote recitation there is nothing but the keva. Heschel attacks this as “religious behaviorism,” where the supreme article of faith is a respect for tradition. “People are urged to observe the rituals or to attend services out of deference to what has come down to us from our ancestors.” Heschel attacks this as “grotesque and self defeating.” Such dogmas create an intense conformity, and are self limiting. Judaism realizes that what we believe in “surpasses the power and range of human expression” to find the great power of the community. All those different coins of different visages become the same coin of the same visage in fundamentalist belief, and the creative power and communal brightness of kavvanah dims.

Prayer may be a personal connection. It may also be the connection of Israel to God. This determines the when of prayer. We pray at set times of the day and we pray certain prayers to commemorate events of the Jewish people. As Heschel reminds us, Judaism is not anchored in space, but in time. We commemorate not places as much as events. The Sabbath is a commemoration of creation, and every seven days we remember and celebrate that. Part of that remembering is the recitation of prayer. We pray three times a day to commemorate the times of the sacrifices. We change that liturgy to commemorate Shabbat, as we add and subtract things for other holidays.

Abraham Joshua Heschel comments that the best way to learn how to pray is to pray near someone who knows how to pray. Sadly, there are not many who know anymore. Neither my fear of prayer nor ignorance of prayer should then be surprising. Yet, I still pray so God hears that beautiful voice God so strives to hear.

*I know some of you are not familiar with that verse. Some liturgy, such as Reform, removed the second paragraph of the Shema, the Haya im shmoah. It is a statement of direct cause between doing good and evil and divine reward and punishment, and some are uncomfortable with that. I don’t read it that way but rather we are stewards of this world and are responsible for it. I usually include it in my private prayer, since it is rare in the minyans I attend.

Parshat Aharei Mot-Kedoshim 5767: Where’s the Golden Rule?

Leviticus 16:1-20:27

We read several times in this double reading an interesting phrase:

Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel, and say to them, You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy. [Leviticus 19:2]

And you shall be holy to me; for I the Lord am holy, and have separated you from other people, that you should be mine. [Leviticus 20:26]

Bracketed between 19:2 and 20:26 is a massive list of mitzvot. If I counted right, there are around 50 to 60 mitzvot in all, though in some cases there are repetitions. Very few have to do with sacrificial law. Most have to do with every day life and every day people. Many could be defined as ethical.

If I were to ask most people they would be hard pressed to tell me 10% of that list. Could you name just five? Try it right now –stop reading for fifteen seconds and see how many you can list.

How many did you get? To be honest, I got three, the rest I didn’t know were here, till I began working on this week Drash. But looking through the list, I found five I missed that should be obvious:

1. You shall love your neighbor as yourself; [19:18]

2. You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall reason with your neighbor, and not allow sin on his account[19:17]

3. You shall not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block before the blind,[19:14]

4. You shall not go up and down as a slanderer among your people;[19:16]

5. You shall not steal, nor deal falsely, nor lie one to another.[19:11]

Much of the ethical principles are there sitting in these two chapters. To do these ethical things is to be as holy as God. I have to wonder why we are not familiar with where the golden rule shows up in Torah.

One of the problems with education is there is a limited time to study an immense amount of material. IN much of the medieval period, Talmudic study was far more emphasized than Tanach – many students, it is clear did not study anything in Tanach that wasn’t referenced in the Talmud. Classical Reform, 120 years ago believed that the Torah was obsolete and that it was the prophetic literature we should study and teach. But one teacher gave a much simpler answer:

On another occasion it happened that a certain heathen came before Shammai and said to him, ‘Make me a proselyte, on condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.’ Thereupon he repulsed him with the cubit-length ruler which was in his hand. When he went before Hillel, he said to him, ‘What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah, while the rest is the commentary thereof; go and learn it.’[Shabbat31a]

All of Judaism is a commentary to Leviticus 19:17-18 according to Hillel. Yet there is another teacher who mentioned the golden rule:

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?" "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' (Deut 6) The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'(Lev 19) There is no commandment greater than these." "Well said, teacher," the man replied. "You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices." [Mark 12:28-33]

This story, also found in Matthew 22, cites Jesus as the source of the golden rule, and if you ask most people they will tell you the golden rule originates in the New Testament. The thing that disturbs me is how many times I’ve heard even Jews mention the golden rule as a Christian rule, totally unaware of Leviticus 19:17.

Hillel died around 10 CE, a few decades before Jesus was preaching. “The teacher of the law” may very well have been a direct disciple of Hillel, one of the members of the school known in the Talmud as Beit Hillel. Beit Hillel was the leading school of rabbinic Judaism and rather lenient in their rulings about halakah compared to their rival school Beit Shammai. Of Beit Hillel we know:

Hillel the Elder had eighty disciples. Thirty of them deserved that the Shechinah would rest upon them as [upon] Moses our teacher. Thirty of them deserved that the sun would stand [still] for them as [for] Joshua the son of Nun. Twenty were of an average character. The greatest of them was Jonathan b. Uzziel; the least of them was R. Johanan b. Zakkai. [Baba Batra 134a]

In an ironic understatement, Johanan b. Zakkai, the founder of the Academy of Yavneh, where Talmudic Judaism would be born, is the worst student. Eighty brilliant, dedicated teachers could easily spread the ideas over a good part of Israel. It is not extremely fanciful then to believe that even if a young Jesus never met Hillel he got a good education from Beit Hillel. To know this story and think that the golden rule was the second most important commandment behind the Shema and V’ahavta was part of his education. I’m sure he would be able to quote exactly where in Torah it was found.

While I am bothered by my not knowing where the golden rule is, I know where to blame. My early education was insufficient. My early Jewish education was almost exclusively Zionist. We leaned where Tel Aviv and Jerusalem was, learned about every victory of the IDF, and how wonderful a Kibbutz was, we learned that Israel made up for the Holocaust. We did do some ritual things, such as decorating Sukkahs and model Passover Seders. Yet, in about four years I learned only the first ten of twenty two letters in the Aleph-Bet. By the time of my bar mitzvah, I could barely read the Shema in Hebrew, nor had I ever looked into the text of Leviticus. Given our moving around, I prepared for my bar mitzvah at an Orthodox school and realized how woefully inadequate my education was. I was pretty much treated by faculty and students alike as treif for being ignorant, so counter to the verse from this week You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall reason with your neighbor, and not allow sin on his account. [Leviticus 19:17] But I did learn at that Orthodox school a verse which fascinated me: You can not see my face; for no man shall see me and live. [Exodus 33:20]

At the same time I was introduced to Taoism in a high school comparative religion Class, with the first two verses of the Tao Te Ching

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao

The Name that can be named is not the Eternal Name

I saw a parallel between these passages of Torah and Tao. I asked my rabbi about it, who promptly and rather rudely rebuffed me. It was the last straw. I left Torah behind, and studied the Tao instead. I’m sad to say, I’m not the only one. All of the Jewish demographic studies point to an increasing abandoning of Judaism for either atheism or other religions. As this cannot be completely be accounted for by intermarriage, intermarriage itself may be a symptom of a bigger problem: a lack of a learned Jewish religious identity. If one erroneously thinks Mark and Matthew say the same thing as Torah, why stay Jewish? If anyone who has an ethical problem with the Israeli government is labeled a self-hating Jew, and is thus hated by other Jews, why stay Jewish? If Christians or Buddhists are more accepting of you for your ignorance of religion, why stay Jewish?

I did return to Judaism, but as a Baal T’shuvah of a sort, I do wonder how our educational system can make sure we do not make the mistakes made in generations past for the future generations. Jewish early learning has to be balanced between many things; Zionism, Ritual and Prayer are among them. But what is the most important is a love of the study of Torah. The next generation should know exactly where the golden rule is and where the Shema is in Torah. I don’t care if one is Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or another smaller stream, Torah is the foundation of a strong, vibrant Judaism. Each stream may teach those words with a different and divergent view but the words must bind all Jews together. It must be the core of our educational system. It is a lot of work to say the least, but R. Tarfon sums up my belief abut Torah education nicely:

He used to say: it is not [incumbent] upon you to finish the work, but neither are you a free man so as to [be entitled to] refrain from it; if you have studied much Torah, they give you much reward, and faithful is your employer to pay you the reward of your labor; and know that the grant of reward unto the righteous is for the future. [Avot 2:16]

While R. Tarfon may have meant by “future” was the afterlife, I believe in these times “future” means the future of the Jewish people. It is my hope we can all be righteous and holy enough for such a reward.

Tzaria-Metzora 5767: Warnings and sickness

This week’s portion has some very interesting, almost clinical mitzvot.

2. When a man shall have in the skin of his flesh a swelling, a scab, or bright spot, and it is on the skin of his flesh like the disease of leprosy; then he shall be brought to Aaron the priest, or to one of his sons the priests; 3. And the priest shall look on the disease in the skin of the flesh; and if the hair in the plague has turned white, and the disease looks deeper than the skin of his flesh, it is a disease of leprosy; and the priest shall look on him, and pronounce him unclean.

This week we learn about leprosy, and I had planned to talk about what medically leprosy really was. Yet two things changed my mind.

The first was that I cannot get past something that happened Saturday. While discussing last week’s Torah portion, I made a statement publicly that I had written on this list before. I have read a lot into the story of the death of Nadab and Abihu and tried to find something that makes sense here. While I can see how many can have interpretations they did something wrong, there is one I tend to like the best – they died heroes. We read in Leviticus 16:12-13 that the incense in the fire pan was used as a containment field, a smoke screen so that no one saw the Glory of the Lord. Remember when Moses asked to see God’s glory, he was told “no man shall see my face and live” [Exodus 33:20] Yet no incense was used in that sacrifices se we are told everyone could see the sacrifice consumed. I believe that Nadab and Abihu realized when the glory and the fire of the Lord came down in Leviticus 9:23-24, the people were not supposed to see it. The fire would continue to expand without the containment field, yet at the time there was no holy fire to light incense pans. So they do not use holy fire but alien fire. While saving everyone else, they sacrificed themselves. When I thought of that in 2004, many of those who died on 9/11 was still on my mind, that there were people who would run into a burning collapsing building in the hope of saving someone else. Today knowing people who put their lives in danger in public health settings around the world, I still use this midrash to comemorate their courage.

There was an objection to this. Someone found my making these two into heroes very disturbing. She specified only one thing in particular that disturbed her. God had not warned anyone. Yet we read after the death of Nadab and Abihu:

Then Moses said to Aaron, This is what the Lord spoke, saying, I will be sanctified in them that come near to me, and before all the people I will be glorified. And Aaron held his peace [Leviticus 10:3]

The key phrase is, This is what the Lord spoke - it is in the past tense.

While that thought was with me for much of the weekend, and into Monday, I was deeply involved in far too many things not to listen to the news until Tuesday. The events at Virginia Tech of course were the second thing that changed my mind about what I was going to write.

Tzarat, often called Leprosy, is some form of skin disease or possibly a variety of skin diseases. While some of the rather detailed symptoms do describe the effects of Mycobacterium leprae, the organism which causes the disease leprosy, it does not completely describe such a disease. Jewish thinking often does not look to a physical cause but rather a behavioral one. Given the cases found in the biblical text there are several versions of what causes leprosy:

(i) Haughty eyes, (ii) A Iying tongue, and (iii) Hands that shed innocent blood; (iv) A heart that divises wicked thoughts, (v) Feet that are swift in running to evil; (vi) A false witness that breathes out lies, and (vii) He that sows discord among brethren. R. Johanan said: All these are punished by leprosy. [Leviticus Rabbah XVI: 1]

For ten things [i.e. sins] does leprosy come upon the world: (i) idol-worship, (ii) gross unchastity, (iii) bloodshed, (iv) the profanation of the Divine Name, (v) blasphemy of the Divine Name, (vi) robbing the public, (vii) usurping [a dignity] to which one has no right, (viii) overweening pride, (ix) evil speech, and (x) an evil eye. [Leviticus Rabbah XVII: 3]

The one who contracts tzarat is a sociopath. He is a danger not to just himself but to everybody around him. But it is one particular sin, lashon hara, evil speech, which is mentioned most often in reference to tzarat. As we read in several place in Talmud, Lashon Hara is equivalent to bloodshed. It is of course related to Miriam’s slander of Moses in Numbers 10. Yet even Miriam’s case ended after seven day quarantine. Tzarat is often not a permanent thing in the text, only King Uzziah and Elisha’s assistant Gehazi gets a permanent case. Given that, the rabbis make a startling claim:

So also when [leprous] plagues come upon man. First they come upon [the fabric of] his house. If he repents, it requires the pulling out [of affected stones]; if not, it requires pulling down [the house]. Then they [i.e. the plagues] come upon one's clothes. If he repents, they require washing; if not, they require burning. Then they [i.e. the plagues] come upon his body. If he repents, he undergoes purification; if not, HE SHALL DWELL ALONE (XIII, 46). [Leviticus Rabbah XVII: 3]

In the case of Nadab and Abihu, there was a warning. It was told to Moses before the incident. Moses was told something by God, and said and did nothing. In the context of tzarat, we see the same thing that has bothered me this week: warnings. Tzarat isn’t the end punishment, but instead the warning that something worse will await you if you continue to do sociopatic things to others. One must turn away from that path, and quarantine is not about the biological hazard as much as the behavioral and giving the person time to calm down and change. Yet, a loss of pigmentation in skin and hair is also a rather obvious visual signal to others as well. Others will stay away from a case of tzarat even if such a person was not quarantined. All are warnings to change before something terrible happens.

With all that is coming out about the events in Blacksburg at the early part of the week, once again I have much to wonder about warnings, and what I could have said to the person who objected to my calling Nadab and Abihu heroes. My only answer upsets me even more. What is more disturbing than not having a warning is to have the warning and not heed it. Not only was last monday a tragic event, but once again it is a set of warnings. It is a warning that guns kill, and there are people that guns should not be sold to. Like Columbine and 9/11 before it, obsessive mass media coverage of the event will once again will transmit the disease to others. Some will take such coverage, along with the less controllable media of internet communications, as approval for such an act, and such viral Lashon Hara will infect and breed a string of copycats.

Hind sight is 20/20. Yet, one does not need hindsight when the event happens not just once but multiple times. Midrash Rabbah’s view of Tzarat, in reverse order of the biblical text, is of an increasingly personal disease. Its effects get more severe each episode reminding us we do know a lot more than we think, and that we must act. A man certified as insane owned hand guns. While a suspected terrorist might not be able to board a plane, that same suspected terrorist can still buy any weapon in the U.S. and open fire in a shopping mall or school. No one can prevent him until he does.

As I wrote this, I look onto the cover of newspapers and see the leprosy in the video-game posed cover photo of this madman. I heard the sickness in an interview with an early suspect in the case, a guy who happed to be a gun collector and graduate of Virgina tech. He told CNN that had students been permitted concealed weapons the tragedy would have been adverted. If this is not Tzarat I have no idea what is. Who gives a portable weapon to the demographic most likely to be drunk?

So I have to ask, when is the Tzarat of society too personal? When is it too severe that we actually take action to prevent the problem? In the words of the great Sage Hillel: If not now, When?

Parshat Shimini 5767: Of Cows and Love Letters

Leviticus 9:1 - 11:47

This week, we have three major parts of our portion; we continue the sacrifices started in last week’s portion. It is the eighth day of sacrifices, and everything goes so well God performs a wonder and fire from the Lord devours the sacrifices. But things then turn tragic. Two of Aaron's sons offer alien fire and are consumed by the fire of the Lord themselves. The rest of Leviticus 10 then gives the aftermath of this tragedy and a prohibition against priests making sacrifices while intoxicated. We end with the laws of prohibited and permitted animals for eating, the basis of the kosher laws. Those start in chapter 11 with

1. And the Lord spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying to them, 2. Speak to the people of Israel, saying, These are the beasts which you shall eat among all the beasts that are on the earth.

While much of what we’ve read from the book of Leviticus has been mitzvot that has been rather impractical in post temple times, in the next few chapters of Leviticus many mitzvot will deal with public health. This all starts with the backbone of the kosher dietary rules in Leviticus 11.

Yet this is not the first time we have heard of the rules of kashrut. Two of its most significant rules were given earlier:

It shall be an everlasting statute for your generations throughout all your dwellings, that you eat neither fat nor blood.[Lev 4:17]

The first of the first fruits of your land you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God. You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.[ Ex 23 19]

As a public health and food safety professional I can appreciate those like Maimonides who see health issues in kashrut. But in my religious life I see things very differently. The way I deal with kosher as a Jew has a lot less to do with health and a lot more with the mitzvot. When we look at the mitzvot we can categorize them in many different ways, but one of the easiest is of course as the negative (i.e. don’t) and positive (do) mitzvot. Of course, we have both in this parsha. For example here is the positive mitzvah of eating red meat:

What ever parts the hoof, and is cloven footed, and chews the cud, among the beasts, that you will eat. [Lev 11:3]

Torah then tells us the negative mitzvot of eating red meat, with examples.

4. Nevertheless these shall you not eat of those that chew the cud, or of those that divide the hoof; the camel, because it chews the cud, but its hoof is not parted; it is unclean to you. 5. And the coney, because it chews the cud, but its hoof is not parted; it is unclean to you. 6. And the hare, because it chews the cud, but its hoof is not parted; it is unclean to you. 7. And the swine, though its hoof is parted, and is cloven footed, yet it chews not the cud; it is unclean to you. 8. Of their flesh shall you not eat, and their carcasses you shall not touch; they are unclean to you.[Lev 11:1-8]

The examples in verses 4-7 are actually underlining the negative mitzvah. It makes sure we know that if only one of the conditions is true, it is still prohibited. Positive and negative mitzvot in the simplest sense tell us what is permitted and what is prohibited. Yet one might ask if this means I have to eat a steak at every meal. Not quite. There are really three states for a mitzvah instead of just positive and negative. We can split positive into two categories, permitted and obligatory. “Observe the Shabbat” is obligatory for example. Eating red meat is permitted, though only under the obligations of an animal with split hoof and chews its cud. While you have to observe the Sabbath you don’t have to eat red meat, you could eat chicken or tofu. Thus we have three categories of Mitzvot: obligatory, permitted, and prohibited. Much of Jewish law since Sinai has been trying to determine which of these categories any specific act happens to be.

We then take the mitzvot, and find the halakah, the ways we accomplish those mitzvot. And this leaves many schools of thought of how to find the halakah and whether each of the halakah are obligations, permissions or prohibitions.

The Jewish tradition has a way of finding the halakah, by deriving it from the biblical text, and from other halakot. But at its core, it isn’t the result of the mitzvah which is important but the deed, the act of doing it. As part of Jewish thinking we are searching for God, and as Heschel points out, God is in a search for us. When God asked Adam “where are you?” in the Garden of Eden, he was not asking Adam, he was asking Humanity. Like the protagonists of the Song of Songs, Jews and God are unrequited lovers searching and pining for each other. They might find each other for moment, then the moment is gone. It is like a princess who is kept hidden in a castle, except for a little crack in the castle wall. Her lover, who she can rarely see, tries to slip love notes through the crack in the wall, just saying “I love you” to let her know he is still there. But she might not be at the crack at that time so she only sees the love note on the ground in front of the hole. If he can slip enough love notes at one time the two lovers can know each other are there and peer at each other through the crack, a tiny glimpse of each other. So too we try to slip love notes to God. Those notes are the mitzvot. We do the mitzvot because they are like a list of the things that we know please our partner.

In orthodoxy, the halakah of those mitzvah are set, primarily in the codification by Joseph Caro and Moses Isserles. The rules are rigid and all must conform. Yet we all write love letters differently. Circumstance changes as do people. While it does create simplicity in following halakah, I do not agree with codification. Until the arrogance of Maimonides to codify the Talmud, there really was no codification. The rabbis declared that only in dire emergencies could a prophet declare a new mitzvah. Halakah was fluid, agreed on by a teacher and a community, which is why the Talmud wrote the minority opinion alongside the majority ones. Several places in the Talmud we are told to follow the custom of the local community, which then give the minority practice of eating chicken with milk of R. Yosi of the Gallilee, who reckoned that hens have no milk and are thus permitted [Shabbat 130a]. Yet later codification would take the majority view as immutable law, and Chicken with cheese was banned forever.

Fundamentalism often takes a stringent ossified view of the Law, while there may be a lenient fluid view of halakah as well. For me however, I think the halakah should remain fluid, but should be based on the works of the past. Our ancestors put a lot of thought effort and experience into their innovations of halakah, one I do not think should be ignored. While we may not come to the same conclusions, we must use the same methods.

As an example we can once again take the issue of eating red meat. I am not a vegetarian, nor do I have any social action or environmental agenda to my diet. I also never want one, because it would diminish what I am doing. I do not eat red meat purely as a love note to God. I did in essence prohibit it, but not from an ethical standpoint but a stringent use of the following negative mitzvah:

17. It shall be an everlasting statute for your generations throughout all your dwellings, that you eat neither fat nor blood.[Lev 4:17]

While the traditional Jew is slightly more lenient in their halakah, I am more stringent, prohibiting red meat on the basis I cannot remove fat and blood to the extent there would be none in the food and still keep it edible. So I simply skip red meat from my diet. It was with such a strict interpretation of the requirement for two witnesses in a capital punishment case that the rabbis pretty much minimized the death penalty to non-existence. On the other hand, I do eat poultry, and in accordance to R. Yosi’s lenient halakah will allow dairy with my chicken. In most of my love notes to God, my performance of the mitzvot, I have done the same kind of finding my own halakah. Even if I derive it from classical sources, what I end up with may not be anything near conventional.

Yet in some I do not derive my own. When I am in my prayer community I follow the communal halakah. My own halakah and traditions can be strongly unconventional. When praying alone, I pick the tunes and the liturgy. When praying together I use the communal liturgy and the communal halakah. There is stability and continuity to the communal setting, a very stable foundation for the rest of my practice, which may disagree in fundamental ways with the communal. The foundation may be used by more than me, and to build other personal halakot, yet tying all of us down to a place where it remains authentically Jewish.

I often wish that foundation, that religious community was also more of the meeting and study place to exchange ideas about halakah, but I’ve yet to find such a place. Some may have the knowledge but ossify the halakah, some are fluid with the halakah, but are either ignorant or reject the knowledge. I’ve never found somewhere with both.

I do not fully know what God intended with the mitzvot, how we really got them or even if they should all be followed. All I can do is follow as many as I can for no other reason than following a single mitzvah I try (but don’t always succeed) in reciting every morning: V’ahavta et Hashem b’kol l’vavcha…You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul and with all your might. I do this because I love God and desire to be close to God, and know that a paradoxically transcendent but lonely God feels the same for me. The more Mitzvot I do means the more love notes I send. When I say the Shema, or decline a hot dog, I am really saying the same thing.

God, I love you.