Leviticus is almost universally seen as the most boring book in the Torah. All the other books have stories or interesting laws, but Leviticus stays in the abstract, sticking nearly exclusively to content surrounding actions that facilitate temple service or objects used in the service. Many people find these subjects too unusual to connect with, so of course, this week’s section of the reading decides to discuss concepts even more unrelatable: ritual impurity.
The most frequently mentioned example of ritual impurity, tzara’ath, is featured in this week’s parshas, Tazria and Metzora. Tzara’ath can take many different physical forms, but is commonly associated with the disease known as leprosy. While tzara’ath is famously credited as being a punishment for gossiping, as seen in tractate Erachin (15b-16a), this is never explicitly written in the biblical text. Its source is due to a juxtaposition somewhere else in the Torah, although this connection isn’t even hinted at in this week’s parshas. What sets tzara’ath apart for me is the power it gives to individuals when describing ritual impurity.
The other impurities discussed in the parshas, being one who released a genital emission and one who gave birth, are simply declared as impure by the verse. Their verses define what needs to happen to reach the threshold of impurity, and then the verse declares that the person is considered impure. Their impurity is a fact of reality. This is in stark contrast to tzara’ath. Every time there is a lack of clarity concerning whether someone has tzara’ath, the verse says it is the priest who determines whether the individual is pure or impure.
This is logically confounding. Either something is pure, or it isn’t pure; how could a human’s judgment have any bearing on this status? Even more confusing, the verses seem to grant the priests the authority to declare something as specifically impure or pure, based on specific details found to be true about the lesion itself. For example, the verse states that if there is a lesion with a white hair and the lesion appears to be deeper than his skin, it is tzara’ath. Right after this, the priest is told he should pronounce the person this lesion affects as impure. Why even do this? The verse has clearly defined this lesion as tzara’ath. Why do you need the priest to also make this person unclean? This is just unnecessary bureaucracy. On top of this, why a priest? Can’t anyone do this? It’s just basic pattern recognition.
The other impurities mentioned in this section seem to have a common source. In all cases, the person emits something from themselves in an uncommon way. This act of uncommon separation not only causes some type of physical change but also clearly causes a shift in religious status. In short, this physical change represents an upcoming need to change how someone acts religiously. Someone who has just had a child is not going to have the same relationship with G-d that they did before. How they related to religion, purely, only worked then, not now. After having a child, their previous view is impure because of their current state. With many thinking the emission that the Zav, also mentioned in the parshas, emits is Gonorrhea, it doesn’t require so much thinking to figure out what possible religious problems this person may struggle with. In short, the physical separation shows the person that they must change their religious conception, and the religious person they were before was unsuited, or impure, for their current state.
Tzara’ath does not fall into this paradigm. Instead of something separating from the person, it attaches. I would like to suggest that, maybe, instead of being an internal change that causes impurity, it is an external change. Instead of the person’s personal religious relationship with G-d changing, here the person’s religious relationship with their surroundings and community has changed. The common rabbinical conception of the source of tzara’ath is from gossip, and the Rabbis were incredibly insightful in discerning this. Nothing causes communal feud and disconnection faster than gossip. However, without assigning tzara’ath as a result of gossip, this idea still truly illuminates some of tzara’ath’s more unique laws. Unlike the other impurities listed in this week’s section, no part of tzara’ath is actually hidden. It’s either on skin, clothes, or houses. All of these are relatively easy for others to see and notice. In contrast, it’s rather difficult for people to accidentally come across someone else’s genital emission.
Similarly, this explains the priest’s role in the matter. Before, the only parties involved were the impure person and G-d. Once everyone recognizes the reality of what has happened, the impure person is officially impure. However, here the priest seems to act as the representative of the community, as he seems to do in other religious matters, like service in the Temple. The priest must see that this person has done something wrong, just as the community must see inequity in its ranks. Unlike before, the priest or community makes the person impure because it is their relationship with the community they have sullied, not with G-d.
Likewise, the other impure individuals stay in the encampment while impure, unlike the person with tzara’ath. He is actively separated from the community. Lastly, the priest must command the person with tzara’ath to go sacrifice as repentance. One of the many components of the offering is two clean birds. Many of the Rabbis indicate that this part of the sacrifice is not solely for G-d, but for the community. By sacrificing two “chirping” birds, the individual signifies to the community that they are repenting for their misuse of speech. G-d is merciful and forgives whenever a person repents, yet in the case of tzara’ath, it is up to the community to forgive. The Parsha displays that when people engage in gossip, the harm that they cause can only be truly repaired by acknowledging their mistake to the community and properly engaging with the community once again. In the end, the community is the one that fully determines their forgiveness.
