As the husband of a Rabbinical student (who, now, is a Rabbi), I got an exposure to a side of Judaism that not everyone gets to see. I was privileged to watch some heartfelt discussions on topics of theology, halacha and issues of modernity - and, sometimes, I even understood what everyone was discussing. And, sometimes, I got to see the lighter side of the Rabbinate. It was that exposure to the lighter side of the Rabbinate that came to mind when the Library Minyan "e-d'rash" list was circulated earlier this year.
JTS, where my wife was ordained, has a custom in the Rabbinical School that each student, in the year leading up to her or his ordination, gives the d'rash in the Seminary Synagogue one shabbat. This custom, not surprisingly, is known as the "Senior Sermon". Each spring, a lottery was held to assign the Senior Sermon dates for the following year. It fell to the Dean of the Rabbinical School to disseminate the assignment dates. One year, the day of the lottery, the story is told of a rabbinical student who walked up to a classmate in the cafeteria, looking horribly dejected.
"What is it?", asked the concerned classmate.
The rabbinical student looked at his friend, and said "The lottery."
"Oh, no", the classmate sympathized. "Not Tazri'a?".
"Worse", came the reply. "Tazri'a-M'tzora".
This might seem like the perfect opportunity to prepare a d'rash on Rosh Chodesh. And yet, as I read Tazri'a and M'tzora, I found myself strangely fascinated by these two parashot, devoted almost entirely to what must seem to most of us as archane procedures for dealing with leprosy, purification of skin diseases, the ritual impurities of bodily discharges and the like.
And yet, these difficult and arcane passages offer modern Jews a deep challenge: How do we reconcile the teachings of Tazri'a and M'tzora with our own views of Judaism?
We read that, once the kohen diagnoses a person with leprosy, the diseased person is to be sent away from the community. Is that prudent isolation of people with contagious diseases, or a panicked, uninformed reaction? Who cares for them when they are outside the camp?
When my turn in the e-d'rash cycle arrives, I tend to use Google to try to locate some alternative commentaries to the "mainstream" that are in our family library. So, I went looking for commentators who address these difficult questions. I was stunned by what I found - or, more accurately, what I didn't find.
Most online sites -- ranging from The Jewish Agency, to Chabad, to "Torah from Dixie", to "Torah Tots" -- completely ignore this aspect of Tazri'a and M'tzora. Instead, they either focus on the one verse commanding that baby boys be circumcised on the 8th day or, predominantly among those websites that we would consider "Orthodox" in outlook, they tend to treat the discussion of the metzora - the person with leprosy - as being not a physical disease (as we know leprosy to be) but rather as a spiritual affliction. As Torah Tots says, "But it's not the kind of Leprosy you know about these days. In the times of the Mishkan and Bait Hamikdosh, tzora'at [leprosy] was a spiritual disease that was cured by doing Teshuva. The number one cause of Tzora'at was Loshon Hora."
Oh, really?
I don't know what to say in response to an attitude like that. The prohibition of Loshon Hora, or as we might transliterate it, LaShon HaRa, is a valid and valuable one. It can teach important lessons to us all - tots, teens, thirty-somethings and "the rest of us". But to say that LaShon HaRa causes leprosy is to belittle and diminish both those who suffer from leprosy (by making it seem to be their own fault) and the strictures against LaShon HaRa themselves.
Our Torah, and our tradition, is replete with challenging elements. As Conservative Jews, we should pride ourselves on being willing to meet these challenges intelligently and candidly. We won't agree on answers; we may not even find answers. But we should still keep looking and learning.