This shall be the Torah for a leper (Torat hametzora) at the time of being purified. (Leviticus 14:2)
זֹ֤את תִּֽהְיֶה֙ תּוֹרַ֣ת הַמְּצֹרָ֔ע בְּי֖וֹם טׇהֳרָת֑וֹ
In distress (min hametzar) I called on the LORD;
the Lord answered me and brought me relief. (Psalm 118:5)Afterward Moses and Aaron went and said to Pharaoh, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Let My people go that they may celebrate a festival for Me in the wilderness.” But Pharaoh said, “Who is the Lord that I should heed him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, nor will I let Israel go.” (Exodus 5:1)
The word for Egypt, mitzrayim, shares a root with tzar, meaning constriction, tightness, anguish. In Yiddish, we complain about our tzuris, our sorrows. Meitzar, referred to by the psalmist—and which we incant as part of Hallel, including on Pesach night—means narrow place. Egypt is a place of pain, but also a channel, a birth canal. Just as the narrow place of the psalmist forces a contraction that enables a new life, the birth of a new self. These words also form a cluster with metzora, the name and topic of this week’s parasha, the leper or outcast—a person who is ensnared in both a physical affliction and possibly a social one as well. The metzora may feel like a pariah, just as the lonely psalmist turns to God in desperation. Both are in a kind of personal Egypt, a mitzrayim of the interior.
Why won’t Pharaoh let us go? Why does the tightness and anguish present as real and absolute when liberation is just around the corner? Read psychologically, Pharaoh is the part of ourselves that holds onto the narrative of oppression and victimhood for fear of who we may become if we are free. Pharaoh is the part of ourselves addicted to drama and catastrophe, the ego that has formed an attachment to being in a place of constriction. “The world is falling apart—and I will not let myself go outside of that viewpoint to a place of light and hope.” The dialogue between Moses and Pharaoh popularized by Queen—”Will you let them go? No. I will not let them go”—can be understood through psalmist’s words “From my narrow place I called on the Lord.” When we call on the narrow place, it will not let us god. But when we call on the Lord, the narrow place widens, the anguish softens. Egypt—our suffering, our holding patterns, our “stuff”—follows us through the wide sea but cannot follow us to the other side. Pharaoh won’t let us go, but the secret is that we don’t need his permission to leave. We might have left even before the first plague. But we can’t know this in advance. We are only free the moment we are free. The psalmist makes the transformation seem so simple, condensing it into a single line. But it takes a lifetime, sometimes more.
As I wrote last week, the metzora’s time apart from society can be regarded as a boon, not a punishment. But that’s not often how we experience exile. Only a mature person can regard the narrow place as a place of incubation en route to redemption and breakthrough rather than suffocation. The spiritual redemption of the metzora is not the return to camp, but the ability to endure solitude without panic. The Israelites leave Egypt, making themselves metzora’ot relative to their host civilization. They go outside the camp. Such a departure is frightening because it asks those leaving to forgo their dependence on what they know in favor of an unknown and unproven God. While Egypt is harsh and cruel, its ways are predictable. The slaves are dependents. Happy rather than anxious solitude presupposes inner strength. Where can this strength come from if you are used to taking orders, used to getting fed and validated by superiors with strings attached. God redeems the people by showing them that their dependence is illusory. There is only one being on whom we can depend: The Creator of the World. God’s existence comes to m’vatel (negate) any reliance on limited and derivative forces, however seemingly great and powerful.
If you have faith in God, you can be in the desert, or on the edge of camp, and feel secure. If you have no faith in God, you will be placing your faith in human systems that are fundamentally faulty and untrustworthy. Idolatry can be thought of as depending on the wrong source. The Egyptians have every reason to be idolaters—their sources of dependence are mostly dependable and reliable. The Nile flows. Life is abundant. But the plagues interrupt that false security. Tail events expose the faulty assumptions of those who base their faith on standard deviations. “There are no atheists in foxholes” should read that God alone provides security. In peacetime, we fail to test our security and thus do not require real faith. Religion can become a mere ritual, mere set of behaviors, a mere ideology. The Metzora is reprieved from bourgeois niceties and thrust into a direct encounter with the Creator.
In Exodus, we plead to leave, but are denied. In Leviticus, Jewish law mandates that we leave society from time to time. It builds a forcing function for de-socialization so that we might come to greater inner strength, greater freedom, and greater trust in the only single source of truth: God. In its wisdom Jewish law anticipates that all societies can become Egypt-like, constrictive. In its wisdom Jewish law anticipates that the key to a good life involves moderation: learning to work through constriction rather than avoid it. Egypt is the repression of awareness; the sea provides the opening that comes with awareness. It is the merchav-ya, the divine expanse.
Trust in God and trust that God will split the sea for us as the Egyptian army chases us are not quite the same. Real trust is trust in the process. We can’t dictate the terms of our salvation. But one lesson that we can take from the story is that we should distrust our certainty, especially when it is negative. Pharaoh—whether another person or a voice within—has no real power over us, because he, too, is a dependent. All power differentials between us and others are diminished by the realization and acceptance that there is one Creator who runs the world. No wonder Pharaoh is so threatened by this. His entire claim to authority rests on the fiction of his deification. With trust in God, the metzora knows that nobody can harm his soul. Outside the camp, he is even more settled than Pharaoh, nervously keeping tabs on his kingdom for his sense of self—and watching it crumble. Trust in God is not the obstacle to self-realization and self-formation; it is the deepest in enabler.
In distress (min hametzar) I called on the LORD;
the Lord answered me and brought me relief.
Shabbat Shalom and Zissen Pesach,
Zohar Atkins