Peripheral Wisdom
Lessons of Affliction
“The body is our general medium for having a world.” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
“When a person has on the skin of his body a swelling, a rash, or a discoloration, and it develops into a scaly affection on the skin of his body, it shall be reported to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons, the priests.” (Leviticus 13:2)
“Who can produce something clean out of something unclean; is it not the One? Who, for example, produced Abraham out of Terah, Hezekiah out of Ahaz, Josiah out of Amon, Mordecai out of Shimei, Israel out of the nations of the world, the world to come out of this world?…We have learned elsewhere ‘If one has a bright spot the size of a bean, he is unclean’ yet if it has burst out all over him, he is clean (Lev. 13: 12-13). Who did so? Who decreed so? Who commanded so? Is it not the One?” (Midrash Tanchuma, Chukat 3:1)”
Parshat Tazria-Metzora (Lev. 12:1 - 15:33) describes the process by which those whose bodies, clothes, and homes are visibly afflicted can become purified and reintegrated into society. The core affliction—tzaraat—which visits people is not described as painful; yet its presence unsettles. Priestly authorities must be summoned to monitor the situation. The Torah does not emphasize the affliction as deadly or toxic, but does imply that it is contagious. Tzaraat is at once highly personal and inescapably public. It lies on the skin and cannot be hidden. The Torah never mentions shame. We can’t know if the presence of the priestly examiner brings comfort or anxiety, or perhaps both.
For Sartre, the sheer fact that we are looked at by others is a source of shame. Perhaps the person who sees a rash for the first time has no concern other than its medical meaning, as it were—“Am I safe?” But as soon as the priests enter, or more precisely, as soon as the person imagines what society will think, the rash becomes a kind of social stigma.
As moderns some of us may assume the priests represent a kind of malign surveillance system coming to infringe on personal liberty (the kind one might see depicted in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale). But it’s equally possible (and likely more plausible) that the priests play a mediating function between the private realm and the public one. Aaron and sons are needed to normalize what might otherwise be a source of panic; their presence shields the afflicted from becoming a spectacle, or at least subdues the force of mob. According to classical typology, priests bring peace; they come, for better and worse, to mend social relations, not intensify polarization.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov teaches that Aaron and the priests should be understood allegorically as the force of Hesed (loving-kindness) in the world. For him, their presence is a presage of the healing that will ensue. Their very declaration of a person as “unclean” is an elixir that helps that person become clean again. The point is not that priests have some magical ability to heal, but rather that presence itself, accompaniment itself, can be a source of healing. Ironically, in the very moment that the priest sentences a person to self-isolate—according to Rebbe Nachman—the priest sends the subliminal message, “You are not alone. I am with you.” In the very moment that we may feel powerless to help others, our very presence may be doing more than we think, more than we can know.
In the rabbinic imagination, tzaraat is a punishment for lashon hara (evil speech). The punishment, then, is quarantine, which fits the transgression. When someone undermines public trust through malicious speech, they need to be put in “time out.”
Read psychologically, the inward insecurity that motivates performative extroversion and point-scoring at the expense of others is a disguised cry for help, for love. The eruption of signs on the person’s body helps that person realize the “source” of their unhealthy need for social approval (at the expense of others), while the quarantine provides a kind of “meditation retreat” in which they can reflect on who they are when they are not busy gossiping, or as we say today, “doom-scrolling.”
For social theorist René Girard, though, the casting away of individuals is a form of scape-goating intended to bind the community together. It’s not that those with tzaraat are particularly guilty of lashon hara, but rather that society needs a mechanism for dealing with—and externalizing—the phenomena for which it feels collectively guilty. Fair or not, those sent out of the camp serve as a kind of atonement for the collective sins of the nation. When the insiders view the outcasts in bad faith, they think to themselves, “Thank God, that’s not me.” When they view them with existential “authenticity,” (as described by Kierkegaard and Heidegger) they think “That could very well have been me. And may well be me in the future. That is me, in fact. Therefore, let me repent and change my ways.” On this reading, the banishment of the leper is not a punishment of the afflicted but a cautionary sign to the community. Still, it matters that the leper returns. Nobody should be a permanent outcast.
Girard thought Christianity solved the problem of social violence and envy (he calls it “mimetic desire”) by making God the ultimate victim (whose death absorbs and deflects our evil nature). But another solution to the problems he identifies is to make everyone a potential outcast, and to normalize the outcast status so as to render it less damning. Perhaps this is too romantic a notion. Yet in an age where “inclusivity” is increasingly a byword, albeit an opaque and poorly-defined one, the Girardian response is that it is impossible (and undesirable) to make everyone an insider; it would destroy the meaning of community, which is founded on exclusion and exclusivity. If exclusion is here to stay, for better and for worse, then perhaps the lessons in our parasha point one way to humanizing this harsh reality.
We need to recognize that being an outsider is never wholly a bad thing, and in some ways is a redemptive position—thus the impulse to want to include also denies the opportunity to enjoy the individual and social benefits of exclusion. Moses is raised in Pharaoh’s palace. Esther lives with a Persian despot. Joseph spends his adult life as a viceroy in Egypt, where he spends much of his life “passing.” He is neither fully Israelite nor fully Egyptian. It is a projection on our part to view the outcast as an invalid. Perhaps he or she is gathering wisdom outside the camp that will be needed to save society from its limitations and biases.
The Midrashic tradition supports Girard’s point when it suggests that the tzaraat-sufferer is a stand-in for the entire house of Israel, whose exclusion from the land of Israel is the national version of the individual’s ostracism. According to the Midrashic reading of Jeremiah, the people will be returned to the land, just as the outcast individual will eventually be re-integrated into the camp. But to the extent that, classically and liturgically speaking, we haven’t yet been returned to the land, the Midrash casts contemporary life as a life outside the camp, as life on the outskirts, waiting out the transformation of our impurity into purity, the alchemy of our waywardness into wisdom. Historically speaking and psychologically, we remain in limbo. Modernity, as it were, is the time between the priestly pronouncement of “unclean” and the time when we can return to our clean state.
A small and easily missed detail in the laws of Tazria-Metzora is that a person who is entirely covered with white splotches is declared clean, while a person with only one spot is declared unclean. The Midrash argues that this is a paradox, one of many in the Torah, in which clean and unclean are co-authors. The appearance of the clean from the midst of the unclean is taken to be evidence of a singular God. Extending this insight, those who acknowledge God must be those who believe that the shameful can become wonderful, the expellable beautiful, the worthless wise.
While metaphysicians focus on the “miracle” of creation ex nihilo, the lesson of the afflicted offers an anthropological version of the same idea. We can’t know where salvation can come from; genealogy is not destiny. Where we come from, personally or collectively, does not determine where we can go.
When we reintegrate the leper into society, or repurpose our own faults into virtues, we participate in the divine creation of the world. To the extent that we are still waiting to return, the world has not yet been created. To redeem the world, we must first (re-)create it by (re-)creating ourselves.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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