The Jew as Blessed Outcast

On the Parallel Between Tzaraat and Shabbat

And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made. (Genesis 2:1-3)

When a person has on the skin of the body a swelling, a rash, or a discoloration, and it develops into a scaly affection on the skin of the body, it shall be reported to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons, the priests. The priest shall examine the affection on the skin of the body: if hair in the affected patch has turned white and the affection appears to be deeper than the skin of the body, it is a leprous affection; when the priest sees it, he shall pronounce the person impure. But if it is a white discoloration on the skin of the body which does not appear to be deeper than the skin and the hair in it has not turned white, the priest shall isolate the affected person for seven days. On the seventh day the priest shall conduct an examination, and if the affection has remained unchanged in color and the disease has not spread on the skin, the priest shall isolate that person for another seven days. On the seventh day the priest shall again conduct an examination: if the affection has faded and has not spread on the skin, the priest shall pronounce the person pure. It is a rash; after washing those clothes, that person shall be pure. (Leviticus 13:2-6)

A person with an obvious case of the skin affliction known as tzaraat presents an easy case. A priest examines that person, immediately pronounces them impure, and quarantines them until their impurity goes away. But even in this easy case, the person is not considered impure, nor quarantined, until a priest comes, examines, and proclaims diagnosis. Until that moment, the person’s status remains tenuous. Society itself is not allowed to quarantine the person or cast judgment on the affliction—even in a case it deems obvious. If a priest is backed up with cases, there is no rushed trial conducted by volunteer judges.

The laws of tzaraat present a clear example of the peace-keeping function of the priest, who serves as a bulwark against mob justice. We can imagine the cancellation campaigns that would ensue were photos of the tzaraat—real or doctored—circulated on social media. Thus, the reality of the skin-disease is determined by a posek, a legal decision-maker. In a two-by-two matrix we can imagine cases where a person has tzaraat but is not judged impure by the priest, and we can also imagine cases where a person does not have tzaraat but is judged impure by the priest. In both cases, it is the priest’s judgment, however faulty, that rules—not a democratic vote, and not the expert testimony of the dermatologist. Priests, we must imagine, also make errors in judgment, but we accept their error rate as the tax we pay for peace. Can you imagine the chaos unleashed by living in a world in which people argue about whether something is or is not tzaraat? Tzaraat has a physiological basis but is not a physiological phenomenon. It is a social reality.

It is tempting to think that the priest creates the tzaraat through pronunciation, but this is false. The priest re-creates it. The priest inhabits a world in which tzaraat is presumed. His job is to check our presumption. Thus the term tzaraat is ambiguous — it refers to the appearance of a skin affliction and the judgment that the skin affliction is indeed tzaraat. We today lack the tacit knowledge—there is no Youtube instructional video—needed to adjudicate on cases of skin affliction, thus tzaraat has become a purely vestigial category in day to day life.

The problem of tzaraat is now practically solved by both the absence of priest-poskim and the consensus view that tzaraat itself is now an inoperative affliction. But tzaraat, as an idea, remains a powerful metaphor. The point of the laws of tzaraat is to emphasize a distinction between the socially apparent and the real, as well as between the legal and the real. Things are not what they seem, and we should not jump to conclusions based upon headlines. Even when a legal judgment is made we should understand that the judgment is about the person’s impurity, not the cause of that impurity. The laws of tzaraat exist because we live in a world of differing viewpoints and fundamental uncertainty.

According to the classical interpretation, the priest comes to X-ray the soul of the leper. Only the priest can really see what is going on underneath the skin. Thus, only the priest can see through the skin rather than be taken in by it. Correlation does not imply causation—but in a world of deep fakes, few can live this principle. The priest was supposed to know better. Thus, the laws of tzaraat emphasize waiting and revisiting. We don’t consider a person impure until they are so proclaimed, and we don’t proclaim until we have conviction. The onus is on the priest to demonstrate impurity. We are pure until proven otherwise.

A remarkable detail in the law of tzaraat is the waiting period of 7 days—7 days between examination intervals. If a priest sees a person and can’t decide if they have tzaraat, he comes back in 7 days to check again. If he still can’t decide, he comes back again in 7 days. The person awaiting judgment is distinct from the person judged, even as both are types of outsiders. The 7 day period of waiting corresponds to the creation cycle, and the 7th day of examination to Shabbat. How should we understand this parallel?

One possibility is that the world itself can be thought of as an ambiguous adventure, neither pure nor impure. It takes a week—which is to say, a lifetime, or a gilgul—to resolve judgment on whether the world is pure or impure. Until then, though, we should assume a positive outlook.

Another possibility is that Shabbat can be thought of as a day of rest because it is the day we reach resolution. Even learning that we are impure is something to be celebrated as we no longer have to live in limbo. Shabbat recognizes the shift from effort to surrender, from investigation to conclusion.

A third possibility is that Shabbat itself is a day of quarantine, a day set apart from the mundane. Thus, we find in the parallel to the tzaraat a positive view of quarantine—not so much social punishment as relief from worldly obligation. To riff on Achad Ha’Am: “More than the Jews have kept quarantine, quarantine has kept the Jews.” Of course we can think about quarantine as a metaphor for exile, as the period of being set apart from the land of Israel. We can also think of quarantine in terms of Jewish cultural and religious distinction to one’s non-Jewish peers. The point is that perhaps quarantine is “holy” and the so-called “leper” not merely a victim, but a “chosen one.” We may feel at times that our social ostracism is a curse—in fact, it is, or can be, a blessing, just as Shabbat is ostracized from the six days of the week. A Midrash suggests that each day of the week found its pair, except for Shabbat, which was saved for the Jewish people. Sometimes feeling lonely or alone is merely a path to deeper accompaniment and connectedness. Had Shabbat sought its “other half” prematurely it would not have found the Jewish people. Had the Jewish people sought to fill its void with idols it would not have allowed its own loneliness to direct it to God.

Just as we cannot rely on “skin-deep” judgments of others, we should be skeptical of our own self-judgments. In a modern context, the point of waiting for a priest to examine us is not to outsource our self-analysis to someone else, but to force ourselves to suspend immediate judgment. Just as we can’t know if a discoloration is actually tzaraat, we cannot know if the time out from society (which can feel like a negative judgment) is actually a cleansing process.

In a culture dominated by grievance politics, it is tempting for Jews to cast themselves principally as victims. While we are indeed targets of rampant and endemic anti-semitism, this is not the headline, and is a profoundly secular perspective. The headline is that God promised Abraham that we would be a great nation only by first being slaves in Egypt. Antisemitism is priced into being Jewish. Just as Shabbat is a taste of the world to come, and a completion of Creation, the Jewish people qua global leper, is a taste of the world to come, and a completion of Creation.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh