Unlike my other blog posts, this is a more "traditional" D'var Torah, or sermon, on the reading of the week, Parashat Tazria, Leviticus 12:1-13:59. I offer this in part for those who missed my service this past weekend. To all reading, especially if you actually did hear my words: I typically write out what I want to say as a way of helping to congeal the ideas in my head, but it's still a little like jelly, fluid, so this isn't exactly what I said on Saturday. Thanks for the supportive readership.
This week’s Parasha, Tazria, contains sometimes vivid descriptions of bodily functions and malfunctions, skin lesions, and other physical “impurities.” While it fits well with the rest of the Levitical blood and guts experience, this can easily be the most difficult, even embarrassing, portion for bar or bat mitzvah kids to work with, and quite disturbing even for an adult audience, trying to read it from a spiritual perspective.
Even the ancient rabbis had difficulty with it. What were these physical illnesses and what did they have to do with the spiritual work of the priests? Surely there were plenty of lesions and illnesses that didn’t have to be proven pure or impure by a priest’s eye or through sacred ritual?
Leaving aside the issue of childbirth, where the parashah opens, the rabbis asserted that the skin diseases weren’t just any physical lesions - these were spiritual afflictions, resulting from actions, things a person did (or didn’t do). Torah teaches that Miriam contracts one of these skin lesion diseases as a direct result of speaking ill of, or doubting, her brother Moses. And so the most direct link between lesions and actions is said to be lashon hara, speaking ill of another.
We could simply leave it at that, as the rabbis do - not try to find any explanation for how action might lead to physical ailment. And indeed, the rabbis more or less do leave it untouched.
But they do offer some clues, in their discussion of this parashah, and in various other biblical texts and rabbinic interpretations.
The lesions at issue here are white. Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Epstein, an 18th century Chassidic leader known as the Maor VaShemesh, taught that this is the clue -
“Now, actually, the reason for this is simple. The key locus of life’s vitality is in the blood, ‘for the blood is the life’ (Deut. 12:23); the human soul (nephesh) is in the blood.”
Essentially, we pale when our life goes out of us. And white skin lesions are evidence of life leaving one or another part of our body, usually, he suggests, because we have embarrassed ourselves or another through our actions or words. Anger, he suggests, is one of the worst offenders, and Rabbi Jonathan Slater interprets this to mean anger is “a small death.”
First, we need to be careful in a reading like this not to think that because a person has an illness of any kind that they have somehow brought it upon themselves by action. Even the rabbis suggested that this was something that used to happen.
Still, the notion of anger as being a portion of death is intriguing. The Talmud also suggests that “sleep is 1/60th of death,” a little like death.
And this carries us to one of my favorite lines in our prayers - mechayei hameitim. That God gives life to the dead need not be read as a direct assertion of reincarnation. It can be easily understood in this way of restoring spiritual life.
In the Reconstructionist and Reform liturgies, mechayei hameitim has been replaced by either mechayei hakol or mechayei kol chai - both essentially meaning that the life we have and know is the life God has given us.
To me, this change in the liturgy is unnecessary. Indeed, it denies the notion that we can be spiritually, or even physically, revived.
One of my colleagues, Rabbi Megan Doherty, once argued that mechayei hameitim was the perfect blessing to recite over the first cup of coffee in the morning. This may be a little tongue in cheek, but I think that the idea isn’t far off base. Indeed, some hold a tradition of reciting these words as a short blessing when seeing someone they haven’t seen in a full year or more.
And what of the Yiddish “mechaya”? Something good happens, even something as simple as a warm day after the winter, or a cup of icy cold water on a hot day - that’s a mechaya. It’s a relief, a little bit of life-reminder.
The Reform siddur has returned mechayei hameitim as an alternative in its new siddur. The siddur you use here is great about giving the options. Reading with alternatives in place is an opportunity for us to rethink how we are reading: is it too literal? Is tzara’at really leprosy, or is it a psychosomatic / or spirituo-somatic symptom, a result of something being not quite right in our inner life force? Is mechayei hameitim only (or even at all) about reincarnation or resurrection, or is it closer to the Yiddish derivation, a mechaya, a little bit of life returning where we have felt a little weary or lost or some such?
Baruch ata Adonay - mechayei hameitim. Blessed are You, our God, who provides sustenance and renewal, raising life up where it has drooped, offering solace and support and nourishment - to the individual, and to our whole world. May we be aware of this renewal as the earth brings forth new greens, as the coming month of Nissan and our season of spring and Passover heralds rebirth and new beginnings, emerging from the deathly constrictions of winter and mitzrayim.
No comments:
Post a Comment