NISSAN TORAH
The parshiot of Nissan take us deeper into Leviticus. There are no stories at all in this month in utter contrast to the holiday of Pesach where we tell the arguably most important myth of our peoplehood, the story of the exile and redemption of the Jewish people.
The 4 parshiot I’m going to discuss take us from Leviticus 12-20, not many chapters, and a dizzying array of laws. We move from a concept of pollution (tameh) that is solely concerned with ritual pollution to one that is concerned with moral pollution in the ritual of the scapegoat. We’ve lost most of this distinction between ritual and moral pollution because we don’t have a sacrificial system; the most important remnant is found in the laws of family purity, nida, where a woman is ritually, but not morally, polluted during her period and must ritually cleanse herself before she can resume sexual relations with her husband.
Tazriah and Metzora are often, but not always read as a combined parsha, and I treat them as a combined parsha because they are interwoven together, even in a year like 5784 where they are read separately.
I’m going to discuss four themes.
What are we to make of the fact that people, clothing and houses can all get scale disease?
The purification ritual in Chapter 14 and how we might purify ourselves today.
The ethics of sending our sins to the wilderness
The cultivation of humility as present in the recognition that we were aliens in Egypt and in leaving the corners of the field unharvested.
What are we to make of the fact that people, clothing and houses can all get tzara’at, scale disease? This was by far my biggest surprise in rereading this text. It was important in this system to know the ritually pure or polluted status of people because this determined if they could offer sacrifices. But given that clothing and houses don’t offer sacrifices, I would not have thought the categories of ritual pollution and purity could possibly have applied to them. Yet they do. The discussion of clothing having tzara’at is Chapter 13:47-59, a lot of verses. The discussion for houses is 14:34-52, also a lot of verses. The discussions are complete with instructions on what the priest should look for to determine if the scale disease is healed or is chronic.
What do humans, clothes and houses have in common that the category of tzara’at can be applied to all of them? I believe that the answer lies in the animism of our ancestors. Animism, and I have written more on this in the blog under “Philosophical Reflections” on the website, is the perspective that everything is alive and thus shares a similar ontological value. The differences between beings, the differences amongst a human, a squirrel, a rock, a house or clothing come from the fact that we have different bodies with different abilities and longevity, but we share the fact of beinghood. This common beinghood is why humans, clothes and houses can all suffer from tzara’at, scale disease.
Animism, as I’ve written, stands in stark contrast with a scientific worldview that regards most things as inert matter upon which humans are free to act. An animistic world view inherently demands much more respect for the more than human world and a far greater emphasis on reciprocity and relationship. Our view of the more than human world is that we can and do feel free to use it for our own ends since it has no equivalent beinghood to humans. But our text here offers us a situation where houses and clothing, two human creations, have equivalent status to humans. That’s an animistic view.
The emphasis on tzara’at is at least somewhat puzzling. It sounds like it can be healed in a few weeks without some kind of medical intervention, so not like my psoriasis. It had to be common enough to capture the imagination of our ancestors, but uncommon enough that quarantining people was economically feasible, if this law was ever actually implemented.
Milgrom argues that tzara’at reminded our ancestors of death and corpses and that is why it was emphasized. The priests hated things that reminded them of death. This isn’t just Jewish priests, by the way. The caste system in India also works diligently to separate the priestly castes from coming into contact with death.
I would speculate that the avoidance of death and the search for something eternal and unchanging are related to each other. Further, I believe they are also related to the denigration of women and female energy. In our tradition, this takes the form of an eternal unchanging God who is often described as male and sometimes, as with Maimonides, beyond gender. in India this takes the form of liberation from a never ending cycle of suffering associated with birth and death and a celibate monkhood. Just as with our gender question from the previous section, there’s a core question of the desirability of the solutions championed by some of our ancestors that take us away from an animism that immerses us in the cycle of birth, death and rebirth.
Can you think of anything comparable to tzara’at, scale disease, personally or in our culture? What do you think about the linking of humans, clothing and houses given in the parsha? What’s your response to what I am suggesting about the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, the motivation to avoid death as ritually polluting and the view of the divine?
There is a purification ritual in chapter 14 after a priest has determined that someone is healed from their scale disease. (14:3-20) The ritual is designed to address ritual pollution and enable the person to return to the community of people who can offer sacrifices. The ritual has three parts, but the really different part of the ritual is the first part.
The priest takes two live birds, cedarwood and scarlet and hyssop. The priest slaughters one of the birds and lets the blood drip into living water (the same kind of water used for a mikvah, the ritual bath that is used for ritual purification) that is housed in a clay jar. Then the priest dips the live bird, the cedarwood, scarlet (I’m assuming this is some kind of yarn) and the hyssop into the clay container that has the diluted blood of the first bird and sprinkles the blood/water mix over the healed person seven times. The priest identifies the person as now tahor, ritually pure, and lets the living bird fly off. The living bird thus carries the pollution off, akin to the scapegoat that we will meet in Leviticus Chapter 16.
The purified and healed person now has to wash their clothes, shave off all their hair and bathe in water. The healed person can return to camp, but that still can’t offer a sacrifice and has to remain outside their tent for seven days. Then they again have to shave and bathe before offering the sacrifices/offerings that conclude the ritual and the return of the person to wholeness.
Purification rituals could address either ritual pollution or moral failings. Tashlich done at Rosh Hashanah is a purification ritual that addresses moral sins and gives them over to the water to be taken away. The mikveh is a purification ritual that can be used for both ritual pollution and moral cleansing. It is used for ritual purification in the case of menstruating women who must submerge in the mikveh after their period ends so they can become ritually pure and sexually available to their husbands for those who follow the laws of family purity. The mikveh is also used in conversion rituals and can be adapted for use for different life transitions. In that case, it might be for the purification of sins, but also might be construed as a symbolic rebirth to a new state of being. Mikveh, the use of living water, covers a lot of territory.
Purification rituals are common in indigenous religious practice. Now I wouldn’t want blood sprinkled all over me—raise your hand if you’d rather be smudged seven times? (smudging is a purification ritual). They aren’t so common in our world but imagine a purification ritual that offers us a ritualized way of saying goodbye to things with which we are done. Think about former partners, former jobs, friends, places you lived, clothing you wore, books you read, cars you owned, mistakes you made, things you wish you would have done differently. How do you let the energy of that go so it no longer sticks to you? How do you let it fly away? This is obviously more necessary when you have had some conflict and have mixed feelings, (this would be moral purification) but we just don’t have much ritualized methods for putting the past into the past and not dragging it with us—we don’t have any equivalent of the bird flying off with our pollution.
What could be an updated version of the bird flying off with our pollution? What kind of occasions would you want to use it for?
These questions about the efficacy of a scapegoat ritual aren’t the same as the questions about the morality of dumping our sins into the wilderness. There’s a brilliant essay by L. Teal Willoughby entitled “Ecofeminist Consciousness” in a book entitled Ecofeminism and the Sacred where she points out that we are treating the more than human world as a thing, an object, when we perform rituals that ask the more than human world to take away our sins without first asking permission to dump the sins there. We are behaving no differently than any polluter who dumps their waste and leaves it to poison the world. The “inaccessible land” to which the goat is sent is being treated as a dumping ground, rather than a “thou” (to use Buber’s language) or a living being with agency. Indeed the sentience and agency of at least domesticated land is something that is affirmed later on in this parsha, as I discuss below.
So what is a responsible way to work with the healing power of the more than human world, what is a responsible way to have the earth absorb our sins, or the living waters of the mikveh purify us? It begins with asking permission. It includes deep listening to what the wilderness, the body of water, the tree etc want from us as humans. It includes a conversation where we express what we want as humans, explain why we’ve chosen to work with whichever aspect of the more than human world we’ve chosen, and listen, listen for what that aspect of the more than human world wants from us.
Do you believe that all of the more than human world has moral agency? Do rocks and lizards have the same rights as deer and bodies of water? How might you work with the more than human world in your ritual practice?
“When you reap the land’s harvest you shall not finish harvesting your field’s corner, and you shall not gather your harvest’s gleaning [the grain that falls to the ground during the harvest]. And you shall not strip your vineyard, and you shall not collect the vineyard’s fallen fruit. You shall leave them for the poor and for the alien.” (19:9-10). “And if an alien will reside with you in your land, you shall not persecute him. The alien who resides with you shall be to you like a citizen of yours, and you shall love him as yourself, because you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” (19:33-34)
There’s an ethic of humility in these four verses that is sorely missing in our society. On one hand, these first verses can be read as a way to take care of the poor that every society has. Don’t try to get every last dime of profit out of your customers or your workers but have a system that at least meets minimum needs for everyone. Why? Not just because it is good public policy (which it is), but because we were aliens in the land of Egypt, because we were brown skinned people struggling to survive with harsh taskmasters. The world would be a different place if we could truly incorporate “there but for the grace of God go I” into our actions. That’s a key lesson of this parsha and of Passover. Avadim Hayinu l’Paroah. We were slaves to Pharoah, so don’t be a Pharoah just because you can. Don’t farm fencerow to fencerow as modern farmers with enormous tractors do, just because you can (or at least think you can in the short term). Leave a little for everyone else dependent upon the harvest because we were all once slaves, even if today we are masters or free people.
We should, I believe, extend this humility to our relationship with the more than human world. We routinely act in disregard for the unintended consequences of our actions, but there are always, always, consequences.
I live in suburbia where we all have lawns and many of us in the subdivision have a little bit of woods in our backyards. We also have a no shooting law in the township (with which I agree). Guess what? We have a ton of deer because what a deer loves more than anything is woods to hide in coupled with open fields. And yesterday my neighbor came over to say we have a coyote who has come into the neighborhood and actually caught one of the deer and killed it—and is also a threat to all the domestic cats and dogs so many of us have. Where there is prey, eventually, there will be predator animals. Humility would look like recognizing that there will be unintended consequences, and instead of saying the coyote is bad or that the deer are bad, recognize that their presence is because of our human actions.
Farming fencerow to fencerow, which has long been the official policy of the US government through grain subsidies or price guarantees, and is contra to the instructions of our parsha, is bad for the ecosystem as a whole. We fail to value the beings that exist on the edges, whether those are trees that protect our riparian system by absorbing fertilizer run off before it gets into our streams, or the birds that eat insect pests, or the jewelweed that is an antidote to poison ivy etc etc. Our modern farming leaves as little as possible for the rest of creation. It is a kind of farming that ignores, deliberately ignores, the claims of the more than human world, that denies the possibility of the other.
Leaving corners of field unharvested is both a metaphor and a literal teaching. As a metaphor, leaving the corners of the field unharvested is at a minimum a message to not take everything you can.
How do you cultivate humility Where are you harvesting the corners of your fields? How do you remember that you were once a slave to Pharoah?
QUESTIONS
Can you think of anything comparable to tzara’at, scale disease, personally or in our culture? What do you think about the linking of humans, clothing and houses given in the parsha? What’s your response to what I am suggesting about the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, the motivation to avoid death as ritually polluting and the view of the divine?
What could be an updated version of the bird flying off with our pollution? What kind of occasions would you want to use it for?
Do you believe that all of the more than human world has moral agency? Do rocks and lizards have the same rights as deer and bodies of water? How might you work with the more than human world in your ritual practice?
How do you cultivate humility Where are you harvesting the corners of your fields? How do you remember that you were once a slave to Pharoah?
