Last week I was stripping the wallpaper from our guest bathroom on the first floor and I was shocked to find a large stain on the wall behind the plumbing, a clear case of dry rot, or what the parsha Torah for this week calls “leprosy of the house.” My first reaction was simply physical revulsion: dryrot is certainly ugly, staining the otherwise evenly-colored plaster with white, brown and other blotchy colors. Then, I was quickly struck with an equally sickening, sinking vision of using hundreds of dollar bills to wallpaper that section, since that simple stain was going to cost us some money to repair, maybe even more money than I might at first think, for dry rot is usually an exterior sign of some inner more prevalaent decay in the house. A small spot (in this case about a foot square) could mean extensive corruption not only in the plasterboard on the other side, but in the wall studs and even the bricks and mortar propping up the wall.
Suddenly, I had visions of our house, our home, slowly crumbing around me secretly, insidiously, in ways I couldn’t detect or even guess. In the few seconds I was occupied with this train of thought, my home had magically and tragically undergone a transformation from a place of comfort and security to an insecure and blemished building in which we were trapped, in some senses already ruined beyond repair. My entire perception, my very vision had been tainted by accidentally uncovering this one secret stain and now I saw the whole house with very critical eyes: the unevenness in the doorway, the small but growing gaps between floorboards, the crayon and pencil marks on the wallpaper, the holes and mud in the backyard where the dog had dug, the bare patches in the front lawn, the cracked tiles in the upstairs bathroom, the poorly fitting windows, the large crack in the garage foundation. My house was in ruins around me even as I stared at the stain on the wall.
For far worse than the physical blotch in front of me, or even the unguessed hidden rot it signified was the psychic stain it had induced in me. If I could exorcise it, remove not the stain but this new perception through some magic ritual, at that moment I would have.
Metsora, the reading for this week, describes just such magical rites of exorcism. It is a companion piece to last week’s reading, Tazria, which clinically described leprosy of the human body, including an almost nauseating catalog of different kinds of running sores, blemishes, pimples, and irruptions, chancres, and lesions, and how to deal with each kind in terms of whether they represent cleanliness or uncleanliness. The two chapters are thus of a piece with most of Leviticus, which generally describes various abominations, the distinction between clean and unclean, technical descriptions of ritual ways to transform uncleanliness into cleanliness, prohibitions against contact with the unclean, and the duration of periods of uncleanliness. Remember, it’s in Levitivus we also find a detailed catalog of kashrut …
Metsora begins by prescribing a particularly primitive and cruel-seeming system of sacrificial magic for exorcising the leprosy described so fully and sickeningly last week: take one bird and dip it in the blood of another bird which the priest slaughtered under running water. A few verses later, we read about another grotesque magic rite, though one perhaps more humorous: the priest takes blood from a sacrifical lamb and dots the right ear, the right thumb, and the right big toe of the impure person, which sounds much more like a Haitian voodoo ritual than the sort of civilized, symbolic Jewish procedures we have come to be familiar with in the centuries since the destruction of the Temple. Compare these rituals with, for instance, the waving of lulav and esrog on Succoth, or the Seder on Passover. For us Jews who inhabit the rationalistic, modern scientific age, this sort of stuff seems particularly remote and incomprehensible, silly, useless, and even a bit irreligious in its brutality to animals. As my friend Steve Cramer said to me last week, it’s these sorts of sections that really make you believe that maybe HaShem did not really hand over the Book of Leviticus to Moses on Mount Sinai. This contrast is made even greater by the fact that this year the parsha falls on Shabbot Hagadol, The Great Sabbath before Pesach.
The questions I’d like to pose, and hopefully answer in the next few minutes, then are these: How are we, as moderns living in a scientific age, to understand these residual descriptions of rituals that obviously survive from a much earlier and more primitive period in our Jewish history? Do we just write them off as no longer relevant, vestigial organs like the appendix? Are they to be understood only symbolically and not literally? And how do we reconcile these obsolete and savage-seeming rituals from the priestly era — or even just their silly superstitiousness — with, for instance the Seder, the very name of which means order, or with the systematic acts of interpretations detailed in the Haggadah? My answer, I hope to show, is that they are all parts of the same religion, that there is no contradiction here at all, and that between the rationalistic and the magical lies a line so thin, so small , that it is really a question of point of view. Metsora, in my view, asks us to collapse those points of view, to cross the line into an appreciation for magic.
Let’s return to the subject of dry rot. Metsora goes on in its middle section to detail what it calls “leprosy of the house,” describing in incredibly precise terms exactly the kind of dry rot I encountered last week in my own house. When you find leprosy in the walls of your house, you must immediately vacate it, taking out all the furniture. Then you have to call a priest, who quarantines your house. If at the end of the quarantine period, the dry rot still persists or has grown, then the wall where its shows must be torn down and the bricks and mortar placed on the trash dump away from the city. Then follows a technical description of how to rebuild the wall of the afflicted house. But if the “leprosy” reappears, then the whole house has to be destroyed, and the people within it will be declared unclean until the evening, and all the occupants, even those who just ate there, must wash their clothes
Metsora concludes with a discussion of various kinds of bodily fluids characteristic of males and females and how and when their flow makes them unclean. In concluding this way, Metsora brings us full circle to the beginning of Tazria, proving even further that they are meant to be read as sister parshas, because Tazria began with a discussion of how the birth of a son makes the mother unclean for seven days, and the birth of a daughter for 30 days. In my mind, this mystery holds the key to understanding the whole parsha, indeed, perhaps all of the injunctions and descriptions of magic in Leviticus.
By concluding with a discussion of menses in women and the unintentional spilling of seminal fluid by men, the Torah here signifies the need to “reduce the paradoxical” to take a phenomenon whose meaning is ambiguous or paradoxical, and surround it with magic in order to reduce its threat. I.e. , to make it rational. Both sorts of flow indicate the definite presence of the potential for fertility and yet, they are themselves occasions of infertility. Thus, as we read in Chap XV, v, 18: when a man and woman enjoy connubial relations they are also unclean. Why? Why should so natural and in some senses sanctified an act be considered unclean? If we are to remain consistent with our other interpretation, then the reason is not because of more obvious physical and clinical circumstances of the act (which I need not deal with here) but perhaps because some spiritual status has not been decided. And what is the most undecided and suspenseful aspect of intercourse? It’s simply whether the act has been fertile or not.
At its simplest level, then, these rituals are kinds of science: notice that the stress in Tazria is on close scrutiny and empirical observation. Priests must play the role of diagnosticians (Tazria = “deliver” as in render a judgement) as well as clinicians (Metzora =”leprosy”) ; they must determine if there is a disease before they try to cure it. So though it’s amazing, we shouldn’t be surprised that thirty centuries before the discovery by Louis Pasteur of the idea of sepsis (germs) and the invention by Marcel Proust’s father of the idea of ‘le cordon saniatire,’ these Levitican priests had the idea of quarantine: the same scientific conclusion is unavoidable, and certainly the Israelite priests were no less capable of logic and deduction and observation than their late 19th century counterparts. Is a sore just a sore, is a blotch on the wall just a blotch, is the stain in the clothing just a stain, or are they signs of the onset of a more pathological problem? Quarantine them with magic for a while. If it turns out to be a true disease, true leprosy, banish the person, burn the clothing, tear down the house.
So it is also not surprising that most moderns when they try to explain these Levitican rulesin terms that make modern sense (what’s called “apologetics”) stress their incredible medical wisdom, the astute and scientific effectiveness of this system of purification, just as many apologists for kashrut emphasize the desirability of avoiding pork because of the prevalence of trichinosis.
However, I always found these rationalizations to be ridiculous, not to mention irrelevant and anachronistic, for there are clearly different goals for the two systems, ancient and modern. And here we come to the crux of the matter, where the magic of modern science and the science of primitive magic part company. For according to Tazria and Metsora, it is especially when the priests discover that the sore was not a true leprosy, or when the priests determine that the patient has been cured of his leprosy, then the person, the house, the garment, still has to undergo a ritual of purification, Why? If they’re cured, itf they’re clean, then why purify them? It doesn’t make scientific sense. Where is the scientific astuteness in this?
The ruling can only be understood in terms of the entire system of Jewish thought and not in logical terms. The now-clean persons or objects have been ritually suspended from clear categorization for the period of their quarantine; they have been kept in a metaphysical no-man’s land, and now, especially now, we have to enact a special ritual to bring them back into the categories, to awaken them from a state of suspended animation back into the normal, as it were, by painting them with blood and waving hyssop leaves in the air. This is the essential meaning of unclean: holiness – kedushah – derives from the root word kadesh, to keep apart.
So what does this all mean?
What it means is that the holisitic magic of Leviticus is bent towards healing the individual and the community not only by scientifically diagnosing and then quarantining the leper, but by then acknowledging another, spiritual dimension and attending to that.
So what Metsora seems to tell us is, in a sense, how the science of Tazria, which the categorical science of our modern age finds easy to understand and appreciate, doesn’t go far enough. And indeed, if we look around us, it’s not hard to tell that mere logic and rationality don’t really work all that well on their own. It’s pretty obvious that while modern science grants us enormous powers, something fundamental is missing. Otherwise, why is there such a massive conflict between modern technology and the laws and rhythms and spiritual wholeness of nature that is obviously leading us to ecological disaster? [2023 intrusion: Or why Covid policies failed to work?) So while science and technology keep us free from irrationality they also lack a vision about the true nature of a magical universe and a supermagical God. The science of Tazria observes and dissects the physical world; but the magic of Metsora acts to repair the damage, to put it back together again.
Metsora shows how ancient Jews, who from our perspective seem enslaved to their superstitions, nonetheless saw in their system a doorway to the hidden, invisible magical order that might have been in God’s mind when He created the world in all its seething richness and abundantly confusing diversity. Metsora seems to tell us to use the order and rationality of our science as a conduit to magic, for the magic is still there, waiting to be discovered just beyond logic. Having read this parsha, I can no longer be persuaded that God was so simple-minded as to invent a universe governed only by logic and anatomized so neatly into categories (2023: simplistic taxonomies).
And once you see this as an essential part of Jewish thought in Leviticus, you begin to see it everywhere. To bring us full circle, we can even see this message in the familiar rationality of Pesach: After all, for all its vaunted orderliness and logic, the prime symbol embedded in the Seder is the highly charged spirit of the Paschal Lamb, whose blood we smeared on our doorposts in a ritual no less primitive than the strange voodoo described in this week’s reading.
Finally, it isn’t surprising that modern medicine, despite its incredible technology of physical healing and anatomization, has been brought more and more to acknowledge the inexplicable power, efficacy, and necessity of spiritual healing – precisely the kind of spiritual healing that the Jewish magic and wisdom of Metsora prescribes for us.
