This is an excerpt from one of my favorite books, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer. It captures a conversation between the protagonist, a little boy named Oskar, and his grandfather:
Oskar’s grandfather says, "Stalin found out about the community and sent his thugs in, just a few days before I got there, to break all of their arms! That was worse than killing them! It was a horrible sight, Oskar: their arms in crude splints, straight in front of them like zombies! They couldn't feed themselves, because they couldn't get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did!"
"They starved?" Oskar asks.
"No,” says the grandfather, “They fed each other! That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!"
I don't believe in the afterlife,” Oskar says.
"Neither do I, but I believe in the story,” the grandfather replies.
--
In this weeks’ portion, Tazria, we are given a series of stipulations related to natural bodily functions, that individuals and kohanim, or priests, must follow in order to regulate the cleanliness, health and holiness of society. The bulk of the text discusses tzara’at, a leprosy-like condition. We are provided with a lengthy list of physical ailments that indicate a person is suffering from tzara’at, and an equally detailed list of the actions, sacrifices and ceremonial acts that the person, along with a kohen, must undertake in order to settle the spiritual inequity that brought upon the tzara’at in the first place. Because, according to classic commentary sources, tzara’at is not simply a medical condition; it is rather the physical manifestation of having committed some sort of moral transgression. Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, for example, demonstrated that tzara’at was not to be interpreted as a medical disorder, but rather a spiritual affliction. According to the beloved source Wikipedia, “the verse itself indicates this, as it directs those who find themselves afflicted to seek out a kohen and not a doctor, while the Torah specifically permits and even encourages those who are in need of medical care to seek treatment from physicians.” According to the text, and bolstered by Rabbi Hirsch’s teaching, an individual cannot actually become healed without the assistance of the kohen.
Verses 45 and 46 describe some of the actions that must be taken by the afflicted individual himself, to treat the tzara’at, when it is confirmed to have made him tamei, or impure. Roughly translated, the verses state that the the person with tzara’at, on whom there is a lesion, should destroy his garments, shave his head, cover himself down to his mustache (with a veil) and call out, “Unclean! Unclean! For all the time that he has a lesion, he will remain unclean. He is unclean; so he shall dwell isolated; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.
What shame, what humiliation these acts seem to entail in a modern context. These “requirements” might have been put into place in order to punish a person for committing moral transgressions, as described a minute ago, compelling them to publically address the reason for their affliction. Or, as the Talmud suggests, perhaps these rules were put in place to create a system through which that individual could publically ask for help, when it was desperately needed.
I couldn’t stop thinking about these proscribed actions: to hide one’s face, to walk around proclaiming one’s impurity… It made me think of my experience living in India. For fourteen months, I stayed in Bombay, an enormous, complicated and chaotic city on the Arabian Sea. I am in love with that place, but anyone who has been to Bombay will tell you that it is at once intoxicating, and suffocating. The poverty is debilitating. The suffering is immense. Everywhere you turn, there are people, children, kids as young as 3 years old even – wandering the streets, alone, with palms open! Begging is now, and may forever be, their occupation. Their lives are about wearing their poverty for everyone to see, and asking day in and day out. But there is one place in the city that stands out to me as a particularly intense confluence of pain. Haji Ali, a mosque, how ironic – a holy place – stands a distance from shore. When the tide comes in, the path to get there is covered by waves, but during low tide, the jagged walkway is lined with vendors, selling religious articles, food and souvenirs. Dotted amongst the stalls, and immediately in front of the stairs to the mosque are throngs of beggars. Men and women you might have a hard time looking at, because of their disfigurement. Mouths with no teeth across; exposed and festering wounds; disintegrating or contortioned or missing limbs – and again, open palms. These individuals – they each have a name, and they each have a mind and a heart – actually belong to one of Bombay’s modern leper colonies. But what spiritual transgression have these people committed? Which of their actions warrant such agony and indignity, where they must sit on the path, advertising and using their disabilities and suffering to survive? Why is it upon them to proclaim their need?
It’s sometimes hard to articulate those images in a way that is tangible and relevant when we’re so removed, relatively comfortable here in our familiar community. They’re terrible images – what can we do about them? I tell you today, that we cannot consider ourselves holy if we do not take into account the mandate Judaism has given us to be aware of, and do our parts to address issues like the social inequity that exists in places abroad -- and here in our own country and state and city and, dare I say, our congregation? There are horrifying aspects of life in our world, but we can’t shut ourselves off from them, and we must become more open, more perceptive to them.
“When Rabbi Joshua ben Levi found the prophet Elijah standing by the entrance to the cave where Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai was buried, he asked him, “When will the Messiah come?”
Elijah replied: “Go and ask him yourself.”
Rabbi Joshua ben Levi asked: “Where is he sitting?”
Elijah replied: “At the entrance to the city (of Rome).”
“How will I recognize him?” Rabbi Joshua wondered.
Elijah proclaimed: “He is sitting among the poor lepers; all of whom untie and retie all the bandages over their sores at once, whereas the messiah unties and reties each person’s bandages separately, saying: ‘Should I be wanted [to carry out my duty as the Messiah], I must not be delayed.’
So Rabbi Joshua went to the Messiah.
“Peace be upon you, son of Levi,” the Messiah said.
“When will you come, Master?” Rabbi Joshua asked.
The Messiah responded, “Today.”
Rabbi Joshua returned to Elijah and said: “The Messiah spoke falsely to me, for he told me that he would come today, yet he has not come.”
Elijah answered him: “He will come today, if you will hear his voice.” (Psalms 95:6)
That’s from Talmud, Sanhedrin. We cannot consider ourselves religious if we fail to hear that voice; if we fail to recognize the humanity and dignity in every person we meet, despite different religions, political beliefs, socio-economic statuses…the list goes on. As I noted earlier, today’s portion, Tazria, lists the actions and sacrifices and blessings that an individual must make, guided and facilitated by a kohen, in order to reconcile the spiritual indiscretion that brought upon their tzara’at in the first place. But in today’s world, we can’t apply the teaching literally; we clearly can’t rely on the notion that suffer-ers have brought suffer-ing upon themselves somehow. The reality is obvious: medical science has come a really long way, and people who are marginalized or suffering around the world have overwhelmingly not done anything to bring about the circumstances that they live in. And so it follows that such individuals – and I’m lumping an incredibly diverse array of people together into this category – cannot simply fix their own problems.
So, we must become kohanim for one another. We must become kohanim, healers, for one another, thereby elevating ourselves to a holier level of being, through acts borne of empathy and compassion and understanding. We must ensure that our Judaism is not just about carrying forward the tradition for the sake of continuity. We must ensure that we aren’t practicing Judaism in a purely personal way; only reciting prayers that comfort us or doing mitzvot just to say we’ve done them. No. A wise and humble educator in our community has committed her life to evangelizing the idea that Judaism means outward-facing chesed and tzedek; that the essence of our religion and culture is taking care of one another. Can we mobilize to do this, individually and collectively? Can we recommit to contributing our time, skills, expertise and yes, money, to effectively repair pockets of the world? Can we allow ourselves to experience the stake we have in the wellbeing of others?
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A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his daughter is asleep on his shoulder.
No car must splash her.
No car drive too near her shadow.
The man carries the world's most sensitive cargo,
but she is not marked.
Nowhere does her jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.
The man’s ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a girl’s dream
deep inside him.
We are not going to be able
to live in this world
if we're not willing to do what he is doing
with one another.
The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.
Those are words by the poet Naomi Shihab Nye. To a world of compassion, of shared responsibility, and of building the “heaven” that Oskar’s grandfather describes, Shabbat Shalom.