Friday, April 27, 2012

Random Musing Before Shabbat - Tazria-Metzora 5772 - We Are the Lepers

Twelve years ago I wrote a musing for this parasha based on the haftarah for Metzora, Even Lepers Bring Good News. This musing is an expansion upon that musing.

Do you ever feel like a leper? I think many of us have experienced, at some point in their lives, an estrangement to family, friends, colleagues, synagogue, social group, community, perhaps even our own faith. We experience a kind of spiritual leprosy. Sometimes the estrangement emanates from our side, other times it seems to emanate from the others-we feel as if we are being treated like lepers. It's not a pleasant feeling, whatever the source.

Now, to begin with, I do want to call your attention to the fact that, although leprosy, or more correctly, Hansen's Disease is treatable, millions remained afflicted with the condition. Even in our time, there are still thousands of leper colonies - even though we know that the disease is treatable and that segregation is not warranted when treatment is readily available. The social stigma of having leprosy is probably no different than it was 4000 years ago, and we, as a society, should be ashamed of that fact.

The Torah, at least as interpreted by the rabbis, seems to be trying to tell us that people suffering from diseases like leprosy are merely reaping what they have sown through their own transgressions and wrongful behaviors. I found that idea repugnant when I first encountered it, and my repugnance is no less visceral today. Yet we do know that the mind-body connection is powerful, and that people can manifest physical symptoms from stress, guilt, and other emotions. I suppose the same is true for societies as well - they can have physical manifestations of emotional issues. How else might one explain the Shoah or other atrocities? I wonder if some of what we are seeing manifested in politics these days is a physical symptom of an underlying stress. Since we know that Hansen's disease has a specific bacterial cause, we should no longer attribute its manifestation to a person's inner mental state or spiritual impurity. Which leads us to once again see the words of Torah in Tazria and Metzora as metaphorical in nature.

The same year I wrote the original musing upon which this is based, I also wrote a musing for parashat Tazria entitled Preventing Spiritual Rot in which I wrote:

The methods described in Tazria for identifying and isolating those who might defile the population are problematic. Why did this specific skin condition render one impure while another might not? Why would a woman who has just contributed her whole body to the greatest miracle of all-only one step below G”d's ability to create life-be considered unclean and asked to make a sacrifice for expiation? Why did G"d give us these particular mitzvot and rituals (if that is what you believe,) or why  did our ancestors develop these particular attitudes towards what was clean and unclean, and rituals to deal with that (if that is what you believe?)
The obvious difficulties aside, it seems to me that our ancestors challenge us to find a way to do as they sought to do-to identify and isolate that which makes the community impure.
Since people don't seem to manifest their spiritual impurity in Tzara'at anymore, how are we to go about this task? And how do we define what is clean and unclean? Do we fully accept the definitions of Torah? And how do we extend those definitions to include things and circumstances unknown at that time (or can we safely assume G"d knew in advance and still wishes these definitions to be used.)

The message is for us to be on guard for that which can make our communities (and our selves) impure. That does become a little harder in the absence of clear physical manifestations like leprosy. How do we identify the symptoms? Once we seem them, what do the symptom,s tell us. This is, I believe, an important question. In the Torah's use of leprosy, is the physical manifestation of leprosy by a person a message to that person, or a message to the community (or both?) Is it intended to get the individual to recognize what they have done to become impure, or to warn others? Is it a way to get society to bring pressure upon those with symptoms to encourage them to do what needs to be done to become pure?

If leprosy was meant to spur the community to action, it wasn't very successful. It spurred action all right, but the wrong kind of action. It spurred society to segregate the impure, assuming that it was ONLY the people with leprosy that were society's problems. Yet it could be that the individual manifestations of leprosy were an indicator of the Israelite's overall impurity. Perhaps we shunted them away because we couldn't bear to look at ourselves? The lepers become our goats for Azazel.

If leprosy is a sign of spiritual impurity of a society, than our society should be leprous simply for its treatment of lepers!

I began this musing with asking if there were times when you felt like a leper - shunned, degraded, ignored. So, what do you do when you are a spiritual or emotional leper? Do you sit around feeling sorry for yourself. Do you develop an intense dislike of those who distance themselves from you as if you were the carrier of a horrible and contagious disease? Do you develop an intense dislike of yourself, instead? You begin to wonder "am I really a leper, that people avoid me, push me away, distance themselves?"

The Haftarah for Metzora is taken from First Kings, chapter 7. It starts with the story of four lepers who were living just outside their own community even though it was a time of war and siege. The text tells us that none of them really thought it was a good idea just sitting around waiting to die or be killed. They apparently believed going inside their home city was an option open to them (thus, they must have felt their fellow Israelites were ultimately good hearted and would not turn away even a leper under these circumstances.) But they decided against that, figuring the city was under siege and in pretty bad shape-they might wind up dying of starvation if they went into the city.
What an irony-here we have four lepers, outcasts in their own community, and by G"d's commandments no less-yet somehow they feel better off than their fellow countrymen inside the city!
Their other option was to go to the enemy camp. They figured either they will kill them instantly, or let them live. Yet another irony-despite their own circumstances, they considered going to the enemy camp as deserting! Still, they decide this seems the best option. They preferred a quick death, if they were to die, than one of starvation in a besieged town.

So they steal their way into the enemy camp-to find it deserted. (The text kindly tells us that G”d had frightened away the enemy with sounds of an approaching army.) They help themselves to some spoils-but then they stop and say to themselves that here they are, taking advantage of their good fortune, yet an event of even greater import, one that was great news to their own community, had taken place. They must go report this to their native city.

They shout the good news to the gatekeeper-and then we hear no more about them, their "good deed" done. (In the continuing story, a disbelieving King sends out scouts, who eventually confirm that the enemy army has retreated.)
These lepers, forced out of their own community, still felt connected to it, felt drawn to share the news of G"d's good fortune.

If they can act this way, so can we all, when we fail tainted with our own kinds of spiritual and emotional leprosy. It's an important lesson to us all.
Remember that even when you feel like a leper, your community still matters-at least it should-to you. It's far too easy to abandon the community that is treating you like a leper - it's almost understandable. Yet here our tradition teaches us that obligation to the community remains at all times.

However, I'm left hanging. I want to know what happened to the lepers. Were they rewarded for their loyalty to the city, or, as is more likely, they were continued to be treated as outcasts, forced to live outside the city? I think the author/s of the Book of Kings missed a real opportunity here.

Here's one possibility:

II Kings Chapter 7 Verse 16.5 - And G"d was so taken with the civil loyalty of the four lepers, that their health was restored to them, and they came back into the city and shared in its triumph.

or

II Kings Chapter 7 Verse 16.5 - And the King and the people of the city were so taken with the civil loyalty of the four lepers, that a share of the spoils was left for them in their place outside the city, so that they might be rewarded.

But no. No hint of reward or salvation for the lepers. Which, in a sense, makes what they did even more important a lesson. They displayed loyalty to their people, to G"d's people Israel even though they were shunned and would continue to be shunned because of their affliction and impurity.

This could be a hard thing to do - to remain loyal and supportive of your community when you feel you;re being treated like a leper. There's no guarantee or hint of a reward for remaining loyal to them. Yet our tradition teaches us that this is what you should do.

Part of me wants to believe this is a good thing, a good lesson. Part of me wants to throw up because the idea is as repulsive as the sort of justifications one hears about the continuance of the caste system among Hindus. Or stories of slaves' loyalties to their masters. A sort of Stockholm syndrome.

If the rabbis are right (and you know that I believe more often than not they weren't - though in recent weeks I've given them a few nods) then when we are suffering spiritual leprosy it is because of something we've done to get ourselves isolated from the community. Perhaps reflecting on that would lead to a healing. On the other hand, sometimes communities treat people like lepers even when they are undeserving of such disrespect. Some communities don't like dissent, so they treat critics like lepers. (One wonders how many potential prophets were silenced by a priest's suspect diagnosis of tzara'at? After all, as I mentioned in that musing for Tazria in 5760, the Torah is concerned with a very specific diagnosis. It was possible to have diseases of the skin that were NOT tzara'at and didn't render one impure.)

We know that leprosy is treatable, yet there are still leper colonies. Seems society as a whole is struggling with these same issues, aren't we? Maybe it is time for those being treated like lepers to speak up and challenge their communities for their treatment of them. After all, that is the greatest loyalty one could show one's own community - pointing out its errors.

Shabbat Shalom,

Adrian

© 2012 by Adrian A. Durlester

Other Musings on this parasha:

Tazria-Metzora 5770 - Excessive Prevention
Tazria-M'tzora 5767-Once Impure, Not Always Impure
Tazria-Metzora 5766 - Comfort in Jerusalem
Tazria-Metzora 5758/5764-Getting Through the Messy Stuff
Tazria-Metzora 5761-Lessons For Our Stuents
Tazria-Metzora 5762-Sing a Song of Leprosy

Tazria/Shabbat HaHodesh 5771 - It's Good To Be the King
Tazria 5768 - Just Not Good Enough is Just Not Good Enough
Tazria 5765-If Naaman Can Be Forgiven...
Tazria 5760-Preventing Spiritual Rot

Metzora 5771 - Afflict This!
Metzora 5768 - Human Nature
Metzora 5765-Defiling the Tabernacle
Metzora 5763-Not So Irrelevant
Metzora 5760-Even Lepers Bring Good News

Friday, April 20, 2012

Random Musing Before Shabbat - Sh'mini/Makhar Khodesh 5772 - Collect Call



As I was re-reading the opening verses of the haftarah we read this Shabbat, the special haftarah read when Shabbat immediately precedes the start of a new month, I was transported back to a conversation I participated in just the other day.  In this conversation, a typical foray by two adults trying to explain to a tween what things were like in the old days, before smartphones and tablets and the internet and video games, we were talking about the phone company. Yes, THE phone company. Ma Bell. AT&T. Sure, there were always other smaller phone companies, but we all knew what we meant when we said "the phone company." We talked about rotary phones, phone booths, operator assisted calls, party lines, and more. The conversation eventually led us to talk about how making a long distance call used to be a big thing, and about the concept of making a collect call. Then we each shared with the young tween the various "codes" that our parents and others would use to use the collect phone call as a way of sharing information without ever actually having to pay for anything.  Like making a collect, person-to-person to call "Miss Holly Wood" or "Mr. Werehere," and other such clever coded messages to let people know where we were, etc. The codes were so transparent, that I am just sure that long distance phone operators probably kept notebooks and shared their favorites with each other.

So when the haftarah spoke of the secret "arrow" code between Jonathan and David my mind made the connection. However, it is a tenuous, and even odd connection at that. The code between Jonathan and David was to help protect David. The code that people used for person-to-person collect calls was an attempt to cheat the phone company. Of course, this was the big, evil, monopolistic phone company, so it was okay for a whole host of reasons to play this little charade.

Decades before today's current 1% vs 99% tensions, corporations were already bad guys that allowed us to play moral relativism in dealing with them. I remember the old story that if you were having a problem with the phone company, you should just put a staple across one of the holes in the Hollerith (punch) cards that you were supposed to return with your payment and write your complaint on the card. This would supposedly jam the reader mechanism, force the card to be manually removed, and theoretically someone would read the message you then wrote on it. When I was young, I did learn to use Hollerith cards, though I never did learn if a staple would gum up the reader. At least by the 70s, they were pretty fault tolerant, and even a folded, spindled, or mutilated card could be handled by the reader (it would reject it, but it wouldn't gum up the works because it was caught before it go to far into the mechanism.) By the way, the irony of writing about Hollerith cards right after Yom HaShoah is not lost on me. Hollerith cards enabled the Nazis to keep such accurate records of their atrocities.

Yet our Torah teaches us that we should not subvert justice to favor rich or poor. Reminds me of another ubiquitous meme making the Facebook rounds:

Like any social action movement, the current Occupy movement, or whatever it has morphed into, struggles with opposing doctrines of community action. There is the non-violent, working within the system (or challenging system injustices through civil disobedience) approach, and there is the more radical, confrontational approach. Some people want to just camp out in a park. Others want to throw chairs through bank windows. This meme seeks to strike a balance, I believe.

SCLC, SNCC Black Panthers. SDS. Greenpeace. Sierra Club. ASPCA. Humane Society. Gandhi. MLK. The Chicago Seven. Dorothy Day. Saul Alinsky. Meir Kahane. AJ Heschel. AIPAC. Jewish Fund for Justice. Peace Now.  Different approaches. Each of them at times claiming the moral high ground. If even the Torah is uncertain, how can we know for sure where the moral high ground is?

I'm not here to endorse or criticize either approach. I've seen enough of life in the real world by now to know that everything has its season, everything has its time. War, for example, is an abhorrent thing. Yet in the shadow of the Shoah, one has to ask if "might for right" is an acceptable answer to evil.

As a child, every time I observed a parent or relative utilize the fake person-to-person collect call ruse I was uncomfortable. It felt incongruous with the values I was otherwise being taught. I guess it was one of my earliest encounters with moral relativism. (Another was how my parents would, because of my short stature, continue to try and get me onto the subway or bus for free, pretending I was younger than I actually was.) It is so insidious. How many of us really think twice about helping ourselves to some office supplies from the workplace to use at home? (Nowadays we rationalize it by reminding ourselves how we often do some work-related things at home, or by how much extra time we are putting in at work. We earned it.)

Hotel towels. "Oh, they expect us to take them home - it's all built into the price of the room." Really? Your taking the towel just makes the room rates higher for all of us. Ah, but we love to "stick it to the man." It's a victimless crime, we say. That's a real slippery slope. All sorts of things can be rationalized - like insurance fraud, white collar crime, hacking into company databases. (Down the same path one can find the sorts of trampling of rights we rushed to in the wake of 9/11.) Is there truly such a thing as a victimless crime? If so, it exists only in a morally relativistic world.

I have no moral high ground on which to stand. I stand as guilty of these acts of moral relativism as any of us. I feel guilty about them. Guilty enough that, in many, if not most cases, I really do try and do the right thing. Until I find it more convenient to employ moral relativism. Doing the right thing can be really inconvenient. So I do my best until I don't feel like it. Hardly a philosophy to pass down to our children.

The characters in our haftarah: Saul, Jonathan, David, are certainly no moral giants. They are, like so many of the characters in Torah, truly flawed. Yet here, in the haftarah reading, we find Jonathan doing the right thing. He stands up to his father, and he works to protect his friend (and lover?) David. So for this one brief shining moment we have a Camelot of morals. It will soon all go to pot, just like Camelot. Moral relativism will rear its ugly head.

I've resisted the temptation up until now to mention once again my two favorite crispy critters from the parasha, Nadav and Avihu. How we judge what they did and their ultimate fate is often from a morally relativistic perspective. One might even entertain the idea that Nadav and Avihu were themselves engaging in some moral relativism.

Also, related to the parasha, the ways many of us practice or choose to not practice the rules of kashrut are often based on moral relativism. We keep kosher at home, but not when eating out. We don't otherwise care about kashrut but won't eat pork or shellfish. And just to try to convince me that eating "mock shrimp" isn't an act of moral relativism. Yes, it works within the halakha of kashrut as we have neatly constructed it for ourselves, but does it really fit in the intent of kashrut? Is not a kashrut industry that ignores issues of workplace ethics a moral relativism? Is not the orthodox electronics merchant who cheats his fellow Jews only a little bit but has no compunction at all with cheating the goyim (and especially the schwartzes) outright moral relativism? (Sorry but my experience with the orthodox and hassidic salesmen at places like J&R or BH Photo has taught me that, sadly, yes they will try to pull a fast one over a fellow Jew-I've even heard them practicing their slick chicanery on other orthodox Jews-probably from a different sect!)

Is not the synagogue that treats its teachers, tutors, and specialists as independent contract labor (in clear contradiction of the IRS definitions) in order to save a few bucks in matching taxes and unemployment contributions practicing moral relativism? And all the synagogues that choose to not opt into their State's or private insurers unemployment compensation funds - are they not practicing moral relativism? (I've ranted about this before. Synagogues and Churches are exempt from compulsory participation in mandated unemployment insurance-but nothing stops them from voluntary participation. You would think the Jewish ethics on this issue were pretty clear.)

I'm not here to say that moral relativism is wrong. I do believe it is problematic, and is something we must work to curtail. The Torah itself practices this game with its position prohibiting murder but not killing. Though I don't often agree with the rabbis, I think they were right when they described a court that would impose the death penalty once in a  thousand cases as cruel. It can be a matter of degree.

I'd like to believe that I know right from wrong. I think I'd be better off praying that I have the discernment to know how to make situational judgments. No two moments in life are the same. No two moments in time are the same. To make decisions, even moral ones, without regard to context, is unwise and probably foolish. On the other hand, to make decisions based solely on the current context, with no regard for other potential context, past, present and future, is equally unwise and foolish. As I have said so many times before, the genius of our Torah is its ability to guide us in changing contexts, by being open to interpretation, yet at the same time grounding us in at least one context, and, often multiple contexts. Say what you will about Mishna, Gemara, Talmud, Midrash, and other commentary, their seemingly endless search to explore the "what-if" implications of interpretations of Torah is laudable (even though at times it is quite laughable in the way it take some arguments to extremes) in that it does teach us to consider context when we make decisions.

Well, what do you know about that. I said something nice about the rabbis. Twice in one musing. I must be getting soft as I age. Or I'm just treating the rabbis situation-ally and with relativism. Darn.

Yes, operator, I'd like to make a collect, person-to-person call for Mr. Eyewishyu Ashab from Mr. Bat Shalom.

Adrian
(c) 2012 by Adrian A. Durlester

Other musings on this parasha: