Tazria-M'Tzora

A two-fer today, as we read a double portion this week (and I fly off to Washington tomorrow). Both portions deal with the duties of the priests, who were responsible not only for the purity of the sacrifices but also for the purity of the camp.

In the Emergency Room

One function of the priests was to check people afflicted with various communicable diseases and sequester those who might pose a danger of infection. The passage reminded me of a trip to the emergency room, where the doctors' insistent questions can have the same incantatory quality as these priestly examinations: "If the priest sees that the eruption has covered the whole body — he shall pronounce the affected person clean; he is clean, for he has turned all white. But as soon as undiscolored flesh appears in it, he shall be unclean; when the priest sees the undiscolored flesh, he shall pronounce him unclean. The undiscolored flesh is unclean; it is leprosy. But if the undiscolored flesh again turns white, he shall come to the priest, and the priest shall examine him: if the affection has turned white, the priest shall pronounce the affected person clean; he is clean" (Leviticus 13:13-17).

Are you having any pain in your arm, in your chest, in your heart?
Is there tingling in your hand, in your shoulder if you twist toward your back?
Can you breathe when you lie down, when you rise up, and when you walk?
On a scale of one to ten, is your pain like the breaking of a rod on a rock?
On the treadmill, do you trudge like a woman climbing stairs
with their tops in the sky? Do you sense the plasma pound in your veins
as the cuff constricts your arm like the fingers of a demon? Is the pattern
on the screen of your breathing and your heart, prophetic as a screed
on the evils of your youth? If the enzymes in your blood betray damage
to your core, can you live outside the camp of the hearty and the well?

Plague House

One of the afflictions the priests checked for, sometimes translated as leprosy, was a kind of lesion that might appear on a person, a fabric, or the wall of a house. It was the duty of the householder to report potential infection with the odd locution, “Something like a plague has appeared upon my house” (14:35). But according to the Talmud, "The house affected by the plague never existed and is not destined to exist. It was stated for the purpose of edification" (Sanhedren 71a).

This house, with green and reddish veins
that spread through the grout like sepsis
streaking from a lesion to the heart,
does not exist and never has,
the rabbis say. Why
of all the implausible stories—
talking asses, parting seas—
should this wall blossom
into parable? Deconstructing
the erupting house, stone
by imaginary stone,
carrying the abstract debris
to an unclean place outside the city
that will come to be inside
the Land, we learn that what is hard—
plaster, rock, timber, plague—
is a kind of language, pointing
to something realer than we know.