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PARSHAT METZORA
By: Rabbi Joel Levy Leviticus Chapter 14 33 The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying: 34 When you enter the land of Canaan that I give you as a possession, and I inflict an eruptive plague upon a house in the land you possess, 35 the owner of the house shall come and tell the priest, saying, “Something like a plague has appeared to me in my house.” The central section of Parshat Metsorah deals with the outbreak of tsara’at (Plague or leprosy) on plastered buildings. On discovering an outbreak the homeowner was instructed to report it to a priest who would then come and inspect the house to determine whether or not the outbreak constituted a true infestation that required full purification rituals. The symptoms of building tsara’at closely resembled tsara’at in human beings, as described in previous chapters in Leviticus. Indeed the parallels between tsara’at in buildings and in human beings are further emphasised by discussions in rabbinic literature – we will see one example of this below. In Leviticus 14:35 the homeowner states to the priest: “Something like a plague has appeared to me in my house.” In Hebrew: “k’nega nire li babayit.” The Sifra, a collection of tannaitic halachic midrashim on the Book of Leviticus, focuses in on the word “li” – “to me”: “Since it says li (to me) rather than l’ori (to my light) from here they said that ‘The windows of a dark house may not be opened to examine its leprosy.’ ” The Sifra understands this verse as implying that in order for a house to be officially declared as infested, any infection had to be visible to the naked eye under the lighting conditions that normally prevailed in that specific room. (This ruling from the midrash appears also in the Mishnah itself in Negaim 2:3.) If you chose to, you were permitted to go grubbing around looking for infestations of tsara’at in your house; turning on all the lights, flinging open the windows and searching diligently with a magnifying glass. However, if whilst doing this, you did indeed discover an infestation, the house could not be declared officially infested. Despite the presence of a fungus that looked a lot like tsara’at, the house would not require any purification process. We can understand why this is the case when we see how the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 92a) uses this ruling to illustrate a more far reaching suggestions about how to lead one’s life: R. Eleazar also said: Always be obscure so that you can endure. R. Zera said: We have learned likewise. The windows of a dark house may not be opened to examine its leprosy. This proves it. Rashi adds: It turns out that its very darkness is its salvation, for as long as the priest cannot see it – it isn’t infected with leprosy. Drawing a parallel between a house and a person, this sugia uses the salvatory darkness of the house to teach us to impose a certain “darkness” or obscurity on our lives. Just as the dark house cannot be declared impure, so a life lived without absolute exposure is saved from being declared impure. In other words, a person should not expose all their inner workings to public scrutiny. We all contain a dark side, a core of impurity, skeletons in the cupboard, desires and instincts that would seem very ugly if we were to display them to the public. Every home contains fungi and bacteria (not to mention dubious moral practices) if we look hard enough; and every soul contains elements which should be left in the private realm rather than being brought to broad public attention. What constitutes the ‘natural light’ of one’s existence is something worth thinking about, but the principle seems to be clear – an absolutely transparent existence would be unendurable. The public sphere of existence should be played out on a macro-scale leaving the private realm to the magnifying glass and the microscope. 8
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