The church fathers had a principle that scripture must always make sense, so it should be taken literally until it starts sounding strange. At that point, you’d probably better treat it metaphorically. This is a good rule of thumb for preventing scripture from ever looking too weird. But what if it actually is weird?
The purified man and the plague in the walls
This week’s Torah portion concerns a set of phenomena that do not exist in our world in any remotely plausible sense. While our Parsha is a bit extreme, it’s a good example for helping understand why most Jews either 1) basically just ignore the Torah 2) listen to it chanted in a language they don’t quite understand or 3) have someone explain that it’s actually a metaphor.
The title of this week’s portion, Meṣoraˁ, prescribes how to ceremonially purify someone from something called ṣaraˁat. It is an illness we cannot even really name let alone understand. Whatever it is, this affliction, classically translated “leprosy” in the King James Version, is definitely not leprosy. Look how it works:
When you enter the land of Canaan that I give you as a possession, and I inflict a plague of “leprosy” (ṣaraˁat) upon a house in the land you possess, the owner shall come and tell the priest, saying, “Something like a plague has appeared upon my house.” … If, when he examines the plague, the plague in the walls of the house is found to consist of greenish or reddish streaks that appear to go deep into the wall, the priest shall come out of the house to the entrance, and close up the house for seven days.
Leviticus 14:34-38
The house–like a human body affected with the illness–has to rest for a week, the length of time it took God to create the world in Genesis 1 and so the cosmic measure of a cycle of purification. After this, the stones infected with this illness are to be surgically removed and taken to an “unclean place” so it does not spread. Yet also like a body, the house can be reinfected:
Lev. 14:43 If the plague again breaks out in the house, after the stones have been pulled out and after the house has been scraped and replastered, the priest shall come to examine: if the plague has spread in the house, it is a malignant “leprosy” in the house; it is unclean
The final chapter describes how parallel impurities can saturate the male body. Having moved on from a cosmic illness we learn just how vulnerable men are to ordinary ritual contamination. A discharge from the male member, surely quite common in a period with no mechanisms for public hygiene or antibiotics, is so incredibly contagious that everything he touches becomes almost radioactive:
Any bedding on which the one with the discharge lies shall be unclean, and every object on which he sits shall be unclean. Anyone who touches his bedding shall wash his clothes, bathe in water, and remain unclean until evening. Whoever sits on an object on which the one with the discharge has sat shall wash his clothes, bathe in water, and remain unclean until evening. Whoever touches the body of the one with the discharge shall wash his clothes, bathe in water, and remain unclean until evening. … If one with a discharge, without having rinsed his hands in water, touches another person, that person shall wash his clothes, bathe in water, and remain unclean until evening. An earthen vessel that one with a discharge touches shall be broken; and any wooden implement shall be rinsed with water.
Leviticus 15:4-12
Now, there is much in Rabbinic literature about the holiness of the land of Israel, but the radioactive discharge of male members and malignant wall plague are mostly forgotten in the conversation for non-Orthodox readers. Yet the Torah itself envisions both dwellings and bodies in the Holy Land as exceedingly porous and contagious, a physical world virtually blooming with impurity and repurification.
As we saw last week, the male creators of the Rabbinic purity system shifted the Torah’s concerns, imposing a presumed status of impurity on women while giving men (and houses!) the benefit of the doubt.
Yet the Torah itself, from God’s creation by word to His coming to physically dwell and eat among us in the Tabernacle to commanding the violent conquest of the land of Israel and expulsion of its natives, often starts sounding weird, or alien, or unjust.
Should we ignore the Torah and just let the obscure language go in one ear and out the other? The great Polish Hasidic commentator Yehudah Leib Alter, known as the Sfat Emet (“Language of Truth”) was not content to do this. Addressing the plague in the walls he wrote:
What sort of strange announcement is this? (The great French commentator Rashi explains this in terms of violent conquest:) that the Canaanites [had been hiding gold treasures inside the walls of their houses, which the Israelites would find upon destroying the houses]. Now really! Did the Creator of the universe need to resort to such contortions? Why would He have given the Canaanites the idea of hiding [things in the walls] so that Israel would have to knock down the houses!
Instead, he writes, the point is the enchantment of the world:
The real meaning of these afflictions of houses is in fact
quite wondrous, a demonstration that Israel’s holiness is so
great that they can also draw sanctity and purity into their
dwelling-places. Scripture tells us: “A stone shall cry out from
the wall and a wooden beam shall answer it” (Hab. 2:11), regarding a person’s sin, to which the walls of his house bear witness. How much more fully does the righteous person have to bring a feeling of holiness into all that belongs to them, including both plants and ordinary physical objects!
Is he saying this is just a metaphor? Notice that his criterion for plausibility is justice. Did the Creator of the universe need to resort to such contortions? It may be a metaphor, but one that is also real and literal, played out in one’s actual physical place.
A distinctive feature of Judaism is that if we want to enter into the covenant, we can only do it deliberately with our bodies and blood. In the Sfat Emet’s spirit one could tie this together with the incantation-like theory of the poet Robert Duncan, where the material world of bodies and objects we see is fraught with potential divine enchantment, ones that reveal to him the originary mythic place:
Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place,
that it is mine….created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.
…Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a given property of the mind that certain bounds hold against chaos,
that is a place of first permission, everlasting omen of what is.
sethlsanders 