Tazria
– Metzorah
The
sun sets, and then he is ritually clean.
He may then eat the sacred offerings that are his portion
22:7
Our goal
in life should be to grow spiritually and become closer to our Creator. When we sin, we stray from our overall objective. We have also misused time that could have
been utilized for spiritual growth. A
full life is one in which all of the days have been employed towards one’s
principle objective…When we stray from our spiritual aspirations; we need to
make two distinct efforts in order to return to our original path. If I were to upset a friend, I would first
need to correct my hurtful behavior.
However, that alone would be insufficient to restore the friendship to
its former state. The relationship would
remain fragile until I have made an additional effort to rebuild the ties of
friendship and affection. The first
state – correcting the faulty behavior…is analogous to the cleansing action of
immersion in water…With the setting of the sun; we begin a new day and a new
start…
Isaac
Kook (20th Century)
These
Torah portions…focus on questions of boundaries – who and what is inside or
outside the territory of ritual purity.
Women who give birth, lepers, “leprous” garments and houses and men and
women who have unusual emissions all share one thing in common – each
represents a crossing of borders. It is
this violation of boundaries that results in ritual impurity and necessitates a
ceremonial act to re-establish the normal boundaries once again…Just as the
woman giving birth crosses the border between two realms – life and non-life –s
o too the leper’s condition profoundly affects a different sort of boundary,
the skin, the demarcation between our internal selves and the external
world. When this boundary becomes ambiguous,
when the skin turns white or raw, a person’s self-definition becomes
frighteningly permeable…
Ellen
Frankel (Contemporary)
As a
result of the division between religious and secular, we tend to equate
religion with ritual and to believe that piety has little effect on
conduct. Each time a person says “Rabbi
– I’m not religious, but I’m a good person” or “I’m a good Jew, because I’ve
never harmed anybody” he is reflecting such a belief. Unfortunately, this charge is given a certain
amount of credence by the conduct of some observant Jews, who may religiously
follow the ritual commandments of the Torah, but seem oblivious to the ethical
injunctions found in the same Torah…As a conservative Jew I view both ritual
and ethics as being important, but I do not see them as equal. For me the ritual commandments are secondary,
and the ethical commandments are primary.
Ritual is educational; it refines character, inspires us to serve God
and our fellow men.
For this
week’s parsha…the “leading word” is strikingly clear – tumah
and its various related forms.
Often translated as “unclean,” Tumah actually
is better understood as the state of being ritually impure. In orther words, by
certain acts and events – some voluntary, some beyond our control – we enter
into a state of ritual impurity and therefore are no longer capable of being in
contact with God’s holy place, the mishkan or
Tabernacle. We must, according to the
Torah, regain the opposite state – we must become tahor,
ritually “clean” – through a period of separation from others, in some cases
through ritual bathing and eventually by offering sacrifices. Through these acts, we are able to re-enter
the world of normal community.
Barry
Holtz (Contemporary)