Where Body and Soul Meet |
It is a phenomenon unlike any in the Torah. Tzaraat, often mistranslated as leprosy, has no real translation, just like it has no real analogue or rational explanation. It was, for want of a better word, a “disease” that was caused by sin. The sinner would have their house, clothing, and then their skin infected with tzaraat. There is no other instance in the Torah where we find a spiritual illness: a disease of the body generated solely by sin. In a rare moment of intellectual resignation, Rambam, who frequently tries to rationalise almost all areas of Jewish Law, abandons any attempt at such an explanation for tzaraat. He declares: “It is a wondrous miracle that has been nationally accepted by tradition…”[1].
There are two crucial features of tzaraat on which I would like to focus: First, why did people get tzaraat? The Talmud[2] lists seven different sins for which it could be a punishment. Of all of them, lashon hara (evil speech) , has most commonly been associated with tzaraat[3]. Second, tzaraat, intriguingly, takes the form of patches of discoloured skin. In his magnum opus, the Kuzari, R. Yehuda HaLevi offers a novel suggestion as to why tzaraat appeared this way:
This was one of the characteristics of the Shekhinah (God’s Presence): it occupies in in (the People of) Israel the same place as the spirit of life in the human body. This divine life force benefitted them and gave them lustre and beauty, in their bodies, dispositions, and houses. When it was absent from them, their intelligence waned, their bodies deteriorated, and their beauty faded. When it distanced itself from individuals, on each one of them came a sign of the distancing of the light of the Shekhinah from them…(2:62)
Tzaraat happened when the godly spirit began to leave a person. Their life........