Parashat Taz-ri’a: A Shift in Power from Biblical Text to Rabbinic Perception
(delivered by Rabbi Sacks on April 1, 2022)
This week’s Torah reading, Taz-ri’a, portrays the Priest as a physician, and it portrays spiritual blight as medical malady. The text focuses on scaly skins and malignant discolorations, but simmering beneath the surface is a mode of power that challenges the modern mindset. Here it is the priest who wields the authority to diagnose, isolate, and adjudicate regarding leprous eruptions. The fate of those afflicted rests solely in the proclamations of the priests, who alone, without consultation with anyone, deems whether people are labeled “clean” or “unclean.”
One section of our portion reads:[1]
“Regarding the person with a leprous affliction: the clothes shall be rent, the head shall be left bare, and the upper lip shall be covered over; and that person shall call out, “Impure! Impure!”
Tazria’s depictions of disease may engender queasy feelings. However, if they do not, the underlying social stratification may do so instead. Post-Temple Judaism and the rise of Rabbinic reimagining of the biblical text to forward Jewish life largely in their time had the predicted and intended effect of upending priestly power. In the Rabbi’s schemata, Divine communication would henceforth no longer require the intermediaries of priests or altar. The offering of flesh and blood would be located in the offering of word and heart, and a collective of 10 individuals, a minyan, would become the new Temple in any place and at any time. All threads and strands of modern Judaism reflect the dynamic disruptions of our early Sages promoting new understandings of power, and new understandings of our human relationship to one another and to God.
In our more modern era, we sense similar disruptions all over. For example, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) stood for decades at the forefront of science and technology, pushing the frontiers of exploration and human possibility. By 2010, however, NASA faced staggering budget cuts and widespread questioning of its effectiveness and viability in the 21st century. Confronted with existential urgency and diminished resources, some of NASA’s leadership reimagined their approach to innovation. Dr. Jeffrey Davis of NASA’s Space Life Sciences Directorate picked out 14 strategic R& D, research and development, challenges and placed them in an open platform for the world to help address.[2]
The results were staggering. More than 3,000 people in over 80 countries contributed. Typical R&D cycles shifted from 3-5 years to only 3-6 months. And people without degrees or academic pedigree offered solutions and concepts that eclipsed much of the best thinking at Johnson Space Center. So successful was this new platform of open innovation that it is now built into both the structure and culture of NASA.[3]
More minds from more cultures and backgrounds, radical transparency, collaborative dynamics, and passion-driven work offer a markedly different path from the institutionalized, confidential, and specialized approach of NASA’s past. Such disruptive approaches to innovation and power may be seen in a multitude of sectors today, from AirBnb to Uber to Wikipedia. Hierarchies have been replaced with collaboratives, silos have been substituted with creativity, and alliances swapped with coalitions.
Such new approaches to power are not without issue and controversy. Access to WebMD does not a doctor make. A Pew study shows that nearly 70% of Americans get their news on social media, dramatically altering the access of information and our encounter with dissonant understandings. Moving power from an anointed elite to a democratized collective may trade one set of pitfalls for another, but this pendulum swing has seen throughout history. However, the times when power rests in a wider pool of people tend to be linked to the greatest explosions of scientific thought and artistic expression, as a fuller range of humanity encounters one another.[4]
Returning to Parashat Tazri’a, we witness the afflicted person physically isolated and humiliated, crying out their tainted status in a world that has left all power in the hands of those above and apart from them. Set apart from the camp, the afflicted persons await a priest to deem them worthy and allow them to return to the community.
Nonetheless our Talmudic Sages offer a different reading of this episode:[5]
- Yochanan exhorted a woman afflicted, “Announce your trouble to your friends so that they may offer prayers for compassion to be given for you. For it was taught: ‘And shall cry, “Unclean, unclean.”[6] Thus, one must announce their trouble to the public so that they may pray for compassion to be dispensed to that person.” Rabbi Joseph stated: “Such an incident once occurred at Pumbedita, and the woman was cured.”
In this radical rereading of our Torah text, a person afflicted and challenged is urged to place their troubles out in the open for the world to see and witness. And in such an act of vulnerability and courage, a world is moved to compassion, and a collective moves toward mercy. Rabbi Yochanan moves away from consolidated priestly power, and instead, to a collective grassroots power. Rather than remove the person and isolate them, the rabbis decided to approach the person and surround them with communal compassion and prayer.
And there is something curative when you know people are rallying on your behalf. This paradigm, seen in the way the Rabbis’ dealt with the text in Parashat Tazri’a is also how they dealt with the biblical text in creating the Passover seder, which we formally begin thinking about today on this Rosh Chodesh Nisan. For after all, the biblical text emphasizes Moses’ role, and pretty much only Moses’ role, in the Exodus, our people’s central story. But at the Seder, Moses’ name is not directly mentioned in a traditional Haggadah booklet at all, not even once. Rather, at the Seder, we reexperience the Exodus as one wherein the people rise up and receive healing and redemption because they dared to be publicly vulnerable with their pain. A groundswell of support from a mixed multitude took notice, and, with G!d’s help, joined with our Israelite ancestors in fomenting rebellion and gaining their liberation.
In these new understandings of Taz-ri’a and the Exodus, heroics are not placed upon the shoulders of an established elite, but rather in the grassroots potency of the people. When transparency of troubles enables a collective to act, we see a new power emerge: one where disease and plight are dealt with not through enforced isolation and solitude, but with G!d’s help, through human encounter and communal compassion.
Shabbat shalom!
[1] Leviticus 13:45.
[2] “Open Innovation at NASA,” 1st World Open Innovation Conference, Napa, CA, Dec. 4, 2014.
[3] Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, “Dismantling Knowledge Boundaries at NASA,” Administrative Science Quarterly, Dec. 14, 2017.
[4] Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms, New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World, p.8.
[5] BT, Niddah 66a.
[6] Quoting Leviticus 13:45.