by Pinchus Klahr

Pinchus Klahr was a student at New York University when he posted this Dvar Torah to the Usenet newsgroup net.religion.jewish in April 1985. He had already posted a celebrated essay on Chanukah to the same group; this essay, written for the double portion of Tazria-Metzora, takes on one of the Torah's most puzzling subjects: tzoraas.

Tzoraas (usually mistranslated as "leprosy") is the Torah's supernatural skin and house plague, a topic that occupies large swaths of Leviticus. Klahr's essay attacks head-on the most obvious paradox in the laws of tzoraas: if it is a punishment, why does the Torah tell the Jews, on entering Canaan, that finding tzoraas in their houses will be "good news"? His resolution, drawing on the Sefas Emes and the Talmud, reaches far beyond the specific halacha into a general theology of repentance, suffering, and spiritual growth. The title — "You're Only a Break in the Wall" — refers to the metaphor of Canaanite treasures hidden in the walls of houses that tzoraas would destroy, revealing them.

This week, we have a doubleheader — we're reading two parshiyos of the Torah this week, Tazria and Metzora. Interestingly enough, the two parshiyos, for the most part, are thematically related. A large part of both of them deal with the various types and aspects of tzoraas. Tzoraas is a broad term that covers a specific set of discolorations of one's skin, clothing, or the walls of one's house. Because one subtype of tzoraas affects the skin, the word "tzoraas" is usually and erroneously translated as "leprosy," and mistakenly identified with the infectious disease known as leprosy (caused by Mycobacterium leprae). The fact that various isolation and apparent decontamination procedures are associated with tzoraas would appear to support the "humanistic" view of tzoraas as a paradigm of the "health precautionary commandments." Nevertheless, as the Ramban, Sforno, and a host of other Biblical commentators point out, a careful examination of the laws of tzoraas show that it is NOT an ordinance proclaimed by the Heavenly Department of Public Health.

Just to cite one law that makes this obvious: a person with one of four defined shades of discolored skin is proclaimed a "metzora" (one who has tzoraas) if the discoloration is larger than a certain minimum size. Yet if the discoloration covers his entire body — when his "disease," if that's what it is, would be expected to be even more contagious — he is "tahor" — ritually clean and not a metzora! I could cite many other laws of tzoraas that refute the health hazard theory, but let this suffice to show that tzoraas is some supernatural type of plague, whose significance and relevance to us we shall now try to explore. (See Rabbi S.R. Hirsch's commentary on Tazria for one explanation of the "all is like none" paradox of tzoraas.)

The Paradox — Punishment or Reward?

In Parshas Metzora (14:34), the Torah states: When you will come to the land of Canaan that I will give you as a possession, and (if) I will place the plague of tzoraas on a house in the land of your possession...

Rashi on this verse, citing Medrash Vayikra Rabba, explains that G-d is giving the Jews a good piece of news:

...because all forty years that the Children of Israel were in the desert, the Canaanites hid treasures of gold in the walls of their houses, and through the plague of tzoraas on their houses (in which, in some cases, the house must be destroyed), the house would be destroyed and the present Jewish owner would thereby find the treasure.

The attitude of this Medrash is that having the tzoraas plague affecting your house is some type of good fortune or reward. How does this view of tzoraas jibe with the views on tzoraas of the house elsewhere in the Talmud?

"Tzoraas of the house is a punishment for stinginess..." (Yoma, Chapter 1)

"Tzoraas of the house comes as punishment for seven sins..." ('Erechin 16a)

Clearly, in these and other places in the Talmud, tzoraas of the house, and indeed all forms of tzoraas, are regarded as punishments. How do we resolve this contradiction?

The Korban of the Metzora — Why Bring Symbols of Your Sin?

To understand this apparent contradiction, let us look at the beginning of Parshas Metzora, which discusses the karbonos ("sacrifices") brought by the metzora when the tzoraas has gone and he has become tahor (ritually clean) again. The metzora brings two birds, a piece of cedar wood, string dyed red with a product made from worms, and some stalks of grass.

Rashi explains the symbolism: he brings the birds because tzoraas comes as punishment for gossiping (Lashon HaRah), which people thoughtlessly babble and chirp, just as a bird constantly chirps. Since tzoraas is also a punishment for arrogance, he brings wood from the tall and mighty cedar tree. Since the "cure" for tzoraas is to "lower oneself as the worm and the grass," he brings representatives of these species as well.

The Sefas Emes asks: If the cure for tzoraas is humility, I can understand why the person must bring symbols of humbleness as part of his offering, but why must he bring the birds and the cedarwood, the symbols of the sins that were his downfall? If anything, he should go out of his way to avoid any reference to the bad traits he is now trying to avoid!

Sin Transformed into Virtue

The Sefas Emes answers along the lines expressed in Yoma 86b. There, the Talmud states that for one who repents out of love for his Creator, his sins are transformed into virtues. I can understand a sin being forgiven, but how can a sin be converted into a virtue?

A person can achieve a degree of penance by "reforming" and turning away from his errant ways, henceforth blocking out some past aspect of his life (this is known as doing repentance out of fear of the Creator). But to achieve true repentance — "teshuva" in the full sense of the word, namely, a returning to one's source — how can you just excise a piece of your life? Instead, the person must somehow incorporate his past mistakes into a positive experience. Now that he has sinned and regretted it, he can feel a greater revulsion for the sin than he did to begin with, having experienced the negative effect the sin had on his own personality. In retrospect, then, his act of sin has become a stimulus to make him a better and higher person. This is what the Talmud means by saying that true repentance turns sin into virtue.

Similarly, the Sefas Emes says, for the metzora to achieve full forgiveness for the sins he was punished for, he must realize that his previous arrogance was instrumental in his now being a less conceited individual than he was before. This is why he must bring symbols of his former sins as part of his korbon offering.

On one level, then, we can now resolve the apparent contradiction in the attitude of the Talmud towards tzoraas of houses. While the plague of tzoraas of houses is the topic directly being referred to as a reward, it is only serving as a model and object lesson for all the plagues of life — all the pain, suffering, and difficulties that we all encounter in life. The Torah is saying that all the problems we face in life are ultimately for our own good, to make us into better and higher people than we were without the problems, by actualizing much of the potential that had lain dormant within ourselves — in the same way that the penitent can realize that his mistakes and follies were in reality powerful stimuli to his own personal development.

And to provide us with a very concrete example of this principle, the Torah selects tzoraas of the house — the tzoraas that seems to involve the greatest monetary loss of any tzoraas, the destruction of one's house. And it is literally through the "punishment" of his house being destroyed that he finds the great treasure that was hidden in its walls by the Canaanites — to show that ultimately, punishment and difficulty are also blessings.

The Collective Dimension — Spiritual Sensitivity as Gift

On a different level, the Sefas Emes has another way of understanding the reward/punishment paradox of tzoraas of houses. On this level, the reward or "good news" is a collective, rather than an individual, one.

As previously mentioned, the Ramban and Sforno both explain the tzoraas concept as something beyond the realm of ordinary nature. Ramban asks why we are "immune" from tzoraas in modern times, if tzoraas is a punishment for Lashon HaRa, gossip, egotism, selfishness, and the like — commodities that we are unfortunately not in short supply of. He answers that the ability of the Jews to be afflicted by tzoraas was a testament to their high moral fiber. While a bum on Skid Row can develop a cast iron stomach and tolerate anything that goes down his throat, someone accustomed to eating only the finest food will be adversely affected by food that's only slightly spoiled. The more refined one is, the more sensitive one is to impurities and coarseness.

The word "metzora" comes from the Hebrew words motzi rah — a manifestation of evil. For Lashon HaRa and the like to not only impinge on one's spiritual state, but even to manifest themselves on one's material existence — one's skin, clothing, or house — a society must be at a high spiritual level, indeed. In our times, Ramban writes, there is no tzoraas due to our own spiritual poverty. We are so steeped in sin that we are dulled to the effects and consequences of our mistakes, so that often we are barely even conscious of committing them, and certainly far from having these errors "breaking out" into our physical lives.

(In light of the above, perhaps we can understand why tzoraas is referred to with the word negah, rather than the more conventional word for plague, makeh — as in the Ten Plagues, the Makos. Makeh comes from the word "hitting," while Negah is related to the word for "touching." Tzoraas is best described as a Negah — a touching, or better yet, a sensitivity. It is only due to a sensitivity on one's part that the effects of his sins are made manifest not only on his own skin, but even on his inanimate clothing and house.)

What was the good news G-d was telling the Jews? What were the hidden treasures He was promising them? According to the Sefas Emes, G-d was telling them that even though they were entering the land of Canaan — the place where a highly decadent society dwelt — they had the ability to create a society of such holiness that not just their bodies, or clothing, but even their houses, the very essence of their material acquisitions, could be sensitized to sin to the extent of being "touched" by tzoraas.

The good news was that the Jewish people have the ability to tap a reservoir of potential for holiness — to "reveal hidden treasures" (or in Kabbalistic terminology, to "raise sparks of holiness") out of even the apparently most mundane aspects of life and the world. These are the true "hidden treasures": the ability of the Jewish people to broaden its horizons, to create a higher level of expectations, to raise their sensitivities to the point that they could actually create an environment in which telling gossip could cause a motzi rah of tzoraas to affect their houses.

Good Shabbos.

Colophon

Written by Pinchus Klahr ([email protected] / [email protected]), New York University, and posted to the Usenet newsgroup net.religion.jewish on April 23, 1985. Original Message-ID: [email protected].

Klahr is also the author of "Chanukah — The Miracle Within Nature," preserved elsewhere in this archive, which was likewise posted to net.religion.jewish in late 1985. Both essays are marked by the same qualities: close engagement with classical rabbinic commentary (Rashi, Ramban, Sforno, Sefas Emes), willingness to address apparent contradictions in the text, and a conclusion that reaches outward from the specific case to a universal principle of spiritual life.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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