Metzorá 5776 - Shabat HaGadol - English

By Rabbi Dario Feiguin

B´nei Israel Congregation, Costa Rica

Lashon Hara 

Purity and impurity are two biblical categories which can seem quite odd for us nowadays.  In fact, they have nothing to do with hygiene; with how clean we are on the outside, or with the perfume we use.  Neither are they related to the clothes we wear, the make-up and production we struggle to acquire, or the quality of our shoes.

The purity and impurity categories which appear in the Torah, in the Book of Va-yikra, have to do with a more substantial dimension: Ethics.

According to our sages, it is there that true cleanliness manifests or not, be it the one related with religious precepts or pertaining to the most basic feelings of human beings.

It is interesting to notice that the Torah begins with what we ingest.  Something like “that which we put inside ourselves”, from the outside.

Two weeks ago we read about the laws of Kashrut and the permitted and forbidden foods.  Since last week, with Parashat Tazria, we started reading and trying to understand that which comes from within ourselves towards the outside.

How we should react before some natural phenomena, morally neutral, so they are recorded as pure, from our consciousness and through our ethics.  Starting with blood, semen and body fluids, up to the awesome and unexplainable experience of creating a new life and giving birth.

None of these episodes could be considered obvious, or go unnoticed.  It was essential to raise awareness about them, and enfold them in a religious and spiritual framework.  In those early days of Judaism, this development translated into korbanot, offerings, in an attempt to do Karov, that is, get closer to God.

The same happened with diseases, especially with those easily recognizable such as skin conditions and rashes, mainly leprosy.

Human beings were understood as a psycho-physical-spiritual Unity, not as separate strongholds.  And in all likelihood, the Kohen was not only priest, but physician and psychoanalyst as well; a sort of Shaman or witch doctor, of the few still around.

But for rabbinical Judaism, which interpreted, developed and consolidated the first revolutionary ideas of the Torah, there was nothing more ethically valuable, among the things that could come from the inside to the outside, as words.

They understood Metzora, literally leprous, as MOTZI SHEM RA, the talebearer or slanderer; the person who spreads gossip.

They learned this from Miriam, Moses’ sister, who was affected by leprosy after speaking lashon hara about her brother, regarding an affaire he had with an Ethiopian woman.

Miram became sickly white as snow for spreading unnecessary words, be them good or bad but out of place, about Moses and this other black woman.

Kosher refers not just to what we put inside our bodies.  Not only that which comes from the outside can make us unclean.  Kosher is also that which comes from within, especially what we say, and also what we do not say.

Lashen hara Is a moral disease which, in the words of CHAZAL,  affects three people:  the sick person who utters it, the useful idiot who spreads it, and the person or persons to whom it refers to.

As any illness it must be cured, from the medical perspective, the psychological damage, and the search for meaning.  The problem occurs when it spreads out, as infectious as the biblical leprosy, with no one doing anything to stop it.

Let us start at home.  There’s a wonderful and very cheap remedy that can cancel out this plague.  You know what it is?  To remain silent.

Let us begin by keeping quiet about whatever is irrelevant.  Because sometimes it is indeed important to speak out, as when they wanted us to believe, during the time of the military dictatorship in Argentina, that Silence was equal to health, when it was actually equal to complicity.  Like when we turn a blind eye before injustice, lack of freedom, poverty and discrimination, in our home and in the streets of some neighborhoods in San Jose, Bogota, or any other city in the world.

The TAMEI and the TAHOR, the clean and unclean, are measured through that prism: things that are not seen nor said only on the outside.

The art of Marcel Marceau, who passed away in 2007, always fascinated me.  His marvelous art, even in his old age, was being able to say so much without emitting a single sound.

Furthermore, this genial artist, born from a Jewish family and survivor of the Shoah, left us an enormous life lesson, matching the Jewish interpretation of leprosy and gossip: to speak less, and say and do more.

Shabbat Shalom!

Rabbi Dario Feiguin
Congregation B’nei Israel, Costa Rica