BY MOVING FROM a state of ritual impurity to one of ritual purity, the everchanging human body serves as the index for the transformation of identity. The person departing from the state of m’tzora (a person with tzaraat, conventionally translated as a “leper”) follows about ten steps that separate the ritually pure from the ritually impure state. The spectrum between the pure and the impure becomes apparent in the gradations of being outside the camp, then inside the camp but outside one’s tent, and finally inside the community and inside the home. That the ritually impure state is transitional becomes apparent in the time-bound nature of each stage. The body passes through the various stages and is likely to cross several borders between ritually pure and impure over the course of its existence.
As the body undergoes the permutations of ritual purity and impurity, the impure body is sometimes exiled—but not abandoned to its exile. The appearance of a priest outside the camp (14:3) signals that exile is ephemeral and that restoration will begin. No particular priestly category fixes the body, but rather it moves through a full range of categories. This sense of the body as changeable and the potential reversibility of its status are what underlie prophetic notions that sinful actions can be retracted and a dire fate averted.
Focus on the body emphasizes the changes undergone by the self in the process of becoming another self. Signs on the body gauge identity and mark transformation. When the sick are healed, their bodies bear the proof. Yet one’s body is not only an indicator of change but also a vessel of memory. Illness and trauma are remembered by nerves, muscles, and scars. The body that gives birth will forever maintain a link with its offspring. The body attests to change as well as to the indelibility of experience. Therefore descriptions of identity, predicated as they are on the language of body, convey the tension between the possibility of change and the integrity of forms.
—Rachel Havrelock