Adult B Mitzvah Parshat Metzora: "Leakage of life-force" April 5th, 2022

"Types of mildew or mold in fabrics that cause erosion and destruction were yet another manifestation of the same leakage of life-force that is the source of all impurity in P and are therefore also "tzaraat". From the Jewish Study Bible, comment on Leviticus, Chapter 13, verses 47-58.

Societies dread invasion, disintegration, and inundation, hence the extremities and borders of our nations, and our bodies are loci of concern, places where integrity might be breached and order over-thrown… Human skin is a long continuous boundary that demarcates the most basic of borders, the border between the human body and the world outside it. Breaches in the skin [such as those of צרעת] are attacks on the body’s wholeness. They leave the raw flesh vulnerable to the external world or display flesh taken over by externalities…
Rachel Adler, “Those Who Turn Away Their Faces,” in Healing Through the Jewish Imagination, William Cutter ed (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2007), p. 145.

Tazria begins its treatment of צרעת with the diagnosis of צרעת that afflicts the skin, then repeats this diagnostic focus with respect to the bodily extremities, the hair and the head; moves outward from there to clothing; and then still further outward, to the walls of one’s house. The next parasha, Metzora, provides the details for how to purify each one of these concentric circles of צרעת in the same order.
And then, as if to create a rhetorical or literary skin to reinforce the physical and ritual boundaries of purity, Leviticus 14 begins and ends almost identically: The words זֹאת תִּהְיֶה תּוֹרַת הַמְּצֹרָע, open the chapter; the words זֹאת תּוֹרַת הַצָּרָעַת mark the end.
This rhetorical structure—admittedly a typical P structure—mirrors the function of skin as a container or a border, one that helps keep insides in and outsides out.
From, The Skin of the Metzora and the Heart of the Messiah
Prof. Rabbi Wendy Zierler
https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-skin-of-the-metzora-and-the-heart-of-the-messiah

1. Function of Ritual
   

Ritual and the Dangers of a Spiritual Life
Rabbi Rachel Sabath Beit-Halachmi
14.06.2013
What can ritual do? Everything. ……..Ritual can purify the impure, turn an impure person into a married person ready for marital relations, determine whether a woman is guilty of adultery, and even make the presence of death somehow vanish. Most of the time, it depends on water-- in the right amount, the right kind, and at the right time. Water purification rituals are still essential in the most primal areas of our Jewish human existence; without ritual immersions in water, it wouldn't be possible to eat, to have marital sex or honorably prepare a dead body for burial. We need ritual cleansing with water in order to uphold the observances of kashrut, marital sexual relations, and the honoring of the deceased. Water brings us closer to God while we wrestle with the most complex issues of what it means to be alive.
Just sprinkle some water or blood here or there –according to this week's Torah portion Hukkat (Numbers 19-22)—and that which was once impure becomes pure and that person who was necessarily taken outside the camp is allowed back in. Even that person or object which was touched by death can become pure again. "He who touches the corpse of any human being shall be unclean for seven days.” (Num. 19:11) But thereafter? "And you shall wash your clothes on the seventh day, and you shall be clean,” (Num. 31:24) With ritual washing –today performed usually in a mikveh, a ritual bath, or through the washing of one's hands-- a person can become clean again from all kinds of impurities. Such a system is a powerful ritual management not only of real public health concerns, but also of the fear of death itself. Coming near death is not death itself, although it may feel that way to us, and so God commands that we ritually purify ourselves before entering back into the larger community of humanity.
For the entire essay see here: https://www.hartman.org.il/ritual-and-the-dangers-of-a-spiritual-life/

2. Anthropological Perspectives
From, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge Classics), First copyright 1966.
by Mary Douglas
…...but Van Gennep had more sociological insight. He saw society as a house with rooms and corridors in which passage from one to another is dangerous. Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others. The danger is controlled by ritual which precisely separates him from his old status, segregates him for a time and then publicly declares his entry to his new status. Not only is transition itself dangerous, but also the rituals of segregation are the most dangerous phase of the rites. It seems that if a person has no place in the social system and is therefore a marginal being, all precaution against danger must come from others. He cannot help his abnormal situation. This is roughly how we ourselves regard marginal people in a secular, not a ritual context. Social workers in our society, concerned with the after-care of ex-prisoners, report a difficulty of resettling them in steady jobs, a difficulty which comes from the attitude of society at large. A man who has spent any time ‘inside’ is put permanently ‘outside’ the ordinary social system. With no rite of aggregation which can definitively assign him to a new position he remains in the margins, with other people who are similar credited with unreliability, unteachability, and all the wrong social attitudes. The same goes for persons who have entered institutions for the treatment of mental disease. So long as they stay at home their peculiar behaviour is accepted. Once they have been formal]y classified as abnormal, the very same behaviour is counted intolerable. A report on a Canadian project in ‘95 to change the attitude to mental ill-health suggests that there is a threshold of tolerance marked by entry to a mental hospital. If a person has never moved out of society into this marginal state, any of his eccentricities are comfortably tolerated by his neighbours. Behaviour which a psychologist would class at once as pathological is commonly dismissed as ‘Just a quirk’.