Sazria-Mtsoyro, AIDS, and Covid / תזריע־מצרע, איידס, און קאָוויד

This is a weekly series of parsha dvarim written by a frum, atheist, transsexual anarchist. It's crucial in these times that we resist the narrative that Zionism owns Judaism. Our texts are rich—sometimes opaque, but absolutely teeming with wisdom and fierce debate. It's the work of each generation to extricate meaning from our cultural and religious inheritance. I aim to offer comment which is true to the source material (i.e. doesn't invert or invent meaning to make us more comfortable) and uses Torah like a light to reflect on our modern times.

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Content note: Disease, ableism, AIDS

This week, we read two parshas. Sazria opens with some laws of nidoh (ritual purity regarding sex and families) after childbirth and the mitsveh of the bris (circumcision) before moving on to tsoraas (also spelled tzaraath), the skin affliction traditionally translated as "leprosy".

Mtsoyro continues with the rituals on how to reenter communal Jewish life after being diagnosed with tsoraas, and what to do if the walls and stones of a house are diagnosed with plague. Discharge of semen and and menstrual blood, and sex, render us impure, and we're given more specifics on nidoh.

The bulk of the parsha concerns itself with the practice around diagnosing and isolating tsoraas. It's a long piece of poetry about lesions, white hairs, burns, and the depth of "uncleanliness". Phrases are repeated like mantras.

Tsoraas is a skin disease that we don't have any more. It's a spiritual affliction. The Midrash Rabbah and Rashi say that tsoraas comes only as a punishment for loshn-horeh—"evil tongue", or gossip/slander—with Miriam's tsoraas (later in Torah) as evidence. Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo says that it signified voluntary depravity. It's a Dorian Gray morality where our corrupted insides seep to the surface, unless you have a magic portrait in your attic.

People today are all kinds of depraved, in moral and immoral ways, but we don't have tsoraas.

"Unclean! Unclean!"

Only a Kohan can diagnose tsoraas, and the skin condition is not "impure" until it is diagnosed.

The first ritual for those diagnosed—before they're removed from the community—is to tear their clothes, uncover their head, and shout "טמא טמא“ or "Unclean! Unclean!" Is this to alert the rest of the community, in case their rent clothing and uncovered head (and the presence of the skin disease itself) isn't enough? Is the shouting for the benefit of the afflicted, to internalize a sense of dirtiness? There is no read on this that doesn't fuel stigma.

Ritual impurity is associated with the creation of life, and death. Contact with menstrual blood, semen, or corpses renders one unfit to appear before Hashem in the Miskhon or the Temple. Childbirth is seen as a gift (and childlessness a curse) but it still puts the birthing parent in a state of impurity. We do negl vasser every morning in order to re-purify ourselves because sleep is too close to death. Maimonides suggested that there are so many ways to be ritualistically defiled that hardly anyone is in a state of purity, and this is intentional—that we might remain in awe of contact with the Temple and not become desensitized through frequent visits.

Tohor (טהר) and tomey (טמא) are translated badly as "pure" and "impure". Christian hegemony has infused "purity" with morality. We could alternatively translate them as ritually "permissible" or "inadmissible". Theoretically, these are ritual statuses, not moral or value judgements.

But arguments insisting that ritual impurity is a morally neutral state are undermined by the centuries of speculation of tsoraas as a punishment. People with skin lesions are not only quarantined but shunned and expelled.

Contagion is not treated as morally neutral. There is an implication that tsoraas requires quarantine because it's contagious, but that's not explicit. There is concern with whether the tsoraas has spread and the infection grown, and with natural fibres that have touched an infected person. In Torah it says that if someone who is ritually impure can spread that impurity through physical contact. If they spit on someone else, the impurity spreads to them until they bathe, wash their clothes, and evening arrives (15:8). If it's a spritual affliction, why are we worried about physical transmission?

AIDS, known in its early days as GRID (Gay-related immune deficiency), was a mysterious "gay cancer". People didn't understand what it was and the homophobic pubic went into a moral panic. People believed that AIDS could be transmitted through spit, physical contact, or simply being too near someone who might have it.

Good AIDS and Bad AIDS

Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) lesions marked AIDS patients as afflicted with a modern tsoraas. KS lesions were difficult to hide and their social and moral meaning was clear: the patient is an outcast who should be quarantined lest they infect the healthy population. (Of course, most people are not willing to interrogate the obvious instability in a category like "healthy". The body is fragile. All of us can easily become sick and disabled and dead.)

The link between tzara’at and HIV becomes even more vivid for me when I recall Kaposi’s sarcoma skin lesions as a common marker of AIDS in the early years of the epidemic. Although much less common today, in the 1980s the purple skin eruptions of KS functioned as an identifiable symbol of the disease, visually marking those with AIDS as if with a tattoo. Those with active KS lesions often went to great lengths to cover the eruptions, acutely aware of the mixture of intolerance, fear, pity and shame this visual signifier of their disease sparked in others. Just as the metzora in Parashat Tazria is to visually mark him or herself and call out “tamei, tamei!” (contaminated, contaminated!) when confronting other people, so did people with AIDS metaphorically “wear” the scarlet letter of their affliction in the epidemic’s early years.
—Gregg Drinkwater, "Tazria-Metzora: Torah for World AIDS Day", 2012

[Sex] cannot be considered just a coupling; it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past. "So remember when a person has sex, they're not just having it with that partner, they're having it with everybody that partner had it with for the past ten years," ran an endearingly gender-vague pronouncement made in 1987 by the Secretary of Heath and Human Services, Dr. Otis R. Bowen. AIDS reveals all but long-term monogamous sex as promiscuous (therefore dangerous) and also as deviant, for all heterosexual relations are also homosexual ones, once removed.
—Susan Sontag, "AIDS and Its Metaphors", 1988

The disease justifies the condemnation of the behavior as deviant. The latent (and not so latent) homophobia is lauded as spiritual enlightment. Bigotry blooms when we associate the sick with contagion, impurity, and dirtiness.

Jewish leaders have gotten it wrong for centuries. Immanuel Jakobovits—Chief Rabbi of the UK 1967–1991 i.e. during the flourishing and decimation of gay culture, halakhik medical authority, and close friend of Margaret Thatcher—advocated for the genetic engineering to prevent the births of queers and argued that "more important than clean needles are clean conduct and clean thoughts."

Ryan White (1971–1990) became a poster child for AIDS activism in the 1980s. He was a hemophiliac who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion, and was diagnosed with AIDS in 1984 and expelled from his school as a young teenager shortly after. His doctors insisted that he posed no health risk to his peers or teachers, but the public stigma and misunderstanding around the disease prevailed despite him having what Chris Morris satirized on Brass Eye in 1997 as "good AIDS" (in contrast to "bad AIDS" that was contracted through sex or drug use).

Moralizing disease is a bad project. It shifts our focus away from preventing and treating illness and improving quality of life—that is, maintaining human dignity. We should never suggest that someone "deserves" to get sick, even if they are a morally rotten person, because our judgement on them extends to all other people who share the affliction. We shouldn't carve sick populations into groups of "deserving" and "undeserving" patients based on what we perceive as risky behavior or bad character. What are the implications for Covid patients and treatment programs if we decide that Donald Trump deserved to die from Covid for being a Covid-denier and actively promoting bad health practices? How does this condemnation, this punishment, help sick people? Our aim as leftists, as people who value human life and dignity, should be to eradicate disease, not to punitively weild it against our enemies. I admit that I lack the imagination for real justice which does not involve the swift death of our oppressors, but this is my failing. We should try harder.

"I took a certain pleasure in informing the gender clinic that even though their program told me I could not live as a Gay man, it looks like I'm going to die like one."

— Gay trans man, AIDS patient and activist Lou Sullivan (1951–1991)

UNAIDS reports that, as of 2023, some 42.3 million people have died of AIDS since the beginning of the plague. I cannot comprehend that scale of loss, but when I look at the work of people like Lou Sullivan, whose advocacy for the rights of trans men was cut short by his early death, it's clear that we are still suffering from the absence of an entire generation.

Khevra Kedushas (burial societies) are the garbage men of Jewish ritual. It's incredibly important work and society couldn't function with health or dignity without it, but most people don't want to do it. I think that a certain comfort with, or at least sober acceptance of, death is a mark of maturity. If you're not spending time around people who are dying, or under threat of death, then you're not spending time with the most vulnerable people in our society.

We condemn other people because it reassures us. We lie to ourselves: we won't get sick if we're good. We should not seek to theologically justify the suffering of other people, which I believe includes spiritually explaining our own suffering because we are not unique in our sins nor the ways we suffer. A Covid patient who blames themselves for getting sick impliates all other patients with their theology.

It is unequivocally wrong to see any suffering or illness, including tsoraas, as a punishment. It is an act of bravery to admit that we are scared and confused—seeking explanation for why some people get sick or experience hardship—but refusing to condemn them. Our tradition demands that we empathize and work to rectify injustice. We should never be theologically comfortable with suffering.

Post-script on PrEP

We still treat STIs as a moral failing: promiscuity punished. I let random men fuck me in the dark rooms of gay saunas and sex parties. I get tested every three months. Sometimes I get an infection, and I treat it. Frum men have told me that my conversion is invalid because I intended to violate a Torah mitsveh when I got in the mikveh. It's hard to accept the divinity of a text—and the morality of a culture—that condemns me for gay sex.

If you are "at risk" for HIV, consider PrEP: pre-exposure prophylaxis, an HIV prevention drug. (It does not prevent any other STIs; you should still use barriers like condoms and post-exposure medication like DoxyPEP. Getting tested every 3 months is also a great preventative measure.)

Broadly speaking, people are "at risk" if they engage in behavior or hold identities associated with the disease: men who have sex with men (including trans men); trans women who have sex with men; anyone who has sex with trans women or queer men; sex workers; intravenous drug users; people who have HIV+ partners; have anonymous sex; have sex without condoms or other barriers; have been exposed to HIV in the past; and have contracted an STI in the past 6 months.

Refilling my PrEP prescription connects me to the men who took AZT—the first antiretroviral drug proven affective in treating AIDS, approved by the FDA in 1987—sitting at their kitchen tables organizing their pills to manage the degenerative effects of AIDS. PrEP means I can have anonymous sex the way I imagine gay men did before the AIDS crisis. It means I won't get sick and die like all those people before me; that I will live and love and grow and teach and make art and contribute to our culture in the ways that they weren't able to due to medical neglect and early deaths. PrEP makes a post-AIDS future feel possible. Taking that pill is an almost spiritual practice for me.

We've lived through several plagues. Get your MPox vaccinations if you haven't already, especially if you're a man who fucks men. Wear a mask in crowds and low/no ventilation spaces to reduce Covid transmission, or if you're feeling a little sick. This is how we take care of ourselves and each other today.