Sazria-Mtsoyro /תזריע־מצרע

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.