tazria-metzora-achrei: אין אחד אלא דאגה
hello friends,
A couple introductory caveats.
I will be using the words "pure" and "impure" in this drash. Often we try to avoid these, since they carry connotations other than levitical ritual purity. But I also think that avoiding them sometimes elides the way that, historically, those connotations have also been part of Jewish practice. However, I do mean by "purity" an unmixed state, not a comment on worth, value, or holiness. I am also speaking of a purity of experience/expectation, not purity of individual human bodies (my hottest jewish take: only you can decide if you are ritually pure).
I will be talking about COVID and the utter nonsense of our current strategies in the US. I want to be very clear: in many Jewish writings on Vayikra and COVID, the impurity discussed in Tazria-Metzora is likened to having COVID or being suspected of having COVID, and the expulsion of the impure from camp is likened to isolating while waiting for a test. This is not my viewpoint. Quite the contrary: what we are doing with COVID today is asking some people (e.g. immunocompromised people) to accept indefinite expulsion from our camp so that those who might have COVID but are otherwise healthy can freely participate.
As always, these are just my opinions, and what do I know.
We've spent the last couple weeks reading and thinking about purity. One of the senses of purity in the last two Torah portions has been the technical sense of an unmixed state. In Tazria, for example, it is taught that someone with an affliction covering their entire body is pure, just as someone with no affliction is pure (Vayikra 13:13). It is only in mixture that impurity arises.
The next portion (which we will read after Pesach) is named אחרי/after, and there's a great purity to afterness. When we are in the middle of something, or in the before of something, there is uncertainty. There is a kind of mixture, since we don't know what will happen. But after it is over, however we feel about it, there is a purity to the experience: at least that's done, one way or another. We can see this in the language of purity -- the word טהרה/pure is also used to describe the clearness of the sky after the rainy season (Berakhos 59a via Jastrow). At last, no more mixture of weather, no more anxiety of living with a mixture of outcomes. It is no accident that the gematria of אחרי/after is the same as that of טהרה/pure.
This anxiety is deeply present in the last two parshas. When someone appears to be impure in one way or another, they must be brought (without their consent!) before the hereditary purity cops, who then determine if they are impure and in what way. If the person is actually impure, they do not need to isolate because while they themselves are impure, the purity of "after" has been achieved: we know, one way or another, what has happened (Vayikra 13:11). If the determination cannot be made immediately, the person is isolated: the purity of "after", of knowing, is achieved by placing the present in limbo until the decision can be made one way or the other. In other words, we achieve the purity of "after", the unmixed oneness of knowing what has happened, by forcibly removing the impure mixture of possibilities of the present.
But the numerical value of one/אחד is in fact the same as דאגה/worry, which only exists in the prior uncertain state of mixture. The oneness of after, it appears, is an illusion: oneness only exists within anxiety, true pureness only exists within the impure. Rebbe Nachman used to say that he had no problem believing in the world to come (the world of "after"), it was this world (the world of דאגה) he had trouble believing in (Likutei Moharan II 119). But, as we have seen, it is only in this world, in this time, with all its confusions and worries and impure mixed-up-ness, that we can find אחד/one.
Aharon selects two goats in the next portion, as identical to one another as possible (Chullin 11a on Vayikra 16:7-8). He then chooses one at random to be a sin offering to haShem, and the other as atonement to send to Azazel. The "after" is clear for the sin-goat: it is killed and offered as a sin-offering. The "after" is less clear for the atonement-goat. This one is left alive, but Or haChaim, our old companion in this newsletter, observes that after a certain point in the portion it is never referred to again as alive (even if it has not yet been clearly killed). It is in some kind of mixed state, some kind of living death, sent to the uncertainty of the wilderness (Or haChaim on Vayikra 16:10).
Atonement, it is clear, does not happen in an unmixed state. Atonement does not happen in the purity of afterward, but in the impure mixture and anxiety (and oneness) of the now. The two goats, after all, are identical except for their fate. And possibly their sense of humor (the rishonim never specify). And while atonement is between us and haShem (and Azazel...), the same is also true of teshuvah, of repairing our relationships with each other. In a midrash on the Tower of Babel story, Rabbi Aba bar Kahana taught that there is no "and now" except teshuvah (Bereishis Rabbah 38:9). As I've argued previously, I believe the reverse is also true: there is no teshuva except "and now" (my expanded commentary on Vayeshev). There is no possibility for repair with each other or atonement with haShem if we try to live in the false purity of "after".
There's lots of places to go here, but I do (content warning) want to talk a little about covid.
In the last month, I have been watching many communities I've been a part of changing their approaches to the pandemic. Some are dropping mask requirements, some losing remote-only events, and some are switching off remote participation entirely. Even those keeping events hybrid have often relegated online attendance to a viewing-only experience. (For me, attending such an event remotely is worse than not attending at all).
These changes are not responses to an actual change in pandemic risk, but to a desire for the purity of "after". Masks, for example, are dropped not because they aren't effective or because the epidemiological data indicate it is safe to, but because they are a נגע-דאגה, a mark that we still live in the messy impure anxious present.
This desired purity of "after", as discussed above, is an illusion. The only reason this worked "before" was by ignoring the absence of those who, even before COVID, could not participate in our in-person communities. The only way this will work for you "after" is if you are happy to force others to accept a lack of community that you are unwilling to accept for yourself. At least in Tazria-Metzora there is a time limit. It appears that some of our communities, that our society as a whole, is happy to expel people for the rest of their lives. This kares, this cutting-off, is a deeper wound, a deeper נגע, than the precautions we are trying to desparately to avoid.
It is a mitzvah to include the sick in community, it is a mitzvah to protect life, and instead I am watching communities expel the sick from camp or ask them to risk their lives to participate.
Masks, online events, and truly hybrid communal events are possible, with work and love. I know this because I am also a part of communities that are working incredibly hard to make meaningful online community or to unify online and in-person groups. We can survive the נגע (mark/touch/illness) of anxiety with ענג (softness/tenderness/joy).
The other option, to create an artificial purity of afterward by cutting off any member of the community that stands in its way (or relegating them to a second-class status "on the screen") is unacceptable.
אין אחד אלא דאגה. There is no אחד except דאגה. There is no atonement in "after", no teshuvah possible except in the now.
Shavua tov,
ada