Tazria-Metzora
What do you hear?
Reflection by Or HaLev Program Director Zac Newman:
"This week’s double portion Tazria-Metzora details afflictions and impurities that can affect skin, clothing and buildings. When a priest pronounces an impurity of the skin, the affected person is sent outside the community for seven days. We are told that there are times when we are clean, and times when we are unclean.
As I read it through, I begin to notice tension creeping across my body and mind. Muscles flinch and tighten. Thoughts pick up pace. I am straining to explain what I am reading, questioning its relevance, and feeling conflicted.
In time, my practice catches up with me. I realise that I am off kilter. I turn to what tends to support me back into composure: conscious breathing, feeling the expanse of the ground beneath me, letting the muscles ease with the out breath. I allow myself to be uncertain, unsure of whether and how to make sense of this Torah. Compassion comes, for myself in the midst of this quandary: desiring to connect and align with ancient wisdom, and desiring also to be authentic and have integrity here and now.
In a softer space, when I am no longer striving to fit it all together - when I breathe deeply in my uncertainty - well, then, after a while, I begin to hear more beautiful possibilities from this week’s parshiyot. They suggest themselves in fragments rather than full sentences, more poetry than prose. I would miss them if I insisted on complete explanations.
I hear the vulnerability of our bodies. The impermanence of the objects we rely on day-to-day. The deep benefits of time spent apart. In the suggestion that these physical and material afflictions are God-given conditions, I hear the inextricable nature of our spiritual lives with the manifest world.
In Metzora we meet the repeated refrain ‘impure until the evening’. At first, my mind snags at the word impure. When I unclench and allow some honest ambivalence around purity and impurity, I begin to hear the phrase in another way too. I notice that it is precisely the evening when purification is completed. I hear the healing power of darkness.
When we unhook from reactivity and judgmentalism, we find more room within, and we are free to choose our own way. We are available to receive without coercion the insights and connections which are whispered to us from other eras, underneath what is jarring and different, or through it.
May we be blessed with the clarity and confidence to discern what to sustain and carry forwards, and what to release. May we find wisdom in all directions."