Tazria-Metzora

Terrible Trouble: An Intertextual Teaching

Rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan

Metzora is the biblical word for a person who has tzara'at. No one really knows what tzara'at is - only that Torah says people, houses, tools, and clothing can all be afflicted with it. The word metzora combines the Hebrew words tzar, which means "enemy" or "trouble" and ra, which means "bad." Literally, the metzora is a person suffering from terrible trouble.

Torah says that the metzora "sits alone at the city's gate" and "calls out 'tamei, tamei' – unclean, unclean!" (Vayikra/Leviticus 13:45-46) Traditionally, these verses are considered instructions from the priest to the metzora about how to behave while afflicted. But these instructions can also be understood as a description of how one feels when suffering from terrible trouble: alienated, lonely, outcast.

Eichah, the Book of Lamentations for the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, describes the terrible outer and inner trouble of the city and its surviving remnant. "How does the city sit alone!" (1:1). "'Turn away, tamei!' they called out." (3:15) The city and its struggling people are each a metzora: alienated, lonely, outcast.

Today's haftarah (Melachim/II Kings 7:3-7:20) tells of four Israelite men, each a metzora with no will to live, who during a war discover a military camp abandoned by the enemy. They loot the camp, then remember that looting is unethical, and instead bring important military intelligence to their king. Terrible trouble, the story teaches, is not permanent. Times of bare survival can give way to times of prosperity, ethics, unity, and strength.

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