Metzora



Metzora and Mitzrayim

In ancient Israel, a person might find himself or herself withdrawn from social life for may reasons: illness, a new baby, mourning -- any great life change. When people rejoined their regular lives, they did so with ceremony and rituals of welcome.



Parshat Metzora describes the ritual of return for a person newly recovered from a specific illness, tzara'at, an outbreak of the skin disease psoriasis. The returning person comes to the mishkan (sanctuary) or Temple and participates in an offering ceremony using red colored items. In the priestly system, the color red symbolizes life. The returning person then goes home and enacts rituals of rebirth - bathing, laundering clothing, shaving off hair to allow new growth. Finally, the person is formally welcomed back to public life.



Metzora is a perfect parashah to read as we enter the Pesach (Passover) season. At Pesach, we symbolically re-enact the Israelites' re-entry into self-determining lives. We mark the moment when they left slavery in Mitzrayim
(Egypt) and entered freedom - including responsibility for creating new ethical, political, religious and economic systems. We participate in a ceremony where we see, smell, discuss, and taste items that represent the whole spectrum of life's challenges: from the bitter to the sweet; from the plain to the sophisticated; from the natural to the artful. 



The exodus from Mitzrayim and Parshat Metzora are connected linguistically. Both Hebrew words come from the root tzar (narrow, troubled ). Both give us the opportunity to reflect on the difficult places in our inner and outer lives, and on how we might see our way clear to freedom, responsibility, and life renewed.

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