blogs/brentspodek

Two lepers denied entrance to town, 14th century, Vinzenz von Beauvais

Parshat Tazria-Metzora

It's hard to know what to do with the wretched of the earth.

Sometimes, the strongest impulse is to draw them close and tend their wounds. We, the comfortable, see the hungry and ill and want to right every wrong they have suffered. Sometimes, we really do want to throw open our doors and invite all who are hungry to come and eat.

Other times, however, we don't. We are overwhelmed by the suffering which the unlucky endure. We see the homeless and the sick and we want to keep our distance from the painful disorder of their lives. Their suffering reminds us that our comfortable lives could be overturned in a moment and we prefer to keep that disturbing idea at arm's length.

The rabbis of the Talmud however, recognize these contradictory impulses of compassion and disgust when they consider the leper who must be put outside the camp, certainly one of the most wretched characters of the Torah. The parshah of Tazria-Metzora is full of characters who suffer from frightful skin diseases and suggests all manner of incantations and salves and offerings to rehabilitate these unfortunate characters, but ultimately the vilest of them have to leave society and live outside, where they don't pose a threat to everyone else.

The Torah (Lev 13:45) demands that an incorrigible leper must publicly declare his wretchedness by running through the community screaming "Impure!! Impure!!" The rabbis of the Talmud (Moed Katan 5a) ask why someone so afflicted should have to compound his shame and make a spectacle of himself. Rabbi Abahu, perhaps speaking for our impulse to make sure our car doors are locked when we travel through a bad neighborhood, says it is so we, the healthy, can protect ourselves from him. Seemingly cursed, this man threatens our healthy and ordered lives and needs to be kept at a distance.

But the Talmud, which knows that life's complex questions are not easily answered, contains another voice as well. Another teacher, speaking for our impulse to cry when we see a person sleeping on the street, says the leper announces his shame so the public will pray for him. This teacher hears the cry of the wretched and knows the miserable aren't to be feared, but loved.

The Talmud, which tries to capture the fluid and contradictory nature of human existence, lets both teachings endure. Both compassion and fear stand, in the text as in our hearts, intermingled responses to the miserable.

But while the rabbis of the Talmud acknowledge our contradictory responses to suffering, the Haftarah (II Kings 7:20) subtly announces its preference. This week's Haftarah opens with four lepers who have been put outside the city of Samaria, which is besieged to the point that some of its inhabitants have turned to cannibalism to survive. With no access to food or medicine, the lepers are left to wonder if their death will come from hunger, illness or violence when suddenly one asks the other, "Why should we sit here, waiting to die? Let's go over to the besieging Aramean army who will either give us scraps of food or kill us on the spot. We have nothing to lose."

The four lepers set off and discover that unexpectedly, the besieging Aramean soldiers have abandoned their camp, leaving their stockpiles and supplies for anyone who might want them. The lepers feast like kings and then, satiated and armed, the return to Samaria, not to take vengeance against the city that left them to die, but to inform the Samarians that the siege is over.

In the span of a day, the lepers are transformed from the weak to the powerful. In the morning, they had nothing, not even a reason to live, and by nightfall, they had the knowledge to save the once mighty city of Samaria. No doubt, they also had two competing impulses, one to reach out to those who suffered, and one to abandon the city and let its inhabitants reap what they had sown. But while they might have felt both impulses, they acted on the better one.

Perhaps the lepers know that when fortunes change, so do responsibilities. When they were abandoned, they didn't owe anything to anyone, certainly not to the city which was willing to let them die in order to try and save itself. But when the lepers left the Aramean camp, they left laden with food and wine and stockpiles of silver and gold. In this new condition of plenty, their responsibilities changed. The inhabitants of Samaria were dying and the lepers would have committed a great evil if they had not informed the city that deliverance was at hand. (II Kings 6:29)

It could be that the Talmud offers two possibilities for responding to suffering for the two different sets of circumstances embodied in the haftorah - one response which was legitimate for the city's residents, who were operating from a posture of fear and self-preservation, and another for the lepers who unexpectedly found themselves in comfortable circumstances.

Like the lepers, many Jews came to America fleeing frightful circumstances - pogroms, the Holocaust, totalitarian governments in eastern Europe. Many of us came with practically nothing and were rightly focused on our own survival. But now, in a turnaround scarcely less dramatic than the lepers' reversal of fortune, we, as a community, are very comfortable.

The lepers who returned to Samaria recognized that when their fortunes changed, so did their responsibilities. So have ours. There was a time when it was legitimate for Jews to be focused on only on our own survival. But now that we are considerably more comfortable than we once were, we have responsibilities we didn't when we were the lepers of the world. The desperately poor in our country and around the world suffer now in way that many Jews once did, but mercifully, few do any more. The lepers, who recognized how their responsibilities changed when they became wealthy, challenge those of us who are at least as comfortable as they were to be at least as righteous.