“There are a few among us — psychoanalysts have encountered them — who are blessed or cursed with a strange imperviousness to the unpleasantness of self-knowledge. Their lies to themselves are so convincing that they are never unmasked.”
— Janet Malcolm
“ . . . so there it was at last, the tiny, luminous nugget of truth that had lain buried all those years under a mountain of . . . interlocking lies . . . ”
— Louise Kehoe
On its face, this portion is Leviticus at its most inaccessible. Ugly lesions and discolorations appear on a person’s body. The victim turns to the priest. Based on the criteria laid down in last week’s portion, the priest knows whether this disfigurement is a sign of disease, requiring medical treatment, or a sign of ritual impurity. If the latter, the priest banishes the victim from all contact with society.
Depending on various changes in the victim’s physical condition, he remains in enforced isolation for up to two weeks. Then he goes through a mortifying purification ritual. Finally, he is is readmitted to society.
What can this possibly mean?
We have here a graphic picture of the powerful grip of denial. Only a psychological framework brings coherence to the extremes of cosmetic chaos, social stigma, and ritual mortification. Only hammer blows to the body and the spirit alike elicit that most simple and most difficult of human responses, the opposite of denial: self-knowledge. I see myself. I erred. Disfigurement and isolation — lesions, discoloration, ostracism — plague this portion’s primary actor, the victim of all this physical and spiritual pain, the metzora.
For centuries, the metzora was commonly translated “the leper” and his ostracism was conceived to be medical quarantine. Rabbi Samson R. Hirsch notices that by conventional wisdom and translation, the symptoms of the metzora and the conditions of the leper do not jibe.
For example, upon evidence of true leprosy, a leper is medically quarantined to prevent contagion, but Leviticus’ metzora, with the spread of symptoms over his entire body, is freed from isolation; and with the healing of certain symptoms, is subjected to isolation (13:12-14). Clearly, the enforced isolation of the metzora is not due to contagion.
Rabbi Hirsch devotes several pages to a detailed analysis of the differences between leprosy and the Levitical debility.
The metzora, therefore, is not a leper. The physical symptoms of the metzora result from a spiritual disease, not a physical one. The metzora is bodily punished for sins of the soul; his enforced solitude is a spiritual solution to sin and its markings.
In a phrase: the metzora’s disease is punishment. With this, the inaccessibility of Leviticus reaches its climax. Even those who regard disease as a punishment from G-d for a spiritual failing do not generally link a specific disease to a specific failing. But Leviticus asserts a one-on-one linkage. The metzora has a specific disease, which is G-d’s punishment for his specific failing.
What can this possibly mean?
The spiritual failing of the metzora is a loose tongue. Etymologically, the Talmud notes, metzora can mean “a person who falsifies another’s reputation” (Arachin 15b). When the First Temple stood, G-d punished derogatory words, talebearing and slander with temporary disfigurement. This required not a “quarantine,” which would imply a medical treatment for a medical problem, but enforced isolation, which implies a spiritual treatment for a spiritual problem. Why such an extreme punishment? Why body blows? Why social ostracism, objective stigma, extreme loneliness? Why? Because of the powerful grip of denial.
A loose tongue damages another’s reputation. It can also undermine a person’s peace of mind and even cost him his job. A loose tongue isolates husband from wife, and friend from friend (Rashi, 13:46). The Torah’s punishment of the gossip is primarily isolation; this gives the gossip a taste of his own medicine. He experiences that which he made others suffer: separation from society. Feeling the devastation of isolation, he will not soon slander again, not isolate one person from another.
So runs the logic. It is true, up to a point. Question: Why is experiential punishment not applied universally?
If one robs, for example, why not poverty for the punishment?
If one inflicts injury, why is the perpetrator not similarly inflicted?
Analogous punishments for each ethical or social violation of the Torah could readily be devised, but the Torah does not do so. The metzora is a special case. Why is denial so powerful in the case of a loose tongue that it needs extreme countermeasures to pierce its shield?
Rabbi Israel Salanter, psychologist of subconscious motivation and observer of human self-deception, writes:
There are two sources of non-normative behavior. One is psychic. The satisfaction of jealousy, lust or vainglory, for example, often provides genuine psychic pleasure and gain. Sin may be ethically perverted, socially exploitive or even physically damaging, but it can be undeniably pleasurable and exercise a strong hold over the spiritually untutored. For sinful pleasure, Rabbi Israel devises therapies.
However, he writes, there is another plane, another source of non-normative behavior. It is not psychic and has no strictly psychological resolution.
It is the second source of sin — a demonic force that Rabbi Israel terms “impure spirituality.”
It is not grounded in heredity or character; it resides outside the psyche and attacks the human being from without. Rabbi Israel’s explanation is this: People violate norms that bring no psychic pleasure, even perverse pleasure. People have desires whose satisfaction yields no psychic gain, even perverse gain. The root of this pleasureless sin must therefore reside outside the psyche.
The classic example of pleasureless sin is the loose tongue.
Rabbi Israel acknowledges that people can derive malicious pleasure or even objective gain from speaking ill of others. But, he insists, an objective perspective on gossip reveals that people often gain nothing from it. They jabber away as if they were machines, casting every manner of aspersion without personal benefit or psychic reward. Accordingly, the source of this reflexive, sinful speech must be outside the psyche. It is demonic.
In part, the solution, too, must be outside normal psychological therapy. The solution extends beyond persuasion, psychological or ethical. Uniquely, the metzora needs hammer blows — experiential punishment — because his denial stems not solely from psychic mechanisms of distortion or subconscious dissembling.
The level of self-knowledge that the metzora requires is profound. He must confess to the power not just of perverted desires but of demonic forces. The resistance is powerful indeed; in the end, it finds its emblem in a single, spare phrase.
G-d afflicts the metzora in ascending stages of severity. Ugly afflictions first appear on the walls of his house (14:33-53); then, if he fails to acknowledge and repair his loose tongue, on his clothing (13:47-58); finally, if he fails again, on his body (13:1-44).
In this recitation, the metzora’s voice is heard only once and only in halting tongue. After he is declared a metzora, his clothes are rent, his hair is left uncut, his face is veiled and, finally, he is required to cry out, “Impure! Impure!” (13:45-46).
This involuntary and degrading confession is prescribed; it does not represent the metzora’s own voice. Indeed, from Leviticus 13 to 14 — two long chapters, a total of 116 verses — the entire narrative of the metzora is in the third person. There is only one exception, the last half of a single verse in which the metzora’s tell tale voice is its first phrase:
The owner of an afflicted house will approach the priest and say, “Something like an affliction has appeared to me in the house” (14:35).
Something like? This strange, hesitant locution is far from the Torah’s precision in matters of law.
Rashi comments that even if the house owner is learned and recognizes the affliction, he should not pronounce the house impure, but leave the matter indefinite (“something like”). To pronounce the house impure is the priest’s prerogative. Rashi apparently regards the metzora’s statement as prescriptive — a required statement.
I take “something like” to be the metzora’s own voice, his own hesitancy, his stammer of denial. Torah law is definitive, while this halting phrase is a metzora’s stutter. He cannot face the truth, cannot utter it. The Divine condemnation betokened by the disfigurement on his house is too much to confront, too difficult to admit.
Remember, an affliction on the house is the initial level of attack on the metzora, the first time he is notified. This affliction represents a radical and unwelcome change in his status and self-image. Even though this punishment is unique — it represents direct, absolute, Divine judgment and public degradation — the gossip’s denial is not unique. His psychological mechanism is transcultural, a hesitancy as understandable now as it was in antiquity. If one receives a terminal diagnosis from a physician, one rarely turns to friends or family and says straight out, “I’m dying.” If one loses great wealth in a major lapse of judgment or luck, one hardly turns to friends and says, “it was nice while it lasted.” If one applies to the best colleges and is turned down by every single one, one does not tell friends, “nobody wants me.” No, one does not say such things. One beclouds. One stammers.
“They say there’s a good course of treatment.”
“We can’t take a vacation in the Bahamas this year due to scheduling conflicts.”
“I didn’t really want to go to college now, anyway; I always wanted to work for a year first.”
Denial.
Something like.
Today there is no more Temple and no more affliction of houses, clothes or body. There is no more practicing priest and no more painful purification. But there is gossip and there is denial. If gossip stems from traceable, perverse pleasure and from an untraceable, demonic force — impure spirituality — how does one grow out of being a gossip today? Rabbi Israel identifies two approaches.
The first is his cluster of therapies for religious growth. The many faces of his proto-psychoanalysis are designed to subjugate and then transmute psychic desire for sinful pleasure. They apply to the gossip because gossip is a violation of the Torah (19:16). Self-analysis, interactive analysis, behavioral modification, acquisition of relational skills, quiet contemplation of Musar literature, impassioned chanting of Biblical verses — these therapies precede Rabbi Israel’s second approach, which is the invocation of “pure spirituality” to counter the demonic “impure spirituality.”
Like the demonic impurity, the pure spirituality resides outside the psyche and impinges on a person from without.
Pure spirituality is elicited by Torah study, but not ordinary Torah study. The Torah’s spirituality that counters the demonic source of sin is accessible only after a full course of ordinary Torah study. Ordinary Torah study, writes Rabbi Israel, is study in order to know the Torah’s laws, particularly those laws that one violates and enjoys doing so. Only upon the acquisition of a high level of Torah knowledge and the repair of perverse psychic desires does the study of Torah become extraordinary, calling forth the pure spirituality.
On this level, Torah study is pure blessedness, a direct pursuit of transcendence — Torah study for its own sake.
On this level, it makes no difference what topic one studies. It may have absolutely no relation to the laws of gossip. Torah study itself is the spiritual fortress against the demonic sin of gossip.
Laws in the Torah fall into many categories, among them commandments, decrees, ordinances and testimonies. Unlike any other law in the Torah, the metzora falls under a unique rubric, torah or “instruction,” five times (13:59, 14:2, 32, 54, 57). The powerful grip of denial can require a fivefold conquest: house affliction, clothes affliction, bodily affliction, purification and Torah study. Today, with the Holy Temple of Jerusalem absent, the first four stages are missing. It remains for Torah study, both ordinary and extraordinary, to conquer the loose tongue.
The power of Torah study is laid bare by examining that which it substitutes for — the purification of the metzora, a process even more potent than the bodily disfigurement itself. Torah study works the same effect as the ancient process of purification:
The metzora is to be sprinkled seven times with a mixture of bird blood and spring water, which is tossed on him from cedar wood and hyssop tied together with a red thread; then he must set a live bird free in an open field, ritually immerse his clothing, be shaven from head to toe and immerse himself; then remain outside the camp for seven days and, on the seventh day, again be shaven and immerse his clothes and himself.
On the eighth day he must stand at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting, observe the sacrifice of lambs and a ewe, have its blood placed on his right ear, right thumb, and right big toe; observe the priest sprinkle oil seven times, then take from its remainder and place this, again, on his right ear, right thumb, right big toe and, finally, on his head (14:1-20).
As Maimonides would have it, whatever the precise pagan rituals in reaction to which this purification ritual might have represented the monotheistic transformation, the ritual worked a powerful effect on the metzora.
It silenced his gossip.
The power of Torah study is to penetrate similarly to every interstice of the soul, defeating the power of denial, bringing the sins of the tongue to consciousness and to a close.
Copyright © 2014 by the Intermountain Jewish News
