Thazriah: disease

Thazriah:  disease

The bulk of the parsha involves tzorath, a disorder that afflicts the skin, hair, cloth, and homes, A disease that requires isolation and sometimes incarceration.  This is a serious matter, something far beyond the ordinary tumah, contamination. It looks like a disease. Those people or objects that suffer from it are isolated, they seem contagious.

What bothers me about this text is its placement in the Torah.  These are instructions from Gd.  What is Gd doing dealing with health issues? What is the relationship between Gd and disease?

We pray to Gd for healing. Gd  has control over health and disease. Gd has the power to heal.  When the hopeless are cured, is it not the Almighty that performed the miracle? Is it not a demonstration of the power of prayer?

The symmetric conclusion is that Gd played a role in bringing the disease. The idea of disease as punishment is instinctive. We want to attribute a cause to the suffering.  Slander is the commonly quoted etiology  for tzorath, but the Talmudic literture ascribes many additional causes. Some are spitiual:  bloodshed, immorality, false oaths, pride, robbery, and selfishness; others involve careless acts, like walking on eggshells ( Pesachim 112b). We often don't know where adversity comes from, and then we look into ourselves for the cause.  This is not a bad practice. We can usually find something and the malady might be motivation enough to improve it. 

But in our generation, we have fancier ideas about the origins and treatments of disease,  Usually, we do not understand the scientific explanations, but we believe that expert scientists do understand them.  Perhaps incomprehensibility is necessary for a satisfying explanation.  I think that principle is part of  the standard university curriculum. 

The truth: we don't understand the truth. Our ancestors understood a reality that we cannot fathom. We abandon their worldview for a flickering match.