Tazria: Spread

Much of the parsha deals with diagnosis. An aberration appears on the skin. Is it insignificant?. Is it  a transient wound, a discoloration from trauma or age; or is it a dread disease that requires isolation, an unpredictable condition that probably has a bad outcome after an inexorable decline.  The diagnosis requires an outside, more objective view and criteria.

The diagnosis of tzoraath, translated as leprosy by the King James committee, requires that the spot appear deeper than the skin.  A superficial problem can, and will, be shed.  If it affects the layers below, it is a more penetrating problem, a process that goes deeper; who knows how far? 

Tzoraath changes the hair.  The hair loses its color and becomes thin, The hair becomes weak.  Does this indicate the potential for the disease to cause other weaknesses?  Tzoraath has the dominion over its neighborhood.  It is more than a spot. 

 Spread and recurrence are   the main indicators of a dangerous condition that requires isolation, time for resolution and purification.  Spread and/or recurrence  mean that the control mechanisms are not working well enough. The automatic correction mechanisms of the body are losing to the lesion. This affliction is not contained.  It is spreading.

The disease entity has a life force. It is an entity that increases. This drive to flourish and perpetuate evokes a dreadful sympathy. The tzoraath is like any other living thing: it is driven to survive and reproduce. That process impacts the complex organization of its more normal human host. The battle is joined.  

In the 1840's,  Rudolf Virchow applied the microscope to the study of disease. Through the lenses he saw how  cells of disease invade the organized structures of the normal. These images became ( and remain) the paradigm of disease. They fit the pattern of tzoraath. We can imagine that the abnormal invades and disrupts; the disease is driven by its life forces and overcomes the defenses. Visualizing the disease process in these terms is problematic. It ascribes the cause of disease to undefined powers  and the temptation to assign feelings to the behaviors of these cells, emotions that mirror our own, is overwhelming.  The origin of human drives is inscrutable, a mystery that is camouflaged by a theory of evolution; and that theory has its own struggles and prejudices. To see what is there is revealing - not explanatory. 

Virchow's contemporary (and student) , Robert Koch, identified microbes, foreign invaders, as the agents of many important diseases. Bacteria, since they are not the products of  human cells, have their own agenda of proliferation.  The human (diseased) host is a source of nutrition and shelter for the independent bacterial purposes.  Disease is a (class) struggle. The modern person lives in balance with this microbial world, for the most part. The "normal" defenses are usually quite adequate.  The emergence of pandemics is rare ( far less frequent than I would predict based upon the huge number of microbes).  How these scourges disappear remains a mystery. 

Each new discovery in biomedicine has offered the ultimate fantasy-free explanation of the cause of disease. The area covered by each new model is usually very small. Mutations in DNA actually explain very few ( if any) cancers. Cytokine patterns generally  fail to explain immune diseases

The parsha begins with the ritual status changes ( days of purity and impurity) and the sacrificial rites associated with the birth of babies. It then transitions to tzoraath for the bulk of the chapter. The baby is the a proliferation that generates an organized, beautiful, one of us. The complex and dangerous processes that make new cells, form organs, and expel children has worked. The peril of the process is recognized by the ritual. 

Is the life force agnostic? I believe not.