Menachem Mirski
Thoughts on Parashat Metzora
The Torah portion for this week, Metzorah, talks about various kinds of afflictions, plagues etc. that can make our life very difficult, if not unbearable. To describe these phenomena the Torah uses the word negah (pl. negaim), which is the same language the Torah uses to describe Egyptian plagues.
This linguistic similarity puts our Torah portion in line with the theme of the holiday of Pesach we are approaching now. The story of our Exodus starts with Egyptian plagues – plagues that enabled and ultimately led to our deliverance from Egyptian slavery. According to the Biblical account the Israelites were spared from some of them (like insects, hail, the plague that struck the cattle of the death of the firstborn). It is commonly assumed that the Israelites were spared from all of them but there is no plain, scriptural evidence for this claim and it’s reasonable to believe that according to the biblical narrative some of the plagues affected the Israelites as well.
This all refers to the literal meaning of the story of Egyptian plagues and our Exodus from Egypt. Behind this literal meaning of the text the Torah describes some deeper structures of processes that underlie changes in social and political reality: on this level of meaning plagues may be seen as symptoms of the general moral and cultural decay of society. The Egyptian plagues can be seen then as mere consequences of terrible, bad decisions of the ruling class i.e. the decision of Pharaoh not to let our people go.
Pharaoh tried to keep our people as slaves and continue to exploit us. It was clearly against the Divine will and it terribly backfired at him and the Egyptian society. Today, our sworn enemies keep trying to destroy us in this or other way – not only through terrorist and military actions but also through destruction of our reputation, as people. They try to inflict on us different nega’im, they try to entrap us. It obviously hurts us or affects us one way or another but at the same time it terribly backfires at them as well. The recent attack on our Homeland carried out by Iran is a good example of it.
The mistakes made by our enemies, their attempts to destroy us bring us closer to victory. I’m not saying everything they do has an effect like that but some things certainly have. Therefore, we should not deviate from the track we, Jewish people, are currently on. Sometimes we have to grind our teeth and swallow the pain, because we cannot lose faith in our victory as God’s people. The crises we are going through, as Jewish people and generally as citizens of the Western world, help us also in another way: they reset our tables of values, reorienting us in the world and helping us distinguish good from evil. It makes us all more focused on things that are truly important to live a good, Divinely inspired life in which values like peace, justice and love are among the most cherished values.
Shabbat shalom!
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