Moral leprosy – Tazria
Leprosy takes up a large part of today’s sidra. It was once a fearful scourge, and the Torah needed to go into great detail concerning how to recognise and handle it.
Today, the laws of leprosy are far from obsolete. For, as the sages adamantly insisted, there remains a frightening disease which might be called moral leprosy, which disfigures and ravages one’s entire being.
The medieval commentator, the Baal Haturim, lists ten different types of leprosy – those of the body, the garment, the house and so on.
The Midrash (Vayikra Rabbah 17:3) identifies ten types of moral leprosy: idol worship, gross unchastity, bloodshed, the profanation of the Divine Name, blasphemy of the Divine Name, robbing the public, usurping a dignity to which one has no right, overweening pride, evil speech and a greedy eye.
The list is reminiscent of the Ten Commandments. Many of the same subjects figure in both. Even their sequence is similar. Both begin with idolatry and end with evil talk and envy.
One lesson may be that if you abandon God and turn to substitute philosophies, you lose your standards. Nothing is necessarily right and wrong any more. Without God your behaviour becomes unreliable and possibly unethical. The modern “God is Dead movement began with a famous assertion of Nietzsche, “God is dead”, which continued, “therefore everything is allowed”.
Reversing the order of the list is also instructive. The person who begins with careless use of the tongue ruins reputations, undermines human relationships, destabilises society, and can even come to the point at which there is no room for him and God in the same world.
King Solomon wisely remarked. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18.51). No wonder the sages said that the word m’tzora, a leper, sounded like motzi ra, a person who uttered evil, for evil talk is the worst kind of moral leprosy.
