Dvar Torah on Parshat Tazria

In this week's parsha we read about a variety of skin diseases which render the sufferer impure. There is a similar category of diseases which appear in houses - some sort of mold or discoloring in the stones. Although the precise details of all of these afflictions (there is a category in clothing as well) are somewhat unclear to us today, there is a very interesting dynamic that takes place when a smitten stone or stones are discovered in the wall of a home. The Torah tells the owner of the afflicted abode to call a priest and tell him that it seems that this disease has struck his house. The Cohen then commands that the house be cleared before he comes to determine its status, so that the objects in the house not be rendered impure. Only then, once the house is emptied, does the priest visit it to determine whether the discoloring is the real deal and the house is, in fact, impure.

Rashi explains that the Torah is trying to save the homeowner some money: any clay pots that are in the house once the Cohen declares it impure are impure as well, and must be broken (metal utensils can be immersed in water and rendered pure again). It is to save these pots that the Torah tells the priest to instruct the homeowner to take them out of the house before he gets there and makes his pronouncement, so that if the house is declared impure the vessels won't be.

This is clearly a legalistic trick: if the spot in the house's stones is the real affliction, then, in actual fact, the house is already impure, along with the utensils in it; the priest is just coming along to make his diagnosis and make it official. But the Torah sees a loophole: the house and vessels may be unclean already, but they have not been declared to be so. If we tell the homeowner to remove the utensils before they are officially declared unclean, before the priest makes his decision, we can save him some shekels.

Now, one could look at this procedure with a jaundiced eye. The Torah seems to be playing fast and loose with its own rules of ritual purity, with its own value system, with the truth itself, just in order to save a few bucks. It feels troublingly Shylock-like that the Torah is so concerned about a few crummy clay canisters that it is willing to compromise the integrity of our religious legal system, the halacha, with this cheap, obvious trick.

Well, this may surprise you, but I don't see it that way. I think that we are being taught an interesting lesson in the way reality is determined. The ritual status of the house, and of the utensils in it, is not an immutable fact of nature. Rather, it is something to be determined by the Torah, by people implementing the process which the Torah mandates. If, according to the Torah, the stones of the house are not impure until the priest says they are impure, then that is the only reality which interests us. The truth is not something that is out there, waiting for us to simply discover it, rather, it is what we determine it to be, what we say it is, when we say it is.

This insight, that reality is a function of our perception amd interpretation, is, I am sure, not new to you, dear reader. It is, in fact, a notion that has achieved a certain popularity over the past few decades and has been around as an idea for quite a long time. What is really interesting here is that, while the truth of the house's halachic status is something that can only be determined by human investigation and decision-making, using the guidelines of the Torah, there is an absolute at work here as well, there is something at the center of our story that compels the Torah to manipulate the house's reality: our concern for the wellbeing of another. The one immutable fact in this story, not to be manipulated or toyed with in any way, is the moral imperative to save a person's property, to not cause him loss or harm. It is that goal, that value, which is absolute, and which motivates the Torah to arrange all the elements of this scenario - the house and its afflicted stones, the homeowner, and the priest - as it does. The desire to do no one any harm is the only absolute truth, the real reality, of this story.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Shimon Felix