A first look at Tzora'at

I took a few minutes today to look over the mention of Tzora'at in the Torah. Tzora'at refers to some sort of skin disease. The usual translation is leprosy, but from what I understand, it is not known what disease it is exactly. The discussion is found in Leviticus 13-14, in parshas Tazria and Metsora.

A quick read is that the first section is about deciding when a person has Tzora'at, which is mostly about a Cohen (priest) coming to look at the person. The Cohen then makes a determination if the person is clean or unclean depending on the color of the skin, the depth of the skin disease, and the color of the hair growing in the affected area. If a person is unclean, they are isolated from the community for seven days at which point they are checked again. If they are determined clean, they can re-enter the community, but they need to go through a very elaborate cleansing ritual which involved shaving all the hair off of their head (eyebrows included) and sacrificing sin and guilt offerings. The blood of the offerings is put on several places on the person's body and then they are considered clean.

The first thing that stuck me was that the diagnosis is done by looking - it's entirely visual. The Cohen must be there is person, and they must look at the afflicted person. I have to study it more to see the role of the Cohen in the healing, but it seems that they declare a person as impure, wait, then declare them pure and perform the purification ritual to allow them to re-enter the community. (I will write another post soon on my thoughts about purity and impurity.) So the simple read is that the Cohen's role is to know when a person can or cannot be ritually pure, and help them become pure when it's possible. This bears more thought.

One passage that particularly struck me was Leviticus 13:13:

יג וְרָאָה הַכֹּהֵן, וְהִנֵּה כִסְּתָה הַצָּרַעַת אֶת-כָּל-בְּשָׂרוֹ--וְטִהַר, אֶת-הַנָּגַע: כֻּלּוֹ הָפַךְ לָבָן, טָהוֹר הוּא.

13 then the priest shall look; and, behold, if the leprosy have covered all his flesh, he shall pronounce him clean that hath the plague; it is all turned white: he is clean.

If someone has Tzora'at, they are impure, but if it has covered his entire body, so that he has no healthy skin at all, then he is pure. The following passage states that if "living skin" re-appears, then he is immediately impure.

In Chinese medicine, one of the basic principles is that Yin can transform into Yang, and Yang into Yin, and extreme Yin can transform into extreme Yang. A simple example is hypothermia. One of the warning signs that someone is entering hypothermia is that they start feeling warm when it is freezing outside. They become so cold that the Yin transforms into Yang and they begin to feel warm.

So it is in this case, when someone has become completely transformed by the impurity such that there is nothing pure remaining about them, they are transformed into a state of purity. It's as if the disease itself, by completely taking over the body, has purified them. This strikes me as a third possibility, they are pure, impure, or extreme impure that becomes pure.

This would also suggest that there is a state of extreme pure that becomes impure, though I don't know what that would look like but the myth of Icarus comes to mind. Perhaps there are those that try to get too close to God only to have it destroy their body.

The role of the Cohen is also generally considered the one who blesses. My hope is that this study will help me understand what exactly is the blessing that we give, and how to do it.