This week's parsha was lost in translation. How did the Torah's anti-gossip message of looking out for the signs of tzaraat become the cruel Medieval practice of quarantining people with skin diseases like leprosy? It's all Greek to us.
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Transcript
Welcome to The Morning Scroll! I'm Rabbi Deena Cowans from Mishkan Chicago and you're listening to what will be a quick dive into this week's parsha. If you’ve been meaning to brush up on your Jewish literacy, or you’re looking for some inspiration, you’ve come to the right place. This week, we read Parashat Metzora, “a person with tzaraat”, YEP we’re still talking about it. We’ll start with a brief recap:
A person who gets tzaraat is declared healed by the priest, and then they have a purification ceremony involving sacrificing two birds, bringing a scarlet thread and some water, shaving their whole body, waiting 7 days, shaving again and then bringing some oil and animal sacrifices. If the person who got tzaraat can’t afford these sacrifices, they can bring two birds instead. As we learned last week, homes can also get tzaraat,which appears as a strong red or green spot on the stones. A priest comes to inspect it, and quarantines the home for up to three weeks. Depending on how much it spreads, the home is either declared pure, the stones are removed, or the whole house is demolished. To purify the home, it goes through steps similar to the ones for a person with tzaraat: quarantine, inspection, water, sacrifices etc. We then move onto other unsavory topics, like penises with unnatural discharge and how to purify oneself if this happens to your penis, purification after menstruation or having sex with someone who is menstruating: spoiler, all of these involve a trip to the mikvah.
You might have heard tzaraat, the disease discussed in this week’s and last week’s parshas, translated as “leprosy”, but this is actually an error. The affliction the Torah is talking about has nothing to do with the actual disease of leprosy. The confusion comes from a translation error. The septuagint, a Greek translation of the Torah, translated tzaraat as lepra, which refers to a skin disease. Several centuries later, another translator saw the Greek term and assumed it meant leprosy. Now, we might think this kind of translation error is just a silly misunderstanding… but it actually has had devastating consequences for many centuries. People with leprosy, or leprosy-like conditions, have been excluded and marginalized for more than a millennium because of this error, when in fact leprosy, the actual disease, is very hard to transmit. This error has led to millions of people being shunned and oppressed, when in fact they just have a bacterial disease that about 90% of people are naturally immune to.
It’s sort of ironic, then, that the rabbinic understanding of tzaraat is that it comes from gossip, or speech that is so careless it is harmful. It’s a reminder that what we say, the literal words we choose, not only matter, but continue to have ripple effects long beyond the moment we speak or write them. We get a chance to check in with ourselves and the care we put behind our words each year at Yom Kippur, but I like to think of this parsha, and last week’s, as a sort of mid-year check in. And I want to offer a blessing to the thousands of people who have been excluded from society because of this translation error, and the thousands who continue to be excluded because they are misunderstood, or they were the victim of someone else’s careless speech.