Parashiot Tazria and Metzora

I thought about this piece of Torah a lot this week, not only because it contains the parashat hashavua, but also because we observed Yom HaShoah this past Monday night and Tuesday. This panel was part of an incomplete, damaged Torah scroll that was found in a pawn shop in Warsaw by members of the Class of 2007 on their last night in Poland during their Lev v’Nefesh experience 16 years ago. We don’t know how it survived the Shoah, or how it came to be damaged, or how it came to be upside down and naked in a Warsaw pawn shop window, but there it was, and we purchased it. 

The Torah, which we came to call the Poland Torah, had all of Bereshit, Shemot, and Vayikra, but only the first few columns of Bamidbar, and then it abruptly ended. In the year that followed, it was matched up with a similarly damaged Torah that had also survived the Shoah, but was missing all of Bereshit and part of Shemot. The panel I have at home was from the overlap in Vayikra, and deemed by the expert sofer we worked with to be the more damaged of the two, so it was set aside when the two Torahs were repaired and combined to create one kosher Sefer Torah. (It’s an amazing and much longer story — ask me about it sometime, I love telling it!)

I think the parashiot of Tazria and Metzora get a bad rap. We often dismiss them as less desirable parashiot because of their uncomfortable focus on tzaraat, a skin disease often misidentified as leprosy, and understood by the rabbis to be not only physical but spiritual in nature. However, these parashiot are actually much less about this skin disease than they are about how to check for it, how to support a person experiencing it, and ultimately, how a person afflicted with tzaraat becomes healed, purified, and returns to the community. Later in the Torah, even Miriam, sister of Moshe and leader of Bnai Yisrael, became afflicted with tzaraat, was cured, and rejoined the people. 

In a way, Tazria-Metzora is actually the perfect parashah to read on the week of Yom HaShoah.

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov is reported to have taught his students, “If you believe that things can be broken, then you must believe that things can be fixed.” I think about this quote every Monday and Thursday when we take the once broken and now kosher Poland Torah out of the Aron Kodesh and read from it in the High School Beit Knesset. I also thought about this quote earlier this week when I stood in the back of the media center on Yom HaShoah watching a room full of our proud, healthy, confident Jewish students standing upright to remember and mark a time when our people were profoundly broken. And I will think about this Rebbe Nachman quote this Shabbat when we read Tazria-Metzora, and I will seek to focus on the ultimate message of this double parashah, which teaches us that even when things feel damaged beyond repair, we must remember that they can be made whole and perfect again in time.

Shabbat Shalom