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Parshat Tazria
2006
Psoriasis or Psychosis?
The Torah portions that we're currently reading, Tazria and Metzora, deal with the biblical affliction known as tzara'at, a term which has no English equivalent but is often translated as "leprosy" and seems to be related to the term "psoriasis." These portions are among the most uninteresting in the entire Torah, and rabbis cringe when they think about what they will sermonize on Shabbat.
Engaging the text directly, though, one will note that there's a clearly discernable pattern in what the Torah calls the tzara'at - afflicted person:
13:2 When a man shall have in the skin of his flesh a rising, or a scab, or a bright spot...
13:9 When the plague of leprosy is in a man...
13:29 (similar in 38 and 40) And when a man or woman hath a plague upon...
13:44 he is a leprous man, he is unclean...
13:45 And the leper in whom the plague is...
ֹ14:2 This shall be the law of the leper in the day of his cleansing...
There's a clear progression here, where the tzara'at itself moves from being something relatively incidental to the person, to being something all-consuming and completely identified with the person. The identity of the afflicted person becomes increasingly wrapped up in the tzara'at, and there's a fall from being adam (a term of stature and humanity), to ish (man) or ishah (woman) to ish-tzaru'a to tzaru'a to metzora. This is akin to referring to a person as "a fellow with a beard," "a bearded fellow" and finally as "red-beard," where something which began as a peripheral detail of the subject's identity is now the very basis for that identity.
Maimonides, in his Laws of Tzara'at-Induced Impurity 16:10, describes a different progression. He explains tzara'at as a divine warning message, imploring its victim to soul-search. The affliction would start by affecting the house, then furniture, clothing and finally the body itself. Within this progression as well, there's a movement from the periphery to the center of the victim's existence.
It doesn't seem too far-fetched to suggest that the diagnosis and cure of tzara'at parallels the psychoanalytic process. Therapy is designed to take a person who appears well on the surface and probe early experiences to discover unhealthy personality structures; by identifying and accepting them, they can be healed. If they remain under the surface of consciousness, they remain unhealthy. Both of the progressions described - the one in the Torah and the one in Maimonides - describe a process by which one must identify and accept something about him or herself before a healing can begin. Maimonides describes the process of repentance similarly - bring a repressed memory to the forefront of consciousness through confession or vidui and then release it.
One final thought relates to a Midrash that's cited by Rashi, the great medieval commentator. He states that when the Israelites entered the Land of Israel, the homes of the conquered Canaanites were afflicted with tzara'at, so that the Israelites would find treasure that the Canaanites had buried within the walls.
This goes with our psychoanalytic model as well: the purpose of tzara'at is to instigate a process of digging. That process can culminate in the finding of "treasure" buried within the subconscious realms.
Prepared by Rabbi Elli Fischer, Jewish Learning Initiative educator, University of Maryland, College Park Hillel
Learn More
Additional commentaries and text studies on Tazria at MyJewishLearning.com.
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