April 16, 2021
This Shabbat: Shabbat Parshat Tazria-Metzora
This week’s Torah portion is a tough one to read. Much of the parsha focuses on a strange skin ailment called tzaraat, often translated as leprosy, that makes one ritually impure. It is not easy to find meaning in Biblical verses about a disgusting skin disease! But, in our present moment, as we continue to struggle through living in a pandemic, one element of our parsha hits closer to home than ever before: the fact that a person that the cohanim, priests, have diagnosed with tzaraat must quarantine outside the camp until the priests deem them able to return. Whereas in earlier years we used to read this parsha and think that quarantine sounded positively medieval, today we’ve all experienced it for ourselves. We all understand that good public health policy requires the removal of the contagious person from society for the duration of their contagion.
But what kind of disease is tzaraat? Is it like Covid-19 - highly contagious with the potential to cause life threatening illness and death? Well, not exactly. The rabbis interpret tzaraat as being a physical manifestation of a spiritual illness - the illness of speaking evil of others. Knowing what we know today about the mind-body connection, we can understand how allowing one’s mind to be overtaken by bile and hatred could lead to becoming physically ill. But why quarantine a person for speaking evil? The Talmud (Arakhin 16b) explains that when people speak slanderously of others, they end up separating people - spouses, friends, and colleagues - from one another. Therefore, separating such slanderers from society is making the punishment fit the crime. Just as they separated others, so too they must be separated.
Our present moment gives us another way to look at the Biblical requirement to quarantine those who become ill with tzaraat. Just as someone can bring down the health of the community by spreading Covid, so too one who spreads evil speech also damages our communal health. Our societal discourse has hit new lows in recent years, with online platforms in particular being hijacked by those who seek to insult and defame others. This discourse is fundamentally damaging to the fabric of our society, tearing it to shreds by normalizing insults and hatred that contribute to poor mental health and even a rise in physical violence against marginalized groups. Of course, we know that “quarantining” or removing those who speak evil isn’t necessarily the right solution; we understand the dangers inherent in restricting free speech. But, as our society engages in massive communal conversation about how to address our epidemic of evil speech, we need to take seriously the lesson of this week’s parsha: hate speech is dangerous not only to the speaker and his or her victims, but to our society as a whole.
For Shabbat Table Discussion:
- Our Torah portion also discusses how tzaraat can afflict inanimate objects like clothing and even houses! How can an inanimate object have a skin disease? What might the Torah be trying to teach us here?
- We are currently in the middle of the counting of the Omer, a seven-week period between Passover and Shavuot. According to Jewish tradition, the Omer is a period of quasi-mourning in which we remember a plague that struck down thousands of students of Rabbi Akiva in ancient Israel. The rabbis teach that the plague began because the students were not treating one another with kindness. What should we make of the repeated connections between kindness and physical health in Jewish tradition?
- How can we each try to be agents of change with respect to the pandemic of evil speech in our society? What can we actually do to change the discourse?
This Week in Jewish History
April 14, 1935 - Death of Mathematician Emmy Noether
You’ve probably never heard of Emmy Noether. I hadn’t either until this week when a friend pointed me toward an incredible article about her that was published on the website of the National Library of Israel. We all need to know who she was and to celebrate her life. Noether was one of the foremost mathematicians of the twentieth century, and her work continues to have a profound impact on mathematics and physics to this day.
Born into a Jewish family in Erlangen in the Bavarian region of Germany in 1882, Noether inherited a love of mathematics from her father, himself a renowned mathematician. But because she was a woman, she was not permitted to enroll in university to study mathematics. To get around the prohibition, Noether enrolled in classes as a mere observer. Because she impressed her professors so much, they allowed her to sit for exams. Against all odds, she received her doctorate, summa cum laude, in mathematics in 1907. Despite her incredible academic achievements, Noether could not obtain an academic position. For a number of years, she taught at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen for no pay. In 1915 she was invited to teach in the world-renowned mathematics department at the University of Göttingen. Again, because she was a woman, she was not permitted to teach under her own name. Instead she lectured under the name of David Hilbert, a senior mathematician in the department. Finally, in 1919, Noether obtained state permission to teach under her own name. Of course, she remained on a lower tier than her male colleagues, receiving a position equivalent to an adjunct professor, with low wages, no benefits, and no tenure.
However, even this recognition was to be short lived. In 1933, when Hitler and the Nazi party took power in Germany, Noether and all the other Jewish professors were fired and forced to leave. Losing the Jewish professors was devastating to the Mathematics institute at Göttingen. In 1934, Nazi Culture Minister Bernhard Rust asked David Hilbert whether it was true that the institute had suffered greatly since the Jews were forced out. Hilbert responded with a heart-stopping statement, saying that the institute did not suffer; it simply no longer existed.
Thanks to the help of her colleague and friend Albert Einstein who had already found refuge in the United States, Noether was able to obtain a teaching position at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and thus escaped death at the hands of the Nazi regime. At Bryn Mawr, she finally received respect as both a woman and a Jew. Sadly, Emmy Noether died after a surgery that went awry at the relatively young age of 53. She remains a revered name in the mathematics world: Bar Ilan University in Israel has a mathematics institute named for her, and her picture hangs on the wall of nearly every room in the institute.
Emmy Noether’s life carries so many messages for us today. She reminds us that discrimination does not only harm the person being targeted, but in fact harms society as a whole because we are all denied the contributions of those being excluded. She reminds us of what was lost due to the Holocaust. How many others with her brilliance and ability to impact the world were murdered by the Nazis? And she reminds us of the quiet superstars whose names we don’t even know but who contribute in incredible ways to the human race.
Shabbat Shalom!
שבת שלום!
