Throughout antiquity, most people assumed that illness was a punishment from the gods. Incensed at some infraction of ritual law, pagan gods were forever visiting terrible diseases, sometimes to the point of death, on their worshipers. In fact, this tendency to attribute divine disfavor to any manifestation of sickness runs rampant in our society as well (although only for the illness of someone else!).
Attestation of this attitude comes from many sources. A Mesopotamian curse screams out: "May Sin, the lord of the crown, the father of the great gods make him bear scale disease, his great punishment." Another says: "May Sin clothe his whole body in scale disease which will never lift." The vaunted Code of Hammurabi asks that "Ninkarrak, the daughter of Anum, my advocate in Ekur, inflict upon him in his body a grievous malady, an evil disease, a serious wound that never heals." Even in ancient Greece, scale disease was understood to be the punishment for ritual infraction. At one time, the entire population of Delos was said to have broken out with this illness because they permitted burial on their sacred island, which was held to be a sacrilege.
This notion of tzara'at (scale disease) as a divine punishment for ritual infraction informs the background out of which the Torah emerged, so it should come as no surprise that similar viewpoints find their way into the Bible as well. Joab, the commander of King David's army is cursed so that his descendants may always "suffer from discharge or scale disease." Similarly, one of the penalties listed in the series of curses in Deuteronomy is that "the Lord will smite you with Egyptian boils...and with scabs and itches from which you will never recover."
Often, we are so distracted (and disturbed) by what the Bible shares in common with other ancient texts that we fail to note what makes it truly distinctive, a beacon for all time. In the realm of tzara'at, Professor Jacob Milgrom points out that the Torah introduces something new: the idea that illness results from moral lapses, not merely from ritual infraction.
Thus, Gehazi, the servant of the prophet Elisha, is struck with a case of tzara'atfor having illicitly taken money from Na'aman, a supplicant who had benefited from Elisha's care. Or, recall that tzara'at applies to one who violates any of the mitzvot in Deuteronomy, a book filled with such moral injunctions as the Ten Commandments. Consider, too, that the metzora (the person suffering from scale disease) must bring a hattat, a sacrifice offered, according to the Torah, "when a person inadvertently does wrong in regard to any of the Lord's prohibitions." Finally, a moral cause emerges from the case of Miriam who broke out intzara'at because of her malicious slander about Moses' wife."
The Torah breaks new ground by extending the cause of tzara'at from ritual to moral infractions. That reading continues to develop in the Talmudic tradition as well. In Midrash Va-Yikra Rabbah, the rabbis teach that "for 10 things does tzara'at come upon the world: idolatry, sexual immorality, bloodshed, the desecration of God, blasphemy, robbery, usurping someone's dignity, overweening pride, slander, and greed." Rabbi Yohanan, in Massekhet Arakhin of the Talmud, observes that "because of 7 things, the plague of tzara'at is incurred: slander, shedding blood, vain oaths, incest, arrogance, robbery, and envy."
While it is virtually impossible for us to accept a link between individual illness and moral deficiency, we dare not reject this biblical innovation too quickly. Perhaps what the Torah teaches is that there is a collective responsibility for the outbreak of disease. Maybe that's why the kohen must become involved with the disease in the first place--to represent the community as somehow implicated in the suffering of the metzora.
In our own day, one must see connections between our rising rates of cancer and heart disease, and the callous way we destroy the balance of our ecosystem, clog our air, and focus our social priorities on the pursuit of pleasure, rather than the prevention of illness. In our laxity in educating our fellow citizens on how to care for their bodies, in our abuse of our planet, and our unwillingness to restrain our rapacious greed, we too bear collective responsibility for much of the illness and death in our midst.
But unlike our ancestors, there is no kohen to restore us to purity. For us, there is only the difficult task of facing up to the truth, repenting of our stiff-necked ways, and turning back to ways of compassion, justice, and peace.
Ethical sins still lead to disease and death. But the way of God, as it did in the past, is still ours to choose. If only we will listen.
Shabbat Shalom.