A new installment...
From this weeks Parsha...
I've decided you need a little religion.... because the Parsha (bible reading) this week is particularly weird. Even weirder than usual.
One of the perks of being a professional Jew is that I tend to stay up on where we are in the bible each week (for those of you who don't know... the calendar and the bible run on a strict simultaneous schedule).
You can read about this week's Parsha for yourself if you like... but basically it details this disease called tzoraas, which is a spiritual disease of the skin. You contract tzoraas by blaspheming and generally acting mean, player-hating, talking smack. When you get it, it turns your body white, but it also breaks out on the walls of your house!!!
Then you have to go live outside the city walls until the priests have decided you're clean, but this purification can only happen if you stop talking smack. If you can't stop talking smack, you continue to be afflicted with your leprosy-like rash, and your house-walls get covered in the weird spots. Then you end up exiled.
Weird, huh?
I think it's really interesting that you get the disease by abusing words, and that it afflicts not only your body, but your dwelling-place. Like the words emanate outward and corrupt the spheres beyond them... which is, I think the power and the danger of language. That it can so quickly and so completely remake and alter the world.
Interesting... if you think that G-d called the world into being with language. The generative quality of speech is, in the bible, really something else. Think of the naming of Isaac (after his mother's laughter) or the re-naming of Jacob after he wrestled with God/ the angel. Language has an active power in the Torah.
It makes sense that the power of misused language would produce a combined mildew/leprosy/exile....
I've decided you need a little religion.... because the Parsha (bible reading) this week is particularly weird. Even weirder than usual.
One of the perks of being a professional Jew is that I tend to stay up on where we are in the bible each week (for those of you who don't know... the calendar and the bible run on a strict simultaneous schedule).
You can read about this week's Parsha for yourself if you like... but basically it details this disease called tzoraas, which is a spiritual disease of the skin. You contract tzoraas by blaspheming and generally acting mean, player-hating, talking smack. When you get it, it turns your body white, but it also breaks out on the walls of your house!!!
Then you have to go live outside the city walls until the priests have decided you're clean, but this purification can only happen if you stop talking smack. If you can't stop talking smack, you continue to be afflicted with your leprosy-like rash, and your house-walls get covered in the weird spots. Then you end up exiled.
Weird, huh?
I think it's really interesting that you get the disease by abusing words, and that it afflicts not only your body, but your dwelling-place. Like the words emanate outward and corrupt the spheres beyond them... which is, I think the power and the danger of language. That it can so quickly and so completely remake and alter the world.
Interesting... if you think that G-d called the world into being with language. The generative quality of speech is, in the bible, really something else. Think of the naming of Isaac (after his mother's laughter) or the re-naming of Jacob after he wrestled with God/ the angel. Language has an active power in the Torah.
It makes sense that the power of misused language would produce a combined mildew/leprosy/exile....
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