Our Rabbis, in their comments on this week’s Sidra, relate four specific laws to each other. Those laws, which are seemingly otherwise completely unrelated, all deal with one common object – a bayis, or house. The four laws are: (1) Nega: Among the laws discussed by the Bible in this week’s Sidra which deal with ritual purity and impurity, we find one which deals specifically with the purity and impurity of a house. In the houses in which our ancestors once dwelt – not brick or steel or concrete houses – it frequently happened that, certain type of fungus, or perhaps a type of parasitic insect, infected the walls of the house. This type of plague was contagious, and if not dealt with immediately and severely, it jeopardized all other houses in its vicinity. The Torah, therefore, declared such a house as ritual, impure, as tameh.Maakeh: A house which has a roof, the Bible teaches us, upon which people walk and from which they might fall off, offers a danger to life and limb, and therefore we are commanded to build a maakeh or fence about that roof. The reason for the law is clearly enunciated by the Torah – lo tassim dammim b’vaysecha, You shall not cause blood to be spilt in your house. It is a law of safety. We must build fences as safety measures, and the violation of this rule entails more than a summons to the Magistrate’s Court – it entails the violation of God’s sacred command. Architectural modes may change, and engineering techniques may come and go, but the eternal principle remains – our homes are to be properly protected to ensure the safety of ourselves, our wives and our children.Mezuzah: Every Jewish home must have, at the doorpost at the entrance, a small box in which is put a small piece of parchment. On this miniature scroll is written the Shema and the accompanying prayer. This box and its contents, called the mezuzah, is the symbol of the sanctity of a Jewish house, and the constant reminder that the Jew, in his home, is ever expected to live up …

It is in a most unfestive mood that I stand before you on this Shabbat preceding Yom Haatzmaut… Would have liked to speak to you of Hope, of the brightness of the Future beckoning to us through the dark skies of the Present so overcast with war-clouds. I would have liked to remind you of another crisis 8 years ago when things then too seemed so bleak and we were nearing desperation, but when we forged a State with sheer determination and with an iron faith that The Lord God of Israel would honor His promise to Abraham and His pledge to the seed of Abraham. I would have wanted to share with you my faith that God will do the same even now, as the rumble of war drums comes rolling from the Near East and frightens us, of how the waters are darkest at the very shores of Hope. I still believe that with all my heart and my soul. All Israel believes that else they could never keep their composure and would crumble in the face of danger. But I cannot speak of that as I had intended to because of the news this past week which you read as well as I did. I refer specifically to the raids of the savage Fedayeen, the murderous Arab gangsters who invaded the heart of Israel and this week killed three young Yeshiva students, aged 19-25, and their teacher in an unprovoked and barbarous assassination while they were in the midst of their Mincha Prayer.We are happy on the occasion of this birthday, yes, but who can be expected to express merriment and joy in the midst of such unparalleled tragedy? And even if it were humanly possible to express happiness when in sorrow, it is impossible when added to this is the element of bitterness. Our people are bitter today, bitter at the pious hypocrisy of the whole western world which has not raised its voice in indignation, bitter at the callousness of a world eager to pick out every occasion to lecture Israel, but which remains dumb when Arab murderers kill three youngsters and their young teacher who have nothing in their heads but siddurim…

Our Haftorah for this morning records one of the more fascinating chapters in the early history of our people. Four lepers who, in keeping with Biblical law, were outside the camp of Israel, were hungry and found themselves near starvation. They decided that it was no use to try to reenter the community, because famine reigned in the Land of Israel at the time. Instead, they decided to take their chances and proceed to Aram, what is today Syria, and what was even in those days the sworn enemy of Israel. If they kill us, they argued, we are no worse off than we are now; and if they let us live, why then we shall we survive. As they approached the fortified city of Aram, the Bible tells us that G-d performed a miracle, and the sound of their approach was in the ears of the Syrians like that of a great army on the march. The Syrians were dumbfounded by the thought that the Israelite king might have hired the Hittites and Egyptian mercenaries to do them battle. Thereupon, the Syrians panicked, and leaving Aram in the middle of the day upon a moment’s notice, they all fled and deserted the city. When the four lepers entered the ghost city, they filled themselves with what they found and then they said to each other, we do not do right to care only for ourselves for yom besorah hu, v’anu mach’shim – today is a day of good tidings, and shall we be silent? As patriotic Israelites, they returned to the Land of Israel and notified the guard at the gate that he should tell the king that they alighted upon Aram and v’hinei ein sham ish ve’kol adam – behold there is no man there, neither the voice of a human being, ki im ha-sus assur, ve’ha-chamor assur, v’ohalim ka-asher hemah – but the horse is tied to the stake, and the donkeys are tied, and the tents are as they were. Aram has suddenly been deserted, and it is the perfect time for an Israelite attack against its mortal enemy. In this manner, the four lepers were instrumental in achieving a victory of Israel over Syria.This …

The most wondrous miracle in the course of life is the appearance of life itself – the birth of a child. If, therefore, when a child is born, he is greeted with simchah, with happiness, this is as it should be; for a child is the very highest expression of joyous creativity. No wonder the Jewish tradition teaches us that the father and mother of a child are partners with God in his creation; for the act of childbirth is the most significant creative act in human life. According to some of our classical commentators, the meaning of the biblical verse, that man was created in the divine tzellem, the image of God, means that just as God is creative so does man have the capacity to build and create. The most God-like of all human activities is that of creativity.It is interesting therefore, and somewhat perplexing to note the somewhat remarkable law which comes at the beginning of the first of the two portions which we read this morning, namely, that a woman is considered in a state of ritual impurity, or tum’ah, for a specified period of time after childbirth. If, indeed, the creative act is an imitation of God, why should the act of childbirth, the most creative natural act of which a human being is capable, bring with it, as a side-effect, a state of tum’ah?What the Torah wanted to teach us, thereby, is that every creative human act, no matter how noble, inevitably brings with it certain negative features. Destructivity is one of the aspects of creativity, for creativity is a reorientation of the kochot ha-nefesh, it disturbs the equilibrium of the inner workings of the soul, for what is new can be produced only by upsetting the status quo; and from the same reorganization which produces creative results there also emerge destructive consequences. You cannot have yetzirah without tum’ah. The creative act involves an area of shade, something negative, an element of pain and agony and frustration. The seed must rot for the plant to grow. When you carve wood, you must …

The conjunction of the two Sidrot we read today, Tazria and Metzora, is remarkable. The first speaks of birth, the second of a kind of death: metzora harei hu ke’met, a leper is considered as partially dead. Tazria describes the joyous acceptance into the fold of a new Jew by means of berit milah, circumcision, while Metzora tells of the expulsion of the leper from the community. Yet, these two portions are read on the same Shabbat with no interruption between them. The tension between these two opposites, this dialectic between birth and death, between pleasure and plague, between rejoicing and rejecting, speaks to us about the human condition as such and the existence of the Jew specifically. Even more, this tension contains fundamental teachings of Judaism that are relevant to the problems of the State of Israel, whose 18th birthday we shall be celebrating this Monday. After delineating the laws of childbirth, the Torah in the first Sidra gives us the law of circumcision. The Midrash Tanhuma relates a fascinating conversation concerning this Jewish law. We are told that Turnus Rufus, a particularly vicious  Roman commander during the Hadrianic persecutions in Palestine, spoke to R. Akiva, the revered leader of our people. He asked R. Akiva: ezeh mehem na’im, which is more beautiful: the work of God or the work of man? R. Akiva answered: the work of man. Turnus Rufus was visibly disturbed by the answer. He continued: Why do you circumcise your children? R. Akiva said: my first reply serves as an answer to this question as well. Whereupon R. Akiva brought before the Roman commander shibolim and gluskaot, stalks of wheat and loaves of good white bread. He said to the Roman: behold, these are the works of God, and these are the works of man. Are not the works of man more beautiful and useful? Said the Roman to R. Akiva: but if God wants people to be circumcised why are they not born circumcised? R. Akiva replied: God gave the mitzvot to Israel le’tzaref ba-hen, to t…

The rabbinic comment on today’s Sidra reveals the moral bias of Judaism. Life and history, and all their vicissitudes, are not merely a series of accidents without rhyme or reason, but the playing out of a moral drama of sin and punishment. Usually the reasons for sickness and tragedy, for joy and good fortune, are a mystery to us. But sometimes we can penetrate the veil of the cosmic enigma and discover the ways in which God works. Occasionally, though very infrequently, such insights are available to us. Thus, the disease known as tzaraat – which is usually mistranslated as leprosy, but which is actually a largely extinct fungus infection – was considered by the rabbis to be not just a pathological medical condition which occurred by happenstance, but the reflection of an ethical failure, and therefore a condition which lends itself to moral diagnosis.This does not mean that only this ill person committed a crime; that in itself would be immoral, for we would then complicate the misery of a patient by accusing him of some unknown sins. All of us, say the rabbis, are nitfas be’avon … be’khol yom, we are ensnared by sins every day of our lives. Therefore, we cannot and do not know why one person is afflicted and the other spared – even by tzaraat. But we are told that in some way beyond our comprehension, life is sensible even if it does not always make sense to us. The presence of tzaraat establishes the guilt of the patient, but by no means exonerates those who are fortunate enough to remain healthy. There is, then, a moral rule that ultimately prevails even though we can never know its details.In this context, let us analyze three sins which, according to the rabbis, constitute a kind of ethical etiology and which are responsible for tzaraat.The first of these is slander, the circulation of false and defamatory reports about a neighbor. This is called, in Hebrew, motzi shem ra, which literally means: one who brings out or circulates a bad name. The rabbis even p…

According to tradition, the terrible plague of tzaraat (usually mistranslated as leprosy) is occasioned by one of three sins. Amongst them is that of gassut, to which we shall devote this morning’s talk. Gassut means thickness, heaviness, and therefore a crudity or rudeness or obtuseness. In a word, gassut is vulgarity. It does not require unusual wisdom or perceptiveness to observe that our society suffers from an over-abundance of vulgarity. We need but look about ourselves to notice the obvious lack of refinement and delicacy and sensitivity. Indeed, not only does gassut lead to nega’im, but today vulgarity itself is a veritable plague. Modern life, for all its sophistication, tends towards vulgarity. Possibly it is a result of our liberal, democratic tradition. Any democratizing movement tends on the one hand to bring culture and the “finer things of life” to the masses of the people, but on the other hand also lowers standards and debases the coin of culture. This is true of language which becomes vulgarized, and of music and art which tend to deteriorate with the increase in mass education. Perhaps the preponderance of vulgarity is the result of instantaneous electronic communication, so that an eruption of vulgarity in any one part of the world, especially America, is immediately broadcast by satellite to all parts of the world which regard such conduct as the norm of behavior. But certainly, vulgarity, as the very word indicates, tends towards commonness; it spreads like the plague. Gassut is itself a species of nega’im. It is not because a thing is common or popular that, by itself, makes it vulgar. We are not and should not be snobbish. But vulgarity, as an inadequate conception of the art of living, simply happens to characterize most people; for the art of living is one that is not easy to master. Let us be more analytic. We can, I believe, discern three varieties of gassut of vulgarity.Lexicographers (see Kohut on the Arukh) tell us that the word gass …

I had a dream last night: I was leafing through the New York Times in the late 1900s, when my eyes chanced upon the following item in the obituary column: WORLD, THIS. Passed away yesterday morning, after long illness. Death came quietly instead of by nuclear explosion. No survivors, no mourners. Services will be conducted in Heaven by a relieved Creator. It requires no dream, no nightmare, but a hard-headed and analytic realism to look at the world and conclude that it is sick and moribund, a candidate for the obituary columns of the cosmos. Here are some quick examples of dreadful symptoms: the USSR, a superpower of hundreds of millions of people, is afraid to let a hundred thousand Jews out, and decides to risk its economic and technological future by cracking down on a handful of ideological dissenters. African nations self-righteously condemn white countries as imperialists and colonialists, and proceed to destroy neighboring (black) tribes with genocidal relish. The United States is mortally wounded by Watergate. Its normal, healthy sexual inhibitions have withered up and vanished. Its clergymen having already excused every sexual deviancy as acceptable in the name of “love,” its psychiatrists now declare that homosexuality is no longer an illness – as if proclamation can change the nature of the perversity. The whole country is being “liberated” to death.Israel is undergoing an erosion of its government and experiencing major political malaise. The first Jewish Commonwealth in over two thousand years, brought into being by the teachings, traditions, and aspirations of a people nourished for millennia by Judaism, feigns ignorance of “who is a Jew.” Religious Jews are torn apart by internal dissension. The Neturei Karta delivers itself of an anti-Zionist diatribe not in a Jewish journal, but on the pages of the New York Times – on the weekend of Yom Ha’atzmaut.So the world is indeed sick, and we must wish it a speedy recovery. It is desperately in need of a re…