Is quarantine and enforced isolation disempowering? When forced to disengage from the community are you a strictly a victim, or is there something redeeming about the experience?  No one wished Corona on anyone, but many will talk about unforeseen benefits of temporary lockdowns and working from home on family relationships and personal stress reduction.

The content of today’s daf is filled with religiously prescribed social and geographical restrictions for those who suffer from various diseases. In Jewish thought, these physical diseases are not random. Rather, they are manifestations of spiritual disease, or shall we say literally “Dis-Ease”, a lack of internal peace. The Talmud (Erchin 15b) attributes the physically enforced isolation as a punishment for anti-social tendencies such as hurtful speech and arrogance, which is in fact a form of psychicaly induced isolation. Surprisingly, even the normal biological and sexual process of seminal emission in a man, and menstruation in a woman, requires a degree of recognition of impurity. 

We must ask, what intelligence and benefit does this hierarchy of enforced isolation represent? Is it not too punitive? Really, can’t a person just become ill without any kind of moral attribution? And even if we are to assign moral failings to more severe illnesses such as zav and metzora, why do we imply a defacto guilt upon the person whose body manifests normal processes such as sexuality and menstruation? At face value, this can be seen as the effects of Adam and Eve’s sin and included in the list of related curses described in Genesis chapter 3. However, that merely describes a superficial relationship between a long ago event and humanity’s outcome. It really does not offer a personally meaningful explanation. We are stained and supposed to suffer for a sin committed in prehistoric times?

I believe the deeper meaning is that we all must be re-enacting this sin in a manner of speaking or we would not be invited to undergo these isolations and purifications. This so-called sin and curse is the inexorable, undeniable reality of mortality. It is a painful gift to be reminded of the shortness of life and our physical vulnerabilities. It is especially valuable to understand the outcome of our lusts and pettiness, though sometimes inevitable and necessary, but still bearing consequences. Our bodies are wedded to our souls in a passionate and tumultuous marriage. As we go about our lives we can either exist in a fog of denial in the ways we isolate from G-d, our soul, and the people around us, or not.

The Torah’s recognition of isolation, and invitation to experience on a material, physical and social level what is always occurring to a greater or lesser extent in our spirituality is not a punishment. It is performance art intended to awaken a realization about our constant denial of the saddest truths and the dangers of denying the truth that we alone are in charge of whether we live or die on a daily basis. This is not only about bodily health or sickness but about spiritual life and death which is just hidden enough for us to deny it, but sufficiently visible when we can tolerate it’s truth.

In other words, the Torah with its many restrictions and reactions to physical disease and process is the deliverer of the news, not its manufacturer.

Translations Courtesy of Sefaria, except when, sometimes, I disagree with the translation

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