#metzora

Rabbi Benji's Weekly Thought - Metzora

it took God 80 days to make me, I counted-- 40 days to play in the mud and blow it kisses, 40 days to shape bend fashion a head mouth hair eyes breasts and toes that, on the 80th day, wiggled in the mud with joy, and

see, when I clutch my baby girl to my chest for 80 days, purified in water, purified in blood, and her body warm and small and perfect and mine, it’s only imitatio dei, I only wanted to keep her a little longer, God, make sure we’ve worked out every kink and

This is the teaching of the leper the teaching of afflicted skin this is the teaching of illness.

This is the teaching of the impure man the ill man the bleeding woman.

זֹאת תִּהְיֶה תּוֹרַת הַמְּצֹרָע בְּיוֹם טָהֳרָתוֹ (ויקרא יד, ב)THIS SHALL BE THE LAW OF THE METZORA, ON THE DAY OF HIS PURIFICATION. (VAYIKRA 14:2) 

The Talmud (Sanhedrin 98a) records a conversation between Eliyahu Hanavi and R’ Yehoshua ben Levi regarding the whereabouts of Moshiach. Eliyahu tells R’ Yehoshua that Moshiach can be found at the entrance to the city—Rome, according to some variants of the text—sitting among the poor and sickly. According to Rashi, and as is implied elsewhere in the Talmud (see Sanhedrin 98b), “the sickly” refers to people suffering from tzora’as, and Moshiach himself is also a metzora—a person afflicted with tzora’as.

Why is Moshiach said to be a metzora?

The Torah calls tzora’as an affliction “in the skin of his flesh’’ (Vayikra 13:2), not a disease of the flesh itself. This indicates, says the Alter Rebbe (Likutei Torah, Vayikra 22b), that a person can only develop tzora’as when he has eradicated his deep, internal character flaws, and his spiritual blemishes are solely skin-deep. Since the person has already refined himself entirely “from within,” and his shortcomings are only superficial, G-d afflicts him with a supernatural skin condition to prompt him to perfect even these slight and uncharacteristic imperfections. (The Alter Rebbe thereby explains why tzora’as is virtually non-existent nowadays, because people with no internal imperfections are difficult to find.)

Accordingly, we can understand why the Talmud identifies Moshiach as someone suffering from tzora’as.

Moshiach’s condition reflects the collective state of the Jewish people in the final days of our exile. Over the generations, the Jewish nation has been effectively refined, both in body and in soul; any remaining imperfections are largely only external. Therefore, in the final days before the redemption, Moshiach, the collective soul of the Jewish people, is comparable to a metzora, whose deficiencies are only slight and superficial. It is only a matter of moments until we perfect even these final details and merit our complete and final redemption.