I started this sermon a couple of different ways. But let’s do it the most traditional way. Let’s look at the text. Leviticus 14:8 says, “The one who is to be cleansed must wash his clothes, shave off all his hair, and bathe with water; he is clean. Afterward he may enter the camp, but he must remain outside his tent for seven days.” Last week we also talked about purity and impurity, being ready and not yet ready. We learned amongst other things the baldness is not a sign of impurity. Good to know. My father, balding, used to say that bald is a four-letter word. The correct term is sparse. And many people are uncomfortable with it, try to avoid it, go through treatments to prevent it. Traditionally Jewish men are prohibited from shaving their beards, so what is going on here? Why the need to shave in order to be pure, to be ritually ready, to resume your place in the community?
An interesting discussion ensued. Maybe it is like when a baby is born with no hair, this is like being reborn. And this is why Torah discussions are so important. They create holy moments!
What if you chose to be bald? A young girl in Colorado also recently shaved her head to support a friend battling cancer and losing her own hair because of the chemotherapy treatments. That decision caused her to be suspended from her school which has a policy of no shaved head. Kamryn Renfro told the Today Show yesterday, “I was pretty sad that they didn’t let me go to school. I was feeling that I was punished.” The school after much public outcry and an emergency school board meeting relented and let Kamryn back into school. She illustrated the mitzvah of “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
That is precisely what happened this week. 73 rabbis, in Chicago for the Central Conference of American Rabbis chose to “Shave for the Brave.” To go bald to support children undergoing cancer treatments who are being so very brave and to support pediatric cancer research. Never did they think their actions would have been so inspiring. Yet they raised over 570,000 for cancer research. I am proud of them because their actions speak louder than words. They brought comfort, caring, and real tachlis attention and organizing to real problem. They fulfilled the mitzvah, “Do not stand idly by while your neighbor bleeds.” They may have even saved a life.
And while these are both feel good stories, what do they have to do with this week’s Torah portion which focuses on purity again. Last week I spent a lot of time talking about the mikveh as a way to be spiritually ready. Again, picking up on what was said, coming out the mikveh is like being reborn.
As I have said before, I don’t ask members of my congregation to do anything that I am not willing to do as well. One of the spiritually transformative things in my life is water. It can be Lake Michigan, either side. It can be Walden Pond. It can be the coast of Maine.
Or, it can be a mikveh. So after talking about it last week and knowing that is a part of my traditional Passover preparations, to rid myself of spiritual chamatz, it was time to go again. Yesterday morning was the appointed hour. Now in order to be ready to enter the mikveh there are seven preparatory steps, matching the seven steps that lead into the water. For me, this is a chance to slow down, think deeply and sigh audibly.
My preparations began at dawn. I chose to do most of the preparations at home. It gave me the opportunity to listen to “mikveh music”. Yes, I have an entire playlist of it. And it gave me the opportunity to write.
One of my insights was about hair. There can be no barriers between you and the water. No clothing, no jewelry, no bandaids, glasses, hearing aids. Even nail polish comes off. You shower or bathe. Even a single strand of loose hair is a barrier. A separation between you and the Divine. An imperfection. An impurity.
A single strand of loose hair is a very fine line. Think about it. Touch your own hair. A single strand of loose hair can be the difference between being tameh, ritually not ready and tameh, ritually ready, pure.
But what is this really about? Why did they have to shave their hair? More holy moments. Maybe it is because hair hides the impurities or itself is impure. Or maybe hair is really dead cells so somehow it is connected with death itself.
The rabbis of the Talmud teach that the impurities discussed in this week’s Torah portion are really about impurity of speech. They draw a connection between the leper and the sinner, between the physically marginalized and morally culpable. They resort to a play on words, metozra, the leper is like motzi shem ra, one who slanders another. And they use Miriam in Numbers Chapter 12 as their prooftext. Miriam is seemingly punished after she speaks evil of her brother for marrying the Cushite woman (stay tuned, that will be part of the Fast of the First Born study session!) She was punished with leprosy, whatever that is, and put outside the camp. But something remarkable happens. Moses, the very one she slanders, prays to G-d for her healing. El na, refana la. Four words. Very simple. Please G-d, heal her. Sing it with me. And she was healed.
It can be a very fine line between lashon hara, evil speech and lashon hatov, good speech. Lord Rabbi Sacks’ D’var Torah this week was about that. There is power in speech. Evil speech can hurt for a long, long time making it difficult to heal. Good speech, praise, can help build up people and create leaders. What I realized while thinking about that tiny strand of hair, is that when I slip over to lashon hara, when I yell at Simon or Sarah (and I sometimes do) or when I say something mean about someone who aggravates me (and they sometimes do), it is when I am out of balance.
Ultimately I think that is what this complex recipe for achieving purity, for removing imperfections, for removing a single strand of hair, is about achieving balance.
The sooner we return to balance, to equilibrium, the sooner we find the strand of hair the easier it is to fix. The Talmud teaches that the kiss of death, the most gentle form of death, the one that Aaron, Miriam and Moses each experienced is so gentle it is like removing a hair from a glass of milk. (Berachot 8a)
Still thinking about strands of hairs and cracks in walls, I was reminded of the story of a king. This king once had a prized jewel, a perfect diamond. So perfect, so beautiful, he kept it under wraps and locked away. One day it would be part of his royal crown but not yet. Not until the setting could be achieved with equal perfection. Every morning he arose and would carefully unwrap the precious treasure to make sure it was still perfect. One morning the king awoke, and in his morning ritual to check the perfection that glinted from every luminous facet, he found a single think crack descending down one facet. His precious diamond was ruined. It was no longer perfect.
He called in all the best jewelers of the entire kingdom, hoping someone could fix it. Nothing could be done. The crack was so deep that any effort to remove it would make it worse. But one craftsman, from a neighboring kingdom thought he could save the diamond. The king laughed. Everyone else said it was not possible. How could this simple man hope to save it? However, seeing that there was nothing else that could be done, nothing else that could be lost, the king said that the jeweler could spend a single night with the diamond. If he succeeded in fixing the diamond, there would be a great reward. If not, he would be put to death.
The jeweler took the diamond and locked in his room, examined the diamond carefully. It was beautiful, sparkling like the fire of the sun on the surface of the water. But the crack, even though as thin as hair, could not be removed without destroying the diamond further. What could he do? He worked all night and emerged in the morning with the diamond and a look of triumph on his face. The entire royal court, the king, the queen, the ministers, even the jester, gasped. The scratch had not been removed. Instead it had become the stem of a beautiful rose, etched into the diamond, making the diamond even more unique and beautiful. The king embraced the simple jeweler. “Now I have my crown jewel. The diamond was magnificent until now. The best. The most perfect. But it was no different than the other stones. Now I have a unique treasure.”
This is true in our lives too. What we learn from this story is that we cannot just remove imperfections. We need to learn to incorporate them into our own lives. We need to integrate them. We tend to shun the lepers, put them outside the camp. And yet, we are taught that all human beings are created in the image of G-d. If we take this teaching to heart, we need to be the warm and welcoming community we talk about. We need to welcome the marginalized into our community. That is part of what Passover is about. Let all who are hungry come and eat. 36 times in the Torah, more than any other commandment it tells us to welcome the orphan, the widow the stranger, the marginalized because we were slaves in Egypt, so we remember what being marginalized is like.
Once a leper is cured and once that person becomes purified, he or she is welcomed back the community with all the privileges of social acceptance. Shimon be Azzai said, “Do not disdain any person or underrate the importance of anyone, for there is no person who does not have his hour and there is no thing without its place in the sun. (Avot 4:3). There are people in our midst we treat as lepers. Modern day lepers. Who are they? People who are tragically marginalized. People with physical deformities. People with mental illness. People who are different from us. Immigrants. Other categories that we could brainstorm at Kiddush. Since we all like the diamond, have cracks and imperfections, it is time to incorporate those into our lives and welcome those lepers back into the camp. That is exactly what the young girl who shaved her head did for her friend and exactly what the 73 rabbis who shaved for the brave did. Now how do we do it here? By using our speech for good and not for evil, to build people up. And maybe our actions speak even louder than our words.
Thank you for revisiting an issue – purity – that I’ve visited a few times before. Let me toss another idea on the pot. Once, at a family retreat, my rabbi put forward the question, why might a woman who has just born a child need to go to the mitzvah? What about birthing could possibly make a woman unholy? My answer: birthing makes us feel G0d-like. We have “created.” Mikva humbles us and brings us back to our human place among others. Perhaps this is the key to shaving, too. Hair is a source of vanity. By shaving it off, we humble ourselves, recommit ourselves to the values that matter.
Thank you for increasing my own understanding of this. Any idea (I don’t have any good ones) of why there is a longer period of time after a girl birth than after a boy birth? How would a C-section fit into this mix?
I don’t. I didn’t even realize that was the case. As for C-section, to me it makes no difference. It’s not the birthing per se, it’s growing the life inside yourself. I remember walking around with my first baby in my arms feeling awestruck and saying, “I did this. I did this.” I don’t think I was lauding myself. I was standing amazed. And yet, I did do that!
In teaching a class on Intro to Judaism recently, we did a session on G-d. One of my readings was about wedding days. But the group felt strongly that they felt closer to G-d when they had just given birth! I have had that response to my own baby, “I did this, I did this.” It usually gets expressed as “I made this.”
Hence the need to humble oneself with a trip to the mikvah! I’m still baffled by the distinction in days for a girl baby versus a boy baby.
Not only do we need to incorporate imperfections into our own lives, but we need to accept them. Without accepting them, we have little success at incorporating them into our own lives. Easier said than done! We also need to accept the imperfections of others. Think of the teens with the peer pressure to be accepted only if they follow the same standards, dress and act the same way. How much more wonderful the world would be, and easier for the teens, (and all of us that continue to go through these situations), if the world could accept our imperfections!
I think one of the most important skills I am beginning to learn through Weight Watchers is to accept my imperfections. I am amazed how much of it is centered around weight and food. This is an extremely gradual process of recognition, understanding, and acceptance. G-d willing, I will get the hang of it!
One of the responses I have had to going to the mikveh is not wanting to put anything impure into my body afterwards. It never seems to last very long. But it speaks to less processed, more real food. You are exactly correct about teens and peer pressure!