Community Blog

Shabbat Shalom. This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Metzora, the continuation of last week’s discussion of the laws of tzara’at, the skin disease sometimes translated as leprosy but which almost certainly is not, the infection that can spread beyond the skin to clothes and house, the infection that is often associated with gossip and then in turn, with women. Many years, this parasha is read the same week is Parashat Tazria, or in fact is skipped over in small, non-Orthodox synagogues that do not have the resources to read a whole double portion. But this year being a leap year, we have this space to speak about Metzora on its own. 

Metzora is a noun, a person with tzara’at. A metzora must report their “impurity” to the priest, who may make the information public, depending on the impurity. A metzora must isolate from the community, and may only reintegrate after the priest has declared them pure again, and then they must still make a sacrifice and immerse in living waters before they are actually pure again to fully re-enter the community. The process is meant to be sanctifying and healing, and the priest is with the metzora to escort them out of the camp and to esort them through the final purification process after the isolation time, to lead them back into the community and ensure their acceptance by the rest of the community. 

However, the isolation in between is significant and lonely, and the public knowledge of their impurity may be humiliating. The whole experience may not feel healing from the tzara’at but rather an exacerbation of the packaged unpleasantness. For some, it may even be as bad as the tzara’at itself. 

The Jewish Coalition Against Domestic Abuse, or JCADA, has declared this weekend to be Teal Shabbat. April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and the Jewish community is unfortunately not immune to sexual violence. Our own Reform movement recently underwent an investigation with a third party firm revealing abuse of varying magnitudes across almost every arm of our movement. From sexual harrassment at the Hebrew Union College and between senior and associate rabbis at congregations, to sexual assault against minors at Union for Reform Judaism camps, and overlooked sexual misconduct between teenagers in the North American Federation of Temple Youth, there seems to have been plenty in our own backyards we wouldn’t have wanted to face. 

I don’t believe any of this is unique to Reform Jews, and I am glad for the investigation and the processes our movement is taking to move forward. Any large group of people is bound to have some bad eggs in them, including but not limited to sexual predators. Many people like to think that those odds don’t include their own community, and in the Jewish world we like to stick to our tropes of “Nice Jewish Boys” that would never commit such acts of sexual aggression. But it’s a lie, and it’s one that continues to silence and further traumatize the people who have experienced harm by such predators hidden by their respectability. 

Much like the varying experiences of the metzora, someone who experiences sexual harm may feel catharsis in reporting, in speaking publicly and educating others about their abuse, and may find healing in Jewish rituals such as mikveh immersion. Others may find the process humiliating, damaging to their reputations, and retraumatizing. The mere thought of the gauntlet that being public about such abuse may entail encourages many to stay silent, to not report at all, or to only come forward once there is safety in numbers with other accusers. Some may find that abuse from a fellow member of the Jewish community, especially one the rest of the community seems to respect, such as a rabbi or a teacher, pushes them away from Judaism entirely. Even a new synagogue, in a new denomination, in a new town, still reminds them too much of the circumstances of their assault. Yet others find the process of teshuvah to be hopeful and even find the courage and strength to continue to share space with their assailant after a true restorative justice process has been followed. 

While the metzora has very specified rules and a timeline to follow, regardless of their feelings about it, there is no such halakha for people who experience sexual harm. There is very little guidance, even, for either the person who has experienced harm, nor the author of the harm. But this is where we can do better in the future. At the CCAR conference last week, I attended a workshop about restorative justice following sexual harm. It included some of the suggestions that have been made to the CCAR and URJ leadership for follow up actions to the recent reports, but the workshop itself was for regular rabbis who may encounter these dynamics on a much smaller scale with the interpersonal relationships in our rabbinates. The restorative justice process takes some concepts of teshuva, but it extends them. It centers the person who has experienced harm, and allows for a personalized process that allows them to feel heard and to again feel safe in their communities, schools, workplaces, and so on. It requires the buy-in of the person who has authored harm, and a true desire to understand the harm they have committed. Beyond apology, it requires internal change and growth, and concrete steps to ensure that the author of harm will never commit such harm again. It is the only way to move forward as a community where such harm has been perpetrated. 

In The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on Leviticus, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg discusses the outsider/insider perspective of the metzora, comparing it to the wicked child of the Passover seder. She praises the objectivity of one who is able to remove themselves from a situation to observe it from the outside, but cautions that it may cause one to lose the sense of one’s own implication within it. “Ideally,” she says, “one would want a judicious balance of the two perspectives, external and internal.” This is her continuation from a classical midrash that plays on the word metzora: rather read it as “motzi ra” - bringing forth evil. The quarantine helps the metzora contain the evil that is inherent, along with the good, in every person. There is no ability to rid oneself entirely of evil inclination, but the separation allows the metzora time to subsume the yetzer hara back into the wholeness of a person. Here, my metaphor of the metzora shifts from representing the person who has experienced sexual harm to the author of such harm, but if Zornberg is right that every person has good and evil within them, and that all must find its balance in the greater whole in order to find harmony within a peaceful community, then that shift still works. We are all but two sides of the same coin. Sometimes the coin flips and we may find ourselves on the other side. Only through restorative justice, by processing openly through these sorts of harm, can we hope to stop the flow of trauma, as we know “hurt people hurt people.”

This Teal Shabbat, let us open our minds and hearts to listen to people who have experienced sexual harm when they tell us what is need for them to again feel safe in our communities. Let us commit to educating ourselves and each other about the range of sexual harms that are committed daily around us, and how we might better stop it. Let us confront authors of such harm with compassion and the hope in their humanity. And may we live to see a world where no month needs to be “Sexual Assault Awareness Month” anymore. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.