Unscrolled, Parashat Tazria-Metzora: A Pox Upon Your House
While today, like Dorian Gray, we have mostly succeeded in severing the connection between our bodies and souls, back then, our sins showed.
Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.
While today, like Dorian Gray, we have mostly succeeded in severing the connection between our bodies and souls, back then, our sins showed.
There is something alluring about that long gone era.
We would be wrong to dismiss the Levitical model of atonement out of hand.
While God commanded Moses from the inside out, Bezalel, the artisan of the tabernacle, builds from the outside in.
Distance and duration are central to this reconciliation narrative.
We are being asked by the Torah to picture. This is no small thing.
For those who seek a philosophically perfect God, this parashah presents a challenge.
The bitterness of the actual can make the text quite hard to swallow.
In forbidding sculpted images, God articulates a vision of the divine that cannot be bound up and kept.