THE HAUNTED HOUSE - Parshat Tazria-Metzora

We pass by this house every year.

It sits on a hill, somewhere out in the land of Canaan, rotting. There is something very wrong with this house. The walls are marked with streaks of green and red, corroding into the plaster… and spreading.

The door bursts open, and the owner of the house suddenly comes out, looking agitated. We see him run to the priest, and say, in a string of uncertain words,

“Something like a plague has appeared before me in my house.” (Leviticus 14:35)



What is it? He has no idea. Something. Something like a plague. Rashi tells us that, “even if he is a scholar, who knows that certainly it is a plague, he does not render judgment with a definite statement.”

Because this doesn’t seem real. It simply “appeared” before him, like some kind of phantom. So he can’t exactly trust what he sees. Who’s to say what this is?

But the Torah tells us, explicitly - this is the plague of tzaraat. Leprosy. Or, at least, we often translate it as ‘leprosy,’ because it usually manifests as some kind of skin disease. But this can’t be the leprosy we know about today, because we’ve seen it also attack clothing, infesting it with those same streaks of green and red. And now a house.

How can a house have a disease? And yet, that’s exactly what it looks like. It looks like this house is dying.

The priest will tells him to put it out of its misery. They will wait and watch for seven days, and then, if the plague continues to spread,

“The priest will order the stones with the plague in them to be pulled out and cast outside the city, to a place of impurity.” (Lev. 14:40)



Now the house is gone. It’s just a pile of rocks, festering out of the edge of town.

What happened here? The old rabbis have their various theories. But one thing they all tend to agree on: this is no earthly force. The Ramban says it explicitly:

This is not in nature at all, and is not from this world… But when one of us sins, then some ugliness erupts on his skin, or his clothes, or his house - to show that God has turned away from him. (13:47)



But if this meant as a punishment, what the owner of the house do to deserve it? There are surely sins that happen every day and cause no plague to erupt. What kind of crime has its sentence carried out on a piece of cloth, or a wall?

Rabbeinu Bachya has a theory:

This was someone who kept his house only for himself. He refused to lend his belongings out, and he never welcomed guests inside. And so the plagues came to attack his stinginess. (14:35)

He thought he could keep all to himself, clutching his precious possessions, holed up inside his house. So God tore his house down, measure for measure. It is a lesson we see running through the Bible - in the freeing of the slave, or the sabbatical resting of the land - there is no real property. The earth belongs to the Lord. Try too hard to hoard things to yourself, and you will have them ripped away from you.

But Rashi tells a different version of this story, and manages to put a positive spin on the destruction of the house. He suggests that the miser was in the house long before we ever got there:

This is good news, when the plagues come! Because the Amorites hid gold treasures in the walls of their houses all forty years that Israel was in the desert. And as a result of the plague, the owner breaks down the house and finds them!

Hidden treasure! What we thought was a punishment turns out to be a reward. In a unexpected stroke of divine justice, the righteous man who lost his house is suddenly rich! This “plague” was actually a jackpot! It’s all so exciting…

But this just feels too easy. Is this really the way God shows His affection - by leading us to gold? Was the journey into the promised land really just some kind of treasure hunt?!

Even if we were willing to embrace this kind of shallow moral message, it still wouldn’t make sense of the larger phenomenon of tzaraat. For what about the affliction of the clothes? Or the skin? Surely we won’t be finding buried treasure under our own withering flesh! No, the the legend of Amorite gold is a fun fantasy, but ultimately the Torah is pushing us confront the fact that this plague is meant for us.

We turn to the great Kli Yakar, who tries comes to terms with this responsibility by giving us a larger conceptual framework for understanding all of the tzaraat plagues:

You must know and understand, that these three types of tzaraat afflict three different things because these are the three “coverings” a person has. The first covering is the skin of his flesh. On top of that, are his clothes, which cover his skin. And then on top of them, is his house, which covers him completely, and protects him from the wind and rain. And one who has all these coverings removed from him is considered wild and exposed… Therefore the plague of the skin is mentioned first, and then, the plague of the clothes, and finally the plague of the house, in order to remove all of his coverings, one by one, until he is completely wild and exposed.

These plagues are indeed devastating. But according to the Kli Yakar, they are not meant as a punishment, exactly. They are God’s way of slowly, methodically breaking down all of the barriers we have that keep us at a remove from the world.

We move about in society, playing out a role, amassing possessions and accomplishments. We wear nice clothes, carefully selected to project an image of style or wealth, modesty or beauty - as if these were our essential traits. We try to present an impressive, invincible self to the world, and hope that we are convincing.

And then we run home, lock the door, and only there, behind the cover of the walls, are we left alone with our true selves.

But even then, we have our masks. You look in the mirror and see a face. Is that really you? Are you just your skin, your flesh? Or is there something more to you?

Where is the essential self? What are we, when everything is stripped away? If we took off all of our coverings, what would we find? It would not be hidden gold, that much is certain - not our money or our success. Nor our intelligence, our charisma, or our beauty.

Forget about where you live, what you wear, or what you look like - none of that matters. When you are finally and completely exposed, what is waiting inside, at the core of your being?

Who are you, really?

That is the question that haunts us.



