Chapters 12-15 of Leviticus are filled with descriptions of bodily discharges and skin disorders that often serve to alienate the reader from any sort of meaningful connection to the verses in the ...

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From the stories in the Torah of people with leprosy, we can infer what the social impairment is that leads to this impurity: gossip, slandering the name of someone else. The Torah portions of Tazria ...

The Torah explicates how the high priest undertakes the task of declaring someone a metzora (a person afflicted with a rare skin disease): “And the priest shall look on the plague in the skin of the ...

This week’s Torah portion is about mass fear, or better put, how to stave off mass fear. Mass fear makes people, and groups of people, think, say, and do irrational and destructive things. You ...

I have Tazria! Great! I am the rabbi that gets to write about the diseases of the Bible. Even though, in a year like this one, we can connect even deeper with the idea of infectious diseases, ...

After explaining the laws of childbirth, the laws of the metzora are presented (Leviticus 13). While many translate metzora as leprosy, in truth there is no exact English equivalent. In general, it ...

The double-portion of Tazria-Metzora (Leviticus 12:1 – 15:33) pulls us out of the orderly purity of the pristine, glimmering golden edifice of the tabernacle, and into the inherent messiness of what ...

Each day, when I pick up my son up from school, I ask him how his day was, and his answer is always the same: “Boring.” When I then ask him what he did, he tells me about activities he enjoyed, who he ...

This week’s Torah portion is about mass fear, or better put, how to stave off mass fear. Mass fear makes people, and groups of people, think, say and do irrational and destructive things. You wouldn’t ...