Dealing with Mold (Metzorah)

The parshiot of Tazria and Metzorah describe something that is very difficult for most of us today to understand - a physical affliction brought on by a spiritual trespass. Last week’s parsha, Tazria, described the physical affliction, and this week’s parsha details how the affliction is to be cured and what to do when a similar affliction appears on a person’s home.

It would be easy to say that the understanding of tzaraas as a spiritual ailment was simply an ancient people’s way of dealing with the unknown. This is why the affliction is most often translated as “leprosy,” which, based on modern knowledge, is a terrible translation. Leprosy is a bacterial infection. It is a long and cruel disease that afflicts a person’s skin and nerves and can be contagious, but a cure and treatment have been discovered. The fact is that in modern day language, tzaraas, has no comprehensible translation because we do not live in an era where one’s haughty or unkind behavior results in strange spots on our skin.

Let’s look at the description of the house tzaraas. If, like bodily tzaraas, one were to try to name it as a modern problem I think it sounds like mold. Mold gets into the recesses of the wood and stone and the best way to stop mold is to get in and tear it out. And sometimes mold can spread everywhere. If we are discussing the house tzaraas on a spiritual level, the comparison to mold is actually still relevant. Mold grows in dark and damp areas, just like loshen harah and the jealousy/haughtiness that drives the urge to speak loshen harah thrives in conversations held in lowered voices and somewhat subtle insinuation. More significantly, mold reproduces via spores, air-born particles that find a nutrient rich surface and latch on. Like the famous analogy of the pillow feathers, disparaging words shoot out of our mouths and drift away on the wind, once uttered they cannot be collected. Those not-so-nice remarks latch on to the thoughts of another person who maybe already had a small sense of negativity and then fester and grow.

Mold is treated by removing the affected area and by making changes so that the environment is unfriendly to further growth. The job of the priest is not just to identify tzaraas on the wall of the house, but to instruct the owner what spiritual repairs need to be made so that the insidiousness of his/her negativity cannot further affect their lives.