torah portion

[cellio]

I drew the "leprosy" portion this week (Tazria-Metzora). Everyone is going to be talking about lashon hara (gossip, approximately), because that's the apparent cause of the affliction (midrash, and one data point in Torah). "Everyone" includes my rabbi tomorrow night (he mentioned it tonight). I'd like to say something Saturday morning that they haven't already heard a zillion times and one of them within the previous 14 hours. I wonder if inspiration will strike. (I suppose there's always the haftarah as a source of material, though we have a fairly strong convention of talking about the Torah portion.)

Comments

[sethg]

One thing I noticed reading the parsha, which I haven't had time to blog about yet, is that the "leprosy on houses" can only happen in Israel. Also, when you take apart a leprous house, the pieces are dumped in a makom tamei -- does that phrase appear anywhere else in the Chumash? (I should just take a concordance to work or something....)

There's a section of Sanhedrin where the leprous house, the stubborn and rebellious son, and the idolatrous city are asserted to have never happened in practice, and the only reason those mitzvot are in the Torah is so we can get the reward for learning about them. (These assertions are all challenged, of course ... this is the Talmud, after all....)

[cellio]

(I should just take a concordance to work or something....)

And I should just buy a concordance. :-) It's an interesting question; if you look it up I'd be interested in hearing where else that phrase appears (if it does).

About the house never having happened: some commentaries argue that you got the house first, then the clothes, and only then the skin affliction; if the house never happened, then neither did any of the rest of it -- ?? Or does that just mean that outside Israel you can have the latter two (just skipping the house, which is the only one Sanhedrin says never happened), but inside Israel none of it happened? I can see that leading to some quasi-mystical arguments about the power of proximity to God's dwelling place...

[sethg]

About the house never having happened: some commentaries argue that you got the house first, then the clothes, and only then the skin affliction

I thought it was the other way around: first skin, then clothes, then house. Maybe I should take a Mikraot Gedolot to work, too....

[cellio]

With a citation only of "midrash" (no specifics given), Rabbi Avi Geller (Aish HaTorah) says that while the three are presented in the order body/clothes/house, they actually occurred in the reverse order. So your first hint was when you had to clean out your house (and potentially tear things down), and if that didn't work your clothes were affected, and if that didn't work then you might have to leave town temporarily. This last is seen as the most severe because it affects you directly.

(Personally, I would think that possibly having to replace your house is a lot more severe than having to replace your clothes. But perhaps housing was just seen as more transient in Torah times, while your clothes were personal possessions. Dunno.)

Housing

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

There was probably lots of mud and straw available.

[sethg]

If my demonstrably shaky memory serves, the leprous-house law only applied to a stone house. So even if you had to tear the whole house down, you could just rebuild it with more rock and mortar. Without such modern conveniences as indoor plumbing, HVAC, etc., this would not take a lot of skilled labor. Clothes, on the other hand, were much much more labor-intensive before the Industrial Revolution. According to this page (I found it on Google, so it must be accurate :-), a typical worker in 3rd-4th century Palestine earned between 0.5 and 2 denarii per day and a cloak cost 12-30 denarii.