To Dwell Alone
Tazria-Metzora 5786
In this week’s double portion, Tazria–Metzora, there is an intense focus on the maintenance of ritual purity within Israelite society, primarily when it comes to a skin disease known as tzara’at. If, after rigorous and ritual observation by a priest, it is determined that an individual has indeed been infected with this affliction, they are sent away. בָּדָד יֵשֵׁב, the Torah says: “They shall dwell alone; their place shall be outside the camp.” As the late, great commentator Steinsaltz observed, “there, they are cut off almost completely from human society.”
I bring you his note because, read from such a distance—in such an interconnected time as ours—I think it can be hard to appreciate the type of isolation Torah speaks of. Set in the decades of our ancestors’ wandering in the wilderness, the Israelite camp in this parashah—a sprawling, collapsible city centered around the Tabernacle and the Tent of Meeting—was human society. In the desert, there is nothing beyond the camp. Everyone you know, everything you know, lies within its bounds. And so, to be sent out, to dwell alone, is to be alone in a way that is difficult for us to fully comprehend.
Even in the middle of the woods, atop a mountain, or far out at sea, we still likely have cell service—somewhere in the distance there is the rumbling of a truck, there is a power line, or a plane. Somewhere above us, there is a satellite. Even when we cannot see it, we are embedded within and embraced by human society. We cannot possibly know what this felt like, to be so cut off. But there are a few who might.
I imagine that I’m not alone in having spent more time than usual these past few weeks thinking about the moon. It’s Rosh Chodesh, so we can’t see it tonight, but of course we know it’s there, our celestial sibling. And four people—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—just returned from a trip around it…
