Dvar Torah from Rabbi Menachem Schrader, founding director of JLIC.
Tazria Metsora
It is commonly assumed in Midrash that the ritual impurity of Tsora’at is a punishment for the sin of “lashon hara”, speaking evil of other people that is either untrue, or even if true, unnecessary. The word Metsora, the person stricken with Tsoraat, ia seen as a contraction of the two words”motsi ra”, or one who lets out (of his mouth) evil.
Let us try to understand the connection between the impurity of tsora’at and “lashon hara”.
Tsora’at is the most severe form of impurity a live person could possibly be tainted with. According to some authorities, it has all the severities of the other forms of “tumah” (Hebrew for impurity), and according to all opinions it has certain severities that it shares with no others. The worst of them all is a required period of isolation. A Metsora was not permitted to live within the Jewish “camp” in the desert wanderings, and in later times he was forbidden to dwell within a walled city in Israel. Anyone who would approach him was to be warned of the “Tumah” he was about to encounter.
It appears that this severe punishment is exactly tailored to the crime of lashon hara, libel, slander, and gossip. The effect of speaking badly of people is to cause them to be isolated. Others begin to distrust them. They are wary of becoming their friends, or giving them responsibilities. Sometimes their employment is curtailed, limited, or suspended. People are less interested in having them as neighbors. Business relations are had with caution, if at all.
As a measure for measure, the person who commits this verbal crime is punished with ritual isolation. Let him understand the feeling of being excluded from society. Let him “savor” his aloneness and loneliness. Let him have a first hand experience of what he has effectively imposed on others.
In our own day, with the state of Israel in particular suffering on an international level from this kind of abuse, from libel and slander that is resulting in an international isolation having its impact on government, trade, and academia, it is all the more important for Jewish individuals to maintain our own unity of purpose and identity, to be especially careful of our own internal lashon hara. It should serve as an internal example of what we would like the whole world to be.
Amen ken yhi ratson.