Parshiyot Tazria-Metzorah – 5786

Protecting Our Garment of Light

A D’var Torah for Parshiyot Tazria-Metzorah

By Rabbi Dr. Rachel Posner

Our skin is the largest organ of our body – and a remarkable one. The average adult’s skin covers about two square meters, hosts roughly 1,000 species of bacteria, and contains millions of receptors that sense touch, pressure, temperature, and pain, constantly sending signals to the brain about our environment. Our skin regulates body temperature, protects us from pathogens, and repairs itself with quiet efficiency: within minutes of injury, platelets begin clotting; within days, new skin cells migrate to cover the wound.

We sometimes think of our skin as a boundary, a wall separating inside from outside. But like the walls of a home, it is both a border and an integral part of us.

As someone who suffered from chronic hives, I know that skin disease cannot be hidden. When our skin erupts, we feel exposed – aware of others’ eyes, fearful of their judgment. I can’t say I rent my clothes or sequestered myself outside of the camp, as Leviticus 13:45–46 describes. But when hives covered my skin, I felt vulnerable and confused about why my skin – whose health I had always taken for granted – seemed to betray me.

Our double portion, Tazria-Metzorah, inspires more inside jokes than any other parashah. It has become a cliché to pity the B Mitzvah student tasked with finding something meaningful to say about leprosy. But what we laugh at often points to where our deepest anxieties lie. These jokes mask a visceral discomfort with diseased skin – and perhaps that discomfort runs so deep because we rely on our skin for so much.

Tazria-Metzorah addresses tzara’at, a scaly skin affliction that conveys ritual impurity. But this impurity does not originate from the outside world; as Avivah Zornberg writes, “it emerges from the unknown interior of the body onto the body surface.”[1] Tzara’at can afflict human skin, fabric, and even the walls of a building. Because impurity is contagious, the afflicted person must isolate outside the community; the affected person is treated as though their body is a corpse leaking life. The scaly, white appearance of tzara’at signals a loss of color, a hint of death.

Is tzara’at a medical condition or a spiritual crisis? Leviticus disorients us precisely because it does not recognize the distinctions we moderns draw between body and spirit. The rabbis of the Talmud, whose thinking moved in a more dualistic direction, felt compelled to read tzara’at as a physical manifestation of moral failure. But perhaps Leviticus is asking us to sit with a more integrated – and more unsettling – view of the self.

Leviticus prescribes rituals of return, methods to restore a state of purity. After the metzorah‘s skin heals, an elaborate purification rite takes place (Leviticus 14:1–18): a living bird is dipped in the blood of a slaughtered bird and then released. Blood, water, fire, oil — elemental substances do their ancient work of purification. These rituals are a kind of poetry, their images land in the body as we read words that feel foreign yet evocative.

Our skin is porous, a liminal space between inside and outside. It responds not only to the external world – heat, cold, touch – but to what stirs within: illness, emotion, stress. We sometimes speak of skin as a garment, a protective outer layer. And it turns out our ancestors did too.

In Genesis 3:21, following the expulsion from Eden, we read:

וַיַּ֩עַשׂ֩ ה׳ אֱ-לֹהִ֜ים לְאָדָ֧ם וּלְאִשְׁתּ֛וֹ כׇּתְנ֥וֹת ע֖וֹר וַיַּלְבִּשֵֽׁם׃

And God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.

What are these kotnot or – “garments of skin?” The verse puzzles readers. Did Adam and Eve lack skin before this moment? Or did God clothe them in animal hides? The sage Rabbi Meir offers a striking alternative: by transposing the ayin (ע) of or, “skin,” for an aleph (א), he transforms “garments of skin” into kotnot or – “garments of light” (Bereshit Rabbah 20:21). This reading connects to Moses’ luminous face after Sinai (Exodus 34:29–35), and to Psalm 104:2, which describes God as wrapping Godself in light as in a garment.

The Zohar elaborates: in the Garden, Adam and Eve were clothed not in darkness or nakedness but in celestial light, in consonance with Eden’s purity. After the sin, God replaced those garments of light with garments of skin – coverings that merely protect but no longer illuminate. The first humans’ insides, rather than their outsides, had changed. Bereft of Eden’s light, they could no longer perceive the deep interconnectedness that underlies all. (Zohar II:229a–b)[2]

We are creatures of skin: bounded, porous, vulnerable, luminous. May we care for our protective boundary, our largest organ, as if it is the garment of light that God used to cloak the first couple. Perhaps, as we tend to our outer layer (and that of others) we might merit to receive a flicker of Edenic light and see the truth that connects us all.

[1] Avivah Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy, Schocken, 2022, 111.

[2] Ismar Schorsch, The Garments of Adam and Eve, D’var Torah on Parashat Bereshit, https://www.jtsa.edu/torah/the-garments-of-adam-and-eve/