Finding the Joy · Parashat Tazria-Metzora
Outside the camp
Outside the Camp
Tuesday night there was a candle on our counter. Yellow wax topped by a six-pointed star — the same shade of yellow as the star Jews were forced to sew onto their clothing in the ghettos of Europe.
It is a yahrzeit candle. The yellow candle exists because there are six million souls for whom nobody is left to light one. So once a year the candles go out to anyone who will light them, and each flame is a stranger saying kaddish for a stranger.
Tuesday was Yom HaShoah. The memorial siren sounded at ten in the morning and the country stopped for two minutes — one siren in a country that has been awash in sirens for two and a half years.
I spent part of the day with a book I had received as a birthday gift: Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust. The thesis is far from subtle and the evidence is overwhelming. IBM did not stumble into the Holocaust. IBM pursued it. Custom-designed punch cards for each stage of the genocide. Hollerith code 6 meant Jewish. Hollerith code 8 meant gas chamber. They built the tool to specification, kept it running, optimized it.
My mother worked at IBM. My father worked at IBM. I learned to golf as a kid at the IBM country club. The connection is distant. But the counter held a lit yellow candle, and I was reading about how a Hollerith number on a punch card became a tattoo on a forearm, and I did not know what to do with any of it.
This week’s parsha is Tazria-Metzora — a double portion in Vayikra. Biblical dermatology. A priest is summoned, inspects the affliction, and issues a ruling. Tamei or tahor.
When the ruling is tamei, the Torah is blunt:
כׇּל־יְמֵ֞י אֲשֶׁ֨ר הַנֶּ֥גַע בּ֛וֹ יִטְמָ֖א טָמֵ֣א ה֑וּא בָּדָ֣ד יֵשֵׁ֔ב מִח֥וּץ לַֽמַּחֲנֶ֖ה מוֹשָׁבֽוֹ׃ They shall be impure as long as the disease is present. Being impure, they shall dwell apart—in a dwelling outside the camp.
Badad yeshev — alone he shall dwell.
That would be a rough place to end the story, so Metzora picks up where Tazria left off:
זֹ֤את תִּֽהְיֶה֙ תּוֹרַ֣ת הַמְּצֹרָ֔ע בְּי֖וֹם טׇהֳרָת֑וֹ וְהוּבָ֖א אֶל־הַכֹּהֵֽן׃ וְיָצָא֙ הַכֹּהֵ֔ן אֶל־מִח֖וּץ לַֽמַּחֲנֶ֑ה This shall be the ritual for a leper at the time of being purified. When it has been reported to the priest, the priest shall go outside the camp.
The priest goes out. The metzora could not come back in on his own. Somebody had to walk out and get him. The structure of return is built into the law.
The rabbis associate tzara’at specifically with lashon hara — evil speech, the kind of speech that puts other people outside the camp. The Torah talks you out in response. The priest walks out to bring you back.
On Tuesday, while our yellow candle was still burning, a freed Israeli hostage named Agam Berger stood on a stage in Birkenau holding a 130-year-old violin. The violin had belonged to a Polish Jewish orchestra musician who was murdered in the Holocaust. Berger had been a surveillance soldier at Nahal Oz on October 7 and was held in Gaza until last January.
At the central ceremony of the March of the Living, on Yom HaShoah, she played “Undzer Shtetl Brent” — Our town is burning. Mordechai Gebirtig wrote it in 1938 as a warning. The Nazis invaded Poland the next year. Gebirtig was murdered in the Kraków ghetto in 1942.
A violin that was put outside the camp. A young woman who was put outside the camp. Both came back. One plays the other.
That is not a metaphor, exactly. It is closer to what the parsha is describing, in the plain sense. Someone goes outside the camp, and someone walks out to bring them back.
This morning the yellow candle is long cold. Modi will bake challah this afternoon. In a few hours we’ll light Shabbat candles — ordinary wax, not the yellow of the ghetto armband. And we read, of all things, about the priest going outside the camp.
Outside, and back.
Shabbat shalom.
— Uriel ben Avraham