By Nicole Martin

This week's double parasha, Tazria-Metzora, focuses on laws and rituals required to maintain a state of ritual purity in the Israelite camp in the wilderness.

Much of the text describes the laws regarding a metzora, an individual afflicted with with a skin disease called tzara'at. Tzara'at is often rendered in English as leprosy, but the Talmud (Arachin 16a) makes clear that it is no natural disease at all but rather a divine punishment for g'sut haruach (haughtiness) and lashon hara (evil speech, that is, spreading unfavorable, true rumors about another person).

Since it is essentially a physical manifestation of a spiritual disease, tzara'at requires religious rather than medical treatment. The parasha describes this treatment at length: if someone is suspected of having tzara'at, he or she is brought to the kohen (priest), who either quarantines him or her for later inspection and eventual release, or declares him or her infected with tzaraat and therefore impure, and forces him or her to announce his or her own impurity, leave the camp, and sit alone outside. Parshat Tazria ends here; Parshat Metzora begins by announcing that, when the day comes for the metzora to be purified, the kohen must go out of the camp to see the metzora and check whether he or she still has tzara'at; but, the parasha announces, the symptoms of tzara'at will have vanished.

Of course, this doesn't make any sense: if the tzara'at is guaranteed to have been healed, why does the kohen still have to check? And if there's a chance that the person might still have tzara'at, why does the parasha say that all the symptoms are gone?

The answer, I think, comes in the next several verses, which describe the ritual by which the kohen "purifies" the metzora and brings him or her back into the community: exactly what sacrifices have to be made, what to do if the metzora is too poor to afford the sacrifices--the emphasis, though, is not on

the metzora but almost exclusively on the kohen. Why? Perhaps because, through his actions, the kohen is working a veritable miracle, not merely transforming impure to pure but welcoming a self-declared outsider back into the arms of the community, announcing to the entire world that there is indeed room in our camp for a person who had been sitting outside alone. And it starts, the parasha insists, with the kohen leaving the comfort of the camp, looking at the metzora in broad daylight, and refusing to see in him or her any blemish.

I barely need to explain the metaphor. So often we see people--unhappy chanichim, surly rommates, frustrated kvutza members--sitting on the outside, alone, feeling guilty and perhaps not without reason, feeling excluded and perhaps because we have indeed excluded them, thinking, perhaps not incorrectly, how unbelievably difficult it would be to try to go back and make up and rejoin the group. And our responsibility towards these people is always that of the kohen: to go to them, to look at them honestly, and to declare them good, even if it makes no sense at all, and then to welcome them back to us, and to go to whatever efforts it takes to make sure they can stay.