Moving Forward-Rabbi Boris' Blog

There has been quite a bit of talk recently about the ways the medical profession has changed over the past few decades. Of course there have been new medicines and new technologies to diagnose and treat illness and disease in addition to the changing politics of insurance and health care. The Covid pandemic put the relationship between people and doctors front and center, highlighting where people put their trust, or their suspicions, when caring for their health. Yet with the takeover of the internet and now AI, it is ease with which we are able to self diagnose ourselves that may become the issue of the day.  Who needs a doctor when you have Chat GPT?

A century ago if you had a disease, or simply felt under the weather, you could have asked a grandma or a family member for advice and possibly received a strong Chicken Soup or some herbal remedy as a cure.  If things got really bad, you could make an appointment with a doctor, who would utilize whatever resources they had to help.  They would examine you, speak with you about your problems. If all worked out, they would give you the proper treatment, and possibly give you a prescription to help the healing.  No matter who helped you, bubbe or doctor, there was a relationship and a conversation that took place. 

No matter how great technology has become, the bedside manner of a computer screen is simply not as good.

This is what makes the words of our Torah portion this week so familiar. We encounter the description of people who have a skin ailment, tzara’at.  In extreme detail, we read about how a person is brought to the priest, how they examine the colours, hairs, the shapes and the location of the rash to determine whether that person is not necessarily sick or healthy, but pure or impure. It is up to the priest, who takes on the role of both spiritual healer and medical professional, to determine what the skin ailment really is.

One could say that the tzara'at starts to make a little more sense as the Torah portion progresses, but in reality even after reading all of the disgusting details, we still know very little about what this disease actually is. It is not a disease as we understand it in our modern medical knowledge, and it is not simply a rash. For the Torah it's something deeply mysterious, and connected with our minds, our spirits, and our bodies. For this reason it's the priest we're in charge of its healing.

In all the years that I have been a rabbi, I can tell you that this Torah portion is not necessarily a favorite of anyone's, especially of the bar and bat mitzvah students who I've worked with. It's always fun to watch the queasiness and uncomfortable faces that are made as we talked about skin disease and white hair and splotches. 

On the other hand, there's something very simple and powerful about this chapter. In a book that is so much about the very lofty ideas of faith, God, ethics, and justice, here we have something so down to earth and so familiar that we cringe because it it hits us so close to home. We've all had something happen to our bodies before, we have all woken up and looked in the mirror and found something strange on our skin, or felt something painful in our stomachs. This Parsha is an important reminder that the Torah is not only in the heavens, but it's also on our elbows!

Today, whether we get our diagnosis our own knowledge and experiences from the internet, Chat GPT, or from an actual physician, it is of course how we get healed that matters most to us. As we know more and more, it's not just the medicine or the medical procedures that provide the healing, but it's also the community and the power of our own minds that helps provide this very important spiritual medicine. Just look at the studies of the mind-body connection.  Look at research about the placebo effect or even of the power of prayer, and you cannot deny that physical healing is inherently connected with spiritual healing. It is always been this way, and whether one believes in a supernatural God or not, the mind-body connection is real.

Yes, all the medical details that we read about this week are not makings of a good story.  There will not be an upcoming Disney movie called “The Priest and the Splotchy Arm Rash.”  Yet, in the midst of all of the other stories of the Torah, the wisdom of this parsha is clear.  Caring for our bodies and our health is as much a part of the spiritual journey as everything else. It is a reminder in the most basic and primal way, that everything is connected.