Tazria / 7 days to reflect on life

A simple reading of the Gemara in Arakhin 16a informs us that tzaraat, a spiritual disease with a physical manifestation that is definitely not “leprosy,” could come upon a person for one of seven sins: lashon hora (slander and gossip), murder, swearing in vain, immorality, haughtiness, theft, and stinginess.

Raise your hand if you might get tzaraat if such a disease were extant today. (We can all put our hands down now.)

It’s sad that most people focus only on lashon hara, because the reality is that even people who are not gossipers are not immune to the other causes of tzaraat. Everyone has a yetzer hara (evil inclination) and everyone makes mistakes. While murder is presumably most uncommon, the rest of the seven are not that far-fetched for many people, in one form or another.

While Israel traveled in the wilderness, getting tzaraat would trigger being sent out of the camp, and once the land was settled it meant a trip outside of town, for the duration of a week. This week-long exile, which was sometimes extended, was meant to give the person pause to reflect on which sin caused the affliction and how to make different choices in the future, choices such as ahavat yisrael (loving one’s fellow Jew) and ahavat habriyot (loving one’s fellow Man).

Tatzaraat is not our reality today, but we do have week-long excursions — and while not brought on by sins, they may nonetheless give us pause to reflect and to think about our lives and what is most important to us. One week-long venture is a holiday such as the upcoming Pesach. Another seven-day escape is the vacation. Sometimes the holiday and the vacation are combined. A third seven-day removal from the day-to-day norm is when someone dies and the family sits for the mourning period of shiva.

On holidays and on vacations, and particularly when they are combined, the test of “who we are and what we stand for and believe” is brought to the fore. How do we conduct ourselves? How do we portray ourselves? How do we spend the time we don’t normally have? Are we unaccountably lazy? Do we spend time dedicated to Torah and tefillah? Do others see us as gluttonous? Or gaudy? Do we show off?