MEN’S CLUB NEWS
Dvar Torah - Parshat Tazria
By Louis Flancbaum
Shabbat shalom and welcome to Men’s Club Shabbat – where every aspect of the service is being conducted by members of the Men’s Club, sort of. I must confess that I didn’t exactly ask for this honor. Jay Greenspan asked me to do something for Men’s Club shabbat, I half-jokingly asked, “who’s speaking?” without even knowing the parsha. He then pretended to know the order by rattling off the names of several parshiot, and said: Achrei Mot, great parsha. I responded: let me think about it. Well, as luck would have it, 20 minutes later, my new drinking companion found me at the kiddush and told me that he spoke to the Rabbi and I had the job.
After shul, I went home and checked the calendar, only to discover that it was not Achrei Mot, but Tazria, perfect if I only was a dermatologist. I quickly reviewed the parsha in an effort to decide what to speak about and found myself not only perspiring profusely, but starting to itch and develop all sorts of rashes myself. My only consolation was knowing that Jay would surely develop full-blown tza’ra’at for getting me into this fix.
In any event, it is what it is and we are where we are. Last week, I was fascinated to hear from Russell Robinson the many things that JNF did besides planting trees and buying land. So before discussing the parsha, it is only appropriate that I share with you some of the terrific things that the Men’s Club does. Normally, this would be done by our President, Myron Shulman, but he is apparently on sabbatical this year. However, the Men’s Club really does do many important things for our shul and community. The list is very long and you can read it on our website: http://www.congregationbethshalomofteaneck. org/men’sclub/importantthingsthatwedo. But that stuff is old hat. Instead, what I would like to do is spend a few minutes talking about some of the new fun activities that the Men’s Club has scheduled designed to encourage people who are not members, like me, to join.
This past week, Brian Blitz prepared and hosted a Torah study session during which we studied this week’s and next week’s parshiot in great detail utilizing a game called “Name that Tza’ra’at”. We divided into 2 teams. Each was presented a series of color photos of the various lesions described in the parsha (you can find these at www.tzaraat.com, one of those websites designed to prepare us for life after the temple is rebuilt) and had to identify them and place them in the proper sequence. Then, Wally Cowan, who is not only a Kohein, but was actually around when this stuff was still being done so he has first-hand experience, came in to judge the results. The winners got to attend a Nets game with Joe Korn and Phil Rhodes, at their own expense, of course, but Phil did provide transportation in his 2008 silver Cadillac CTS – the “car of the year.” The losers, on the other hand had to figure out what idiot would give the d’var torah on next year’s Men’s Club shabbat.
Other planned activities include an eco-friendly, halachically-correct nature walk, led by Harry Kisseleff and Rabbi Lawrence Troster to be held on Lag B’Omer. Harry will lead us as we meander through the “greener” swamplands of Bergen County while Rabbi Troster will inspect the ground under us before we complete each step, to ensure that it is ecologically and halachically sound, allowing it to double as an introduction to Tai Chi.
Finally, we have a golf outing planned, in preparation of which Dr. Eitan Fishbane and Rabbi Elliot Schoenberg will discuss the compare and contrast the mystical and rationalistic meanings inherent in golf, such as the significance of playing 9 or 18 holes, the meanings of the various hazards (sand traps and water) as well as the scoring terms (eagle, birdie, par, and boggy) based upon the writings of the Ari and the Rambam. Seriously though, I do want to draw your attention to a real golf outing which is sponsored by the Rabbinical Assembly for the purpose of raising funds for the Yitro Educational Fund, which provides continuing education for Rabbis of the Masorti Movement throughout the world. This year, the tournament is dedicated to the memory of my late father-in-law, Irving Biskin, who loved golf and, as it turns out, was an active member of his shul’s men’s club in Troy, NY for many years. If any of you would like to make a donation to the RA for this worthy cause, please see Elliot, Debby or me. We will, in turn, notify Eddie Zizmor, who I guarantee will see to it that the pledge is paid, for a third.
OK. For those of you that are waiting for a real d’var torah, let me spend a few minutes trying to say something worthwhile about this week’s parsha. According to Rabbi Menachem Liebtag, who teaches Torah at Yeshivat Har Etzion, Tazria and Metzora consist of a series of laws dealing with ritual purity and impurity. The Torah painstakingly describes the various categories of “contamination” that result in ritual impurity, such as eating or touching dead bodies, the birth of a child, contact with lesions on a person’s skin or garment, the presence of tza’ra’at in one’s house, and various bodily emissions. Detailed instructions are given to Moshe about each of these forms of ritual impurity and the procedures for purification. The purpose of these laws is solely to ensure that only individuals that are ritually pure enter the Mishkan or Temple. They are inserted at this point in Sefer VaYikra to clarify the issue of who can enter the Mishkan after Nadav and Avihu violated the prohibition of doing so. So, if one had no need, desire or intension to ever enter the Mishkan or Temple, or, as in our time, cannot do so because there is no Temple, then these laws actually serve no purpose.
However, over the centuries, perhaps because of this, the commentators have attributed various other meanings to the affliction of tza’ra’at, the most famous being that it is a physical manifestation of a spiritual infirmity caused by engaging in certain sins, most notably lashon hara. This explanation, while interesting and perhaps plausible, certainly serves the purpose of transforming tza’ra’at into a biblical illness that is a punishment from God for one’s sins. This category of schar v’onesh (reward and punishment) is one that is alluded to numerous times in the Tanach and which the Rabbis utilized extensively throughout our history to explain everything form a minor cold to a major catastrophe.
However, the use of schar v’onesh to explain adverse outcomes has several problems. First, it portrays God as vengeful and often cruel, which challenges the sensibilities of many modern believers. Second, it requires that God be intimately involved with all sorts of the minutiae in people’s daily existence, which challenges the notion of free will.
So, if this model doesn’t work, and I suspect that it doesn’t work for most of you just as it doesn’t for me, how does one reconcile things like illness, personal and national tragedy, and the role of prayers (especially those like birkat ha-gomel or mi she’berach for cholim), with belief in a beneficent and caring God.
For me personally, this has at times been quite challenging. I am the child of Holocaust survivors, so I grew up without grandparents and a very limited extended family. I became a surgeon, and for 25 years devoted my practice to caring for the “sickest of the sick”: trauma and emergency surgery patients, critically ill patients, and most recently bariatric surgery patients – areas that many consider the most challenging within general surgery. During that time, I would like to believe that I helped most of my patients and saved a lot of lives, while probably killing a few people along the way. I saw many people live that I thought would die, and watched many die who I swore would live. I saw the natural order turned upside down over and over, with parents burying children rather than the reverse. Contrary to popular belief, surgery is actually quite a humbling experience. Then, last May, I myself was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which instantaneously ended my career as a surgeon. Now, instead of spending my days in the operating room dealing with the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, my days are spent taking zillions of antioxident pills to retard its progression and learning all sorts of new activities, like yoga, tai chi, piano lessons and golf, designed to “open” new neurological pathways in my brain. (FYI – PD does not shorten one’s lifespan and I have a very mild case with only an occasional tremor, so I can potential go decades without getting worse while waiting for the Bob Goodman’s of the world to tell me its time to inject some viruses into my brain and cure me). And it’s not all bad’ there are some perks. I get to spend a lot of time with my lovely wife and my beautiful granddaughter and smoke cigars because the nicotine receptors in the brain are near the dopamie receptors.
As you can imagine, I have spent many hours during my life pondering the question of schar v’onesh. For any number of reasons, I can’t accept it as a personal theology – it is simply too painful. Although I do believe in a God that created the Universe and the scientific laws that govern it, I do not believe that God concerns himself or herself with the everyday goings on in lives of individuals. I am content to acknowledge that God is actually quite busy keeping the mountains out of the oceans and the clouds up in the sky (a la Job) and may, on rare epochal occasions, intervene in the workings of the world, as suggested by Emil Fackenheim.
Therefore, I don’t believe that God gave me Parkinson’s disease as some sort of punishment, nor do I believe God participated in the Holocaust or any number of personal or communal tragedies to punish us. That is not to say that I do not believe that people should not be introspective and examine their own behaviors in order to optimize their health and well-being, as we are commanded to do. People, except me, should not smoke and should watch their weight, exercise regularly, etc. However, I believe, as does Maimonides, that decay, disease and death are a natural part of the human condition. They were “created”, if you will, by God, as were the other laws of nature and God cannot and does not interfere in them. When we say the Amidah or offer a mi-shebeirach, we are not actually asking God to intervene on behalf of a particular individual. If we really believed that, then we would have to live with the notion that one child or one parent or one sibling was spared by God because he or she was more deserving than another – a notion that I think many of us would find irreconcilable. Rather, I prefer to believe that these prayers offer thanks to, or acknowledge, God for creating a universe in which the advances in medicine or weather prediction or whatever that have occurred over time exist and pray that such advances continue to occur in the future. This is the meaning of the biblical command “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it....” (Gen 1:28), in which God gives all of humankind permission to create solutions to the world’s problems. In halacha, as a general rule, the needs of the community always trump those of the individual. I believe that prayer is no exception; our prayers are primarily communal in nature and not meant to be for the benefit of us as individuals.
So, in conclusion, I would like to think that the messages of the parshiot of tazria and metzora do have relevance for us today, even if their primary purpose no longer exists. Shabbat shalom and please support the Men’s Club and the Irving M. Biskin Memorial Golf Tournament. And if any sees Myron Shulman, please send him home.
