Threshold: Never back to Normal
כָּל־יְמֵ֞י אֲשֶׁ֨ר הַנֶּ֥גַע בּ֛וֹ יִטְמָ֖א טָמֵ֣א ה֑וּא בָּדָ֣ד יֵשֵׁ֔ב מִח֥וּץ לַֽמַּחֲנֶ֖ה מוֹשָׁבֽוֹ׃
“For as many days as the disease is on him, he shall be tamei. Being tamei, he shall dwell apart. His dwelling shall be outside the camp” (Vayikra/Leviticus 13:46).
Much ink (and blood, for that matter) have been spilled over this week’s Torah portion, Tazria-Metzora, which details the fluids, growths, and infections that affect our, and our environment’s, status as either tamei or tahor. “Unclean” or “clean.” “Impure” or “pure.” Or, as my friend and colleague Faith Brigham Leener, of Base Brooklyn, translates, “ritually unready” or “ritually ready.”
Because so much misogynist and ableist rhetoric has been employed (and so much damage, so much exclusion, so much harm and injury and death; done) around the concepts of tamei and tahor, it is difficult to push beyond our internalized notions to try and encounter the text broadly and generously. Let’s try anyway.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her foundational 1966 book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, notes, “Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment” (2).
Douglas’s attempt to analyze cultural taboos as judgment-neutral fails at many levels, but at the base level of “order,” she’s got a point: as we move through the COVID-19 pandemic, we can see both a craving for order, organization, control, and predictability; at the same time, we see clearly taboos surrounding race, class, ability, gender, and size.
In the days of the Torah, the stakes were stark and clear:
וְהִזַּרְתֶּ֥ם אֶת־בְּנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל מִטֻּמְאָתָ֑ם וְלֹ֤א יָמֻ֙תוּ֙ בְּטֻמְאָתָ֔ם בְּטַמְּאָ֥ם אֶת־מִשְׁכָּנִ֖י אֲשֶׁ֥ר בְּתוֹכָֽם
“You shall put the Israelites on guard against their tumah, lest they die through their tumah by defiling My Tabernacle which is among them” (Vayikra 15:31).
These days, to many of us, they stakes are equally high:
(@PNW_Louise on Twitter)
[Image description: rows depicting contagion rates based on use of masks; COVID-19 carrier with no mask has 70% possibility of infecting a masked uninfected person; carrier with mask, 5% possibility of infecting unmasked uninfected; carrier with mask, 1.5% possibility of infecting masked uninfected. “WEAR IT!”]
Today as in the ancient past, anyone with “symptoms” or “signs” is asked (or sometimes, required) to isolate themself for a prescribed period of days or weeks. In our moment, as in the Israelite priests’ days, there will be rituals and procedures for reentry and “normalization”: not the sprinkled blood of turtledoves on a stone altar, but sacrifices, to be sure. Social distancing measures will continue; restrictions against large, in-person gatherings will linger on for many, many months. All in service of attempting to have some modicum of control over the precarious line between death and life.
Our children (and we, for that matter) are having a tough time with these sacrifices. They ask, Why do we have to wear masks? We’re not sick.
No. Thank G-d, we are not sick. Not that anyone can tell by looking: as we know, many asymptomatic people can be carriers for COVID-19.
In our neighborhood, who is sick? Well, according to two of my college classmates, Doctors (and twin sisters) Uni and Uché Blackstock, here in Brooklyn, its black and brown folks, disproportionately. As Dr. Uché Blackstock recently told Mother Jones, “34 percent of fatalities in New York have been Latinos, who make up just 29 percent of the population, while 28 percent of fatalities have been Black New Yorkers, though they make up just 22 percent of residents” (“These Twin Sisters Are on the Front Lines Fighting the “Pandemic of Inequality” in New York City,” Jamilah Jones, Mother Jones, 10 April 2020).
It’s clear to me, then, that “back to normal” is, frankly, unethical. “Normal” was employers claiming that “work from home” strategies were “impossible” in their firm or their field, when it was “just” disabled or immunocompromised or parenting folks who inquired about the possibility, suddenly open to everyone working productively (with full trust) from home. “Normal” has long been literally deadly implicit bias in all fields of medicine, causing clinicians to ignore Black patients’ reports of pain; add to that the current COVID-19 testing shortage, and the criteria which privilege folks who have had the ability to travel to certain regions in the past few months (see “How Racial Disparities Will Play Out in the Pandemic,” Julia Craven, Slate, 30 March 2020). I think it’s worth reading Dr. Blackstock in some detail:
“When it’s time for clinicians to ration resources, I think we can already assume that Black patients are going to be disadvantaged because they’re not going to be listened to. They’re going to be disadvantaged because even if you say we’re going to use a certain protocol, which we’re saying is objective, it’s not really objective. It has bias embedded in it. And I think it’s just going to compound the inequities.” (Slate).
We are at the threshold of a disaster compounding a past sin, the sin of enslavement and racial discrimination. And thresholds are dangerous: they’re the border between “us” and “them,” between “inside” and “outside,” between “safe” and “dangerous” — at least, that’s what we tell ourselves.
In the Torah, when a previously isolated individual is admitted back into the camp, into the community, they are instructed to “remain outside [their] tent seven days” (Vayikra 14:8).
I used to think of this step in the reentry process as a cruel one, a finger-pointing of sorts. But these days, I think about resting on my elbows on my windowsill, spring breeze coming in through the screen, hearing my neighbors (some of whom I know by name, many of whom I know by sight, and some who feel like strangers) shout and hoot and holler and drum in support of essential workers. And maybe against racism and bias and contagion. And maybe in hopes of connection and meaning. Who knows?
I think about what it would be like, when this is all “over,” to sit at our thresholds and acknowledge that we have not “all been in the same boat,” because some of us paddle furiously to stay afloat in vessels already riddled by the implicit bias Dr. Blackstock so clearly identifies. I think about what it would be like to spend time at our thresholds reevaluating what we want “normal” to be.
When my younger child struggled against anxiety to fall asleep, they asked me, again, “Why do we have to stay inside? Why do we have to change our whole life for this virus?”
I answered with a piece of wisdom from rabbinic tradition:
וכל המקיים נפש אחת …מעלה עליו הכתוב כאילו קיים עולם מלא
“One who saves a single soul, the Torah counts it as if they had saved a whole world” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5).
Normally, when I teach this text, my students interpret it this way: Each individual is like a world unto themselves, with family and friends and wishes and hopes, with potential unfulfilled and contributions to make; therefore, saving one person means saving those relationships, that potential, allowing an entire world to flourish.
But my child had a different view. “How can what the rabbis taught be true?” I asked. And my precious kiddo answered, “Well, if you save someone’s life, then they know it’s possible to save someone’s life. So then they will save someone’s life. And they’ll save someone’s life, too, and you can save the whole world.”
In other words, saving a life lets others know that it is possible to save the world. Saving a life empowers each of us to take whatever small action, because it will, eventually, make a huge difference.
The line between death and life has always been tenuous for us: we are mortal. In this crisis, there’s another line we should take great care not to cross.
“What’s at stake here?” Slate journalist Julia Kraven asked Uché Blackstock.
“Humanity. If we don’t think about the most vulnerable members of our society, what kind of society are we? We talk about all the values of living in this country, but if we don’t take care of each other, we don’t take care of the people that really have the least, then we are on a, really, a very dangerous, dangerous course — especially with this pandemic” (Slate).
During the Nazi Holocaust, during whith 6 million Jews and at least 1 million other “undesirables” were systematically murdered while so many “bystanders” did nothing, brave folks like Oskar Schindler and Irena Stanislawa Sendler saved hundreds of souls, of worlds. Indeed, Schindler later received a ring inscribed with those words from the Mishnah, “He who saves a life saves a world entire.” But the rabbis of Jewish tradition first warned us, “One who destroys a single life, the Torah counts it as if they had destroyed an entire world.” It’s a lesson heavy on my mind, as Yom HaZikaron laShoah velaGvurah, Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day, fell this past Tuesday.
Many of us, behind the relative safety of our thresholds, want to know who is “infected” and who is “healthy.” And we want to know, as my child desperately does, that our sacrifices are making a difference, are saving lives (they are).
I hope we also want to know that we, each person in our camp, in our community, in our nation and our global society, has a future. That we each have a part to play in saving a world, the only world we’ve got.
