Kevin Bemel ·
Gain Greater Life Balance With This Insight
When seeking a balanced life, often I notice disequilibrium in retrospect. I wish G-d had let me know sooner. Parshas Tazria, explains the delay:
A person . . . it will be on the skin of his flesh a tzaraas affliction . . . if hair in the affliction has changed to white . . . the Kohen shall look at it and declare him spiritually contaminated. (Vayikra/Leviticus 13:2-3).
This week’s parsha tells about a woman becoming tahor, spiritually purified, after giving birth. Then it explains how to verify a tzaraas, baheres or s’eis affliction on a person's body or a tzaraas affliction on a garment.
Tzaraas’s common translation, leprosy, is inaccurate. The latter is a chronic, infectious physical malady caused by Mycobacterium leprae. Tzaraas is a spiritual disease contracted because a person’s life is out of balance.
Forces Striving for Balance in Your Soul
Chassidic teaching says two opposing forces drive the human soul: the drive to run or escape known as ratzo, and the drive to settle known as shov. When moved by excitement, love, ambition, or yearning, you are escaping your current self to reach for something greater, more beautiful and perfect. But if you experience awe, humility, devotion, or commitment, you are settling, affirming your connection to existence, your place in the world and mission in life. Ratzo drives you to climb a mountain. Shov to build a home. Ratzo to pray, shov to fulfill a duty.
When spiritually healthy, your soul vacillates between ratzo and shov. It swings like a pendulum or the contraction/expansion of a smoothly beating heart.
The constraints of your place in the world, the finiteness of your nature and body, the boundaries of your very being, all impel you to escape. Your soul wants to strive for the unbounded and infinite. But escaping brings you to a place where you can better appreciate the beauty and necessity of your existence. When ratzo peaks it causes a counteraction of shov. You return to yourself and your place in the world. But now you're more deeply immersed in your soul and on a higher spiritual plane.
Tzaraas occurs when the pendulum of the soul ascends in its ratzo arc but fails to swing back in shov. Constant striving to escape creates a vacuum in the soul. This creates space where all sorts of undesirable elements can take root like weeds in an abandoned garden.
Normal Struggles Versus Imbalance
The combination white patch and white hair symptoms of tzaraas symbolize this void. A patch of white skin indicates that life and vitality have departed from this part of the body. But a white patch alone does not mean the soul's failure to settle has resulted in any negative developments in the character and behavior of the person. When white hairs sprout in the white patch, now dead things are feeding on this dead place. A full-blown case of tzaraas has developed.
Note, white hairs alone also do not indicate tzaraas. These might represent the ordinary baggage that you lug through life. Or they could come from ordinary negative traits and experiences. These have the positive function of challenging you and stirring your finest talents and most potent energies. By leaving behind this negative baggage you, in effect, pluck out the white hairs.
But when the white patch nurtures white hairs, something serious is afoot. At that point, the person has so run away with his escapist impulses he has completely abandoned his commitments to life and productivity. He leaves behind a hollow and lifeless self. He becomes a breeding ground for the worst in human nature.
Imagine the humiliation of people seeing your tzaraas and knowing your life was spiritually imbalanced. I'm not sure I could bear it. Yet it would provide motivation to get my life back in balance. In the meantime, search for concrete signs of impending spiritual disequilibrium. When you keep your spirit strong, you have a powerful ally for maintaining physical and mental balance.
What do you look for that indicates a spiritual imbalance in your life?
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Every year beginning on Simchas Torah, the cycle of reading the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, ends and begins again. Each Sabbath a portion known as a sedra or parsha is read. Its name comes from the first significant word or two with which this weekly reading begins.
Do you have a question about the Old Testament? Ask it here and I will answer it in a future Parsha Nugget!
