When imagination is the mother of invention: Tazria-Metzora 5785

This week’s double parashah presents to us a difficult set of rituals regarding a type of disease that evinces physical manifestations. The rabbis associated this disease with the sins of improper speech and personal slander. We no longer have any real knowledge of the disease, its true appearances and effects, its quarantine period and the healing process that restored people to their community and society. The ritual laws of purity and impurity no longer apply in our post-Temple society and, since the Babylonian Talmud offers no specific analysis of these laws, they are not subject to the usual intensive scholarship and study that pertain, for instance, to the laws of money and torts in the Talmud. 

In the nineteenth century a great and learned Chasidic rebbe composed a “Talmud” regarding the laws of purity and impurity. This feat of erudition however met with criticism from other scholars, remaining controversial and largely ignored in modern yeshivot and the world of scholarship. Accordingly this topic remains mysterious and relatively inexplicable to us. When these two parshiyot occur together, as they do this year and in most years, the question of their relevance becomes even more acute and perplexing.

The Torah, which always challenges us to understand it, retains its inscrutability. And perhaps this is the message of the Torah to us. There is a world that is beyond our earthly eyes and rational vision. Modern man dreams of space aliens and universes other than the one we inhabit. An almost innate sense pervades us that there is more to creation than what we sense and feel. It fuels our individual drive to immortality, our dreams and imaginations, and it allows us to think creatively and to invent.

There is a popular saying that necessity is the mother of invention. I do not feel that this is so. Imagination is the mother of invention. There was no real necessity for the astonishing advances in technology that our past century has witnessed, but people who lived in a place beyond our own real world imagined the computer, the wireless phone and the internet. This capacity to deal with an unseen universe and bring it to fruition is one of the great traits of the human mind.

The Torah indicates to us the existence of an intangible world, a world of purity and impurity, of holiness and of the human quest for attachment to the Creator of all worlds. Even though our mindsets do not quite relate to this concept, the Torah wishes us to realize that such a world does exist beyond our limited human vision. And that is a very important and essential lesson in life. 

Shabbat shalom, Rabbi Berel Wein