Haftorah This Week
Welcome to Haftorah This Week, the place where you will find thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on this week's Haftorah.
HAFTARAT MEZTORA
(II Kings 7:3-20)
The ritually impure people described by Parshat Meztora are the marginal figures in the desert society of ancient Israel. They live outside the physical structure of the camp and are barred from the religious life of the people which focused on the Tabernacle. However we understand the relationship between their illness and their status as ritually impure, their marginality demands our attention. How were these people seen by their community? Can we actually assume that others saw them as innocent victims whose illness demanded their isolation? Or is it more likely that their fellow Israelites understood them as carriers of the dangerous contagion which could in turn cut them off from the social life of the camp and the religious life of the Tabernacle as well? The danger of the likely answer being the latter is all too real.
Perhaps that is why the Haftarah attached to this Torah portion tells the story that it does. We are told of four lepers in famine ridden, war ravaged Israel, whose situation is so desperate that the choice before them is not life or death, but only where to die. Rejecting that as the only possible choice, they decide to defect in the midst of a war, and risk their lives on the mercy of the Arameans. Arriving in the Aramean camp and finding it completely deserted, they eat their fill and fill their pockets with silver and gold. They report the desertion of the Arameans to their countrymen and lead the conquest of the Aramean camp, thus ending the war and the famine. The same four men who were forced to live outside the camp because of their leprosy, become the unguents of their people's redemption and of the prophet Elisha's vision.
All communities and the systems which articulate their values have borders, and therefore outsiders. The real question is: how often do we confuse those who may be outsiders to us or to our meaning systems with those who are somehow less human or less capable of enriching our lives and the lives of our people?
(Brad Hirschfield)
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