This week’s Torah portion describes an uninspired procedure – the Priest examining an afflicted person’s skin disease. Yet it contains an essential truth about life, and a critique of our word.
In Leviticus 13:3, the Priest is deciding if the skin lesion denotes an impurity. One of the criteria is if “it is more than skin deep.” In other words – are we dealing with something that goes beyond the appearance and touches the character of the person?
The Torah is not fixated on appearances. Strange as it seems, for most of the major figures of the bible, we have no physical description. We do not know if Abraham was tall or short, or if Rebecca had brown hair. In an age of Instagram and selfies, there is a pervasive indifference in our sacred texts to the physical presentation of our greatest figures.
Even more, the Torah actively resists the imputation of morality to beauty. Many characters described as physically imposing are not impressive in their actions, such as Saul, Samson, and Goliath. We know from various studies that an attractive person is liable to be thought of more favorably. This is called the “halo effect” – that we tend to credit beauty with goodness. Yet character is not determined by one’s outward appearance, and as the poet Masefield reminds us: “I have seen flowers come in stony places.”
Never has a society been more fixated on the way things look than our own. But in combatting cruelty and promoting kindness in this world our tradition asks us to recall what God said to the prophet Samuel: people focus on what is visible, “but the Lord sees into the heart (I Sam. 16:7).”
Action is the measure of character. How we speak about and treat other human beings is the measure of our moral standing, not how we look on a screen. Many civilizations worshipped the contours of the human form, but the section from Proverbs we recite each Friday night, a “Woman of Valor,” reminds us that beauty can be deceitful but one who has reverence for God should be praised. Summing up the difference between the Greek and Jewish attitudes, the 19th century poet and scholar Matthew Arnold wrote that “Greece worshipped the holiness of beauty; Jews found the beauty of holiness.” For all of us, Jew and non-Jew, character is more than skin deep.
