If you want to understand Tazria-Metsorah on a deep level, do what I did last week — walk the grounds of Auschwitz with March of the Living. There you will see barracks where life was not only extinguished, but systematically degraded. Life in the camps was not only designed to murder Jews; it was designed to make them murderable.
It is not always easy, even for people steeped in a hateful ideology, to kill other human beings. It takes a terrible alchemy: a process of stripping them — of clothes, of all hair on their bodies, of their own names — and forcing people into their own filth, to make them seem less than human. The more a human being was degraded into a ragged shadow, the easier it was to kill them. In the eyes of the Nazis, it was no longer murder, but sanitizing.
Laws of purity in the Torah are less about hygiene than about holiness. They are a way of saying that ‘cleanliness’ is not skin deep – it is from the soul. Purity radiates from inside. The greatest source of impurity in Jewish tradition is a corpse because that is a human being without the vital spark, the Godly spark, that makes us so much more than animals. A carcass is not pure. It takes a living, breathing person to be pure.
At Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek, and Auschwitz, we recited Kaddish, an affirmation of the purity of victims of the Nazi murder machine. Each man, woman, and child was not a number, or a corpse, or a forgotten, discarded body but a precious Jewish soul. We may not know all their names, but we hold them all in the words we prayed, in the steps we took in their memory, in the witness we bear to the world.
Laws of purity on one level may feel like an arcane relic of a time when Priests were consulted for conditions for which we seek medicine. But the lesson is so much deeper — it goes to the very essence of human dignity. Eighty years later, we still weep for them. We still remember them. And we still fight in their name.
