From time to time couples come to see me before their wedding. Sometimes they ask me whether I have any advice to give them as to how to make their marriage strong. In reply I give them a simple suggestion. It is almost magical in its effects. It will make their relationship strong and in other unexpected ways it will…
The Sages understood tsara’at, the theme of this week’s parsha, not as an illness but as a miraculous public exposure of the sin of lashon hara, speaking badly about people. Judaism is a sustained meditation on the power of words to heal or harm, mend or destroy. Just as God created the world with words, He empowered us to create, and…
The Sages were eloquent on the subject of lashon hara, evil speech, the sin they took to be the cause of tsara’at. But there is a meta-halachic principle: “From the negative you can infer the positive”[1] So, for example, from the seriousness of the prohibition against Chillul Hashem, desecrating God’s name, one can infer the importance of the opposite, Kiddush…
Advances in medical technology such as in vitro fertilisation have raised complex ethical and legal questions. In the case of surrogacy for example – where the ovum comes from one woman, but the fertilised embryo is carried to term by another – who is the mother? On the one hand, the donor mother from whom the ovum is taken contributes…
The sidrot of Tazria and Metzora contain laws which are among the most difficult to understand. They are about conditions of “impurity” arising from the fact that we are physical beings, embodied souls, and hence exposed to (in Hamlet’s words) “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Though we have immortal longings, mortality is the condition of human…
On 20 December 2013, a young woman named Justine Sacco was waiting in Heathrow airport before boarding a flight to Africa. To while away the time, she sent a tweet in questionable taste about the hazards of catching AIDS. There was no immediate response, and she boarded the plane unaware of the storm that was about to break. Eleven hours…
The Parsha in a Nutshell Parshat Metzora continues with the themes we started to see in parshat Tazria, including the process of purification for tsara’at, the decay that causes skin disease in humans and discolouration in garments and the walls of houses. This parsha concludes with the process of purifying after various types of bodily discharges. Questions to Ponder The…