Have you ever been shamed?

Have you ever felt like a person has publicly attempted to shame you or rebuke you?

Have you ever done it yourself?

This week, we read Parshat Tazria-Metzora, the parashah known as being famously hard to interpret. It's all about skin disease and mold. Yuck.

The rabbis in the Talmud felt the same way about it, I imagine, which is why they anchored one of their most important Jewish claims in it: that it is defamation and shaming that are the disease described in it, not leprosy. I often joke to bnai mitzvah students: this is basically the only synagogue-appropriate topic in this parashah. (If you want to hear the other one, come to Torah study tomorrow morning.)

This sin is considered to be in Judaism the fourth cardinal sin. In a profound teaching on this topic, Rabbi Shai Held explicates a teaching from the Talmud that a person is supposed to be martyred rather than ever shame another person publicly. That is: the prohibition on shame is as serious as the prohibition of idolatry, rape, or murder, and the sin is called comparable to them in its seriousness.

Rabbi Held writes: "There is no question that one may not humiliate another person ... According to a variety of Jewish sources, the honor of a person is in many ways akin to the honor of God."

He continues: "All too often, we tend to rationalize the act of embarrassing people. Sometimes, after speaking abusively to another person, we can almost hear ourselves saying, "It's not like I killed them, is it?" Actually, Jewish ethics reminds us, it is."

It's hard right now to be distant from other people all the time. It's hard to be cooped up in houses, away from our normal communities and world. It puts us all on edge. And that's why I think it's helpful to think of the impulse to shame as like an illness, not just a sin.

The Torah itself makes this comparison of shaming to illness. It's similar in many ways. Shaming is contagious. It operates in crowds. And it's something that can't just be fixed at the symptoms - you have to get to the root causes.

We should try to always view other people charitably. We should try to act kindly toward others all the time, and at a bare minimum, never shame, or apologize when we do - we all make mistakes. But most significantly, we should spend some time thinking about our own self. What leads us to places of arrogance or anger? What leads us to places of entitlement? How can we avoid those causes? How can our prayer life and Shabbat practices lead us toward a more Torah-filled way of living? How can our commitment to Judaism make us better people, rather than worse people?

That's the real task of Torah. To become better, holier, kinder, every day. And every day is a new, totally refreshed, opportunity for that.

Shabbat Shalom

Rabbi Woodward