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May 3, 2025 - 5 Iyyar 5785 Parashat Tazria-Metsorah - Labels & Limitations
Dear Friends, Thanks to those of you who joined us for the first session of Understanding the Service Structure. We had a great turnout and there were terrific questions and discussion. If you would like to find out more about our services and why we include the prayers that we do, then be sure to Zoom in with us for the second part of the course. Part two will take place on Monday evening at 7:30PM and I hope you will join us. The Zoom link is below. It's been a while since I watched any of the singing competition shows like American Idol or the Voice, but one of the things that has stuck with me from these shows is a recurring pattern of feedback the contestants receive from their celebrity judges. I still remember one in particular from a few years ago… This exchange, between the Idol judges and a young woman named Siobhan, stood out to me. Frustrated with the continuous mixed messages of “be who you are,” but “don’t be afraid to take risks,” while critically slamming contestants who do just that, Siobhan struck back at the judges. They were trying to figure out, -- out loud, talking about her amongst themselves as much as, if not more than, actually speaking to her -- what genre seems to work best for her. Was it country, R&B, soul, pop, gospel, something else? The judges went back and forth, eventually throwing it back to her by saying something to the effect of, “We just don’t know who you are.” And she said to them, point-blank, “Even I can’t pinpoint who or what I am, and I’ve always kind of taken pride in that. I’m not just one kind of singer or one kind of person. If I can’t even label myself, I don’t think it’s necessary to be labeled. I just love to sing.” And I said, “Good for you. Don’t be labeled. Don’t pigeon-hole yourself.” Because that is precisely what the people in the music industry want. They want to know your category, your genre. They need to know how and where to file your songs and your albums, so that they know how to market you, how to make the most money off of you, how to make sure they know which of those categories, those genres, they have covered, and which spots they still need to fill. But it’s not just the music industry. It’s everyone. Everywhere we go, it seems people want to know how to sum you up in as few words as possible. In one way, it certainly makes sense. It’s easy and convenient. It’s efficient and economical. It saves us the time and energy we might have exerted actually getting to know someone beyond the surface of name, place of residence, or occupation. Even just saying it sounds like we’re filling out a form with our conversations, tucking our new acquaintance neatly under the proper tab in the filing cabinet of our brain. This week’s double Torah portion, Tazria-Metzora, deals mainly with the prescriptions for ritual purification from various skin diseases. Good times, right? The big deal here has to do with guarding against contagion, so concrete, black-and-white categorizations of who is pure and who is impure, who is clean and who unclean, are an absolute must. We see this way of thinking all throughout Halacha, the canon of traditional Jewish law, where everything fits into Column A or Column B, and never the twain shall meet. And yet, our Sages also teach us that saving a life is like saving the world because each of us, each individual, is really a world of its own. Perhaps we’re privileged to see only a facet or two of the people we meet, only a brief glimpse into a singular interest or hobby or passion of theirs. Even with our closest friends and family members, those whom we know the best, chances are we’ll never know all about them, never know every single detail of their life, their thoughts and feelings, their philosophies and worldview. And so, finding a label of a word or even a few may be convenient; it may be easy, but in essence it negates the person behind it, cutting away the facets and spheres of the divine spark that gives an individual his or her uniqueness. Because, it seems to me, few things are as limiting, as constraining, as a label. And the more concise the label, the more it suffocates the life out of the person or thing being labeled. I feel like this is all the more true of our world today. Our tastes in music, television, hobbies, clothing, music, sports, etc. are so diverse, so all over the place, that attempts to place someone in a particular category is increasingly laughable. While chatting on social media with a good friend in Los Angeles this week, he changed his status to read: “I’m talking to a rabbi, listening to Jay-Z, and writing about women’s boxing. Yeah, just try to put my life in a box.” Better still? Don’t. Try instead to realize the places in our life where categorizing and organizing are welcomed and encouraged—our work desks and files, our closets and clothing drawers, and our refrigerators and silverware drawers. And then with everything else, most especially with the people in our lives, toss it aside. Because we are each so much more than our hometowns, our colleges, our jobs, so much more than the sum of our individual parts. And when we take that propensity for labeling, that tendency of human nature to pigeon-hole, and just throw it completely away, that’s when we see people for who they truly are, and enjoy all that life has to offer us—without labels, without categories, without limitations. May it be so for us. Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Joshua Strom
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