Turning Over a New Leaf

One of the hardest things we face is change. It's rarely pleasant, and often requires paradigm shifts that mean re-examining our lives in ways that create new demands, admissions about the past, and a need to relate differently to either different people or things that were entrenched as a given in our lives. 

The biblical exemplar of change could be said to be the experience of the leper, or a metzora, who either experiences bodily changes, his skin becoming blotched in different colors and hues, alternating textures, and protrusions, that concave in or out, or whose clothing itself becomes spotted, or whose walls overnight become blotched. For each of the above, there is a different purification process, making this one of the most abstruse topics in all of biblical literature. Priests were trained, and specialized in gauging and examining different shapes and hues, paying repeat home visits, and were essentially the biblical version of a modern day oncologist, the commonality between them that the same way leprosy uses the body's energies against itself, similarly does cancer, and its metastasizing cells. 

Thankfully, leprosy could be cured, cancer, often cannot. What is worth honing in on is the process through which the metzora becomes cured. Essentially, he's hurt the world and himself, by employing inappropriate speech that rather than build, destroys. 

To deal with such a malady, perhaps similar to cancer, every errant element of the person's personality has to change; he has to admit his wrong, even calling out twice upon exiting the encampment of his fellow brothers and sisters, "Impure, impure," for his being, on a bodily level, took on the embodiment of his adulterated, corrupted self. Rather than build up another, he put him down. Rather than share positive feedback, the response was deleterious slander, or libel, behind closed doors. The person sought to spread ill will, and so he or she, was punished out in the open, having to make a full reckoning, leaving behing the comfort of family, friends, regularity and routine, to become a hermit with no communal attachment, someone expunged from society, who turned his back on them and so, needs to leave to see how truly dependent he is on them.

It sorts of reminds me of a scene in the play, "Twelve Angry Men," when the jurors as one, turn their backs on Juror 10 after he declares that the defendant in the murder trial should be put to death because he's no more than a "slum dweller," like all the other minorities living in New York's filthy back alleys. They turn their back on him, and only then, faced by the rejection of his fellow jurors, can he stop his rant and realize the gravity of what he has said, meaning the recognition of one's depths, with the assistance of others, can be a springboard for reappraisal and preservation of one's inner dignity, seeing the good in others.