od omen for the Israelites. The ritual of emptying the house when one discovers a reddish – greenish stain on the wall, and if necessary, pulling out the stones, would have enabled the people of Israel to find treasures hidden by the previous occupiers – the Amorites, who had fled.
However, another Midrash (Leviticus Rabbah 17:3) interpreted this passage as a curse sent by God in order to punish the people by spreading slowly but surely this curious “disease”. In this context the emerging of tzaraat is a result of a sin, that of being greedy. “What does the Holy One, blessed be He, do? He causes tzaraat to alight on his house and as he takes out his household effects, people see and say: “Did he not say: “I have none”? See how much wheat is here, how much barley, how many dates! Cursed be the house with such cursed inmates.” (Leviticus Rabbah 17:2).
The Midrash describes a people who, after years of wandering, of fear and insecurity, is finally returning to a kind of normality. They settle in a land, build houses and look after their families rather than being preoccupied by the larger community. Their focus shifts to more personal and probably more selfish concerns. This behaviour, if it is not quickly dealt with, can become a bad habit. It is easy to see why this would have disturbed the Sages.
Nowadays also, the search for material security leads us to accumulate goods. Most of the time, we forget that our possessions are temporary and we tend to grasp them as the Israelites held tight to the land, Eretz achuzatchem (Leviticus 14:34) from the root – a ch z – meaning to grasp.
When we are given something, at the same time we are given the anxiety of losing it and for some of us it can turn into an obsession, a kind of plague – nega. In the Bible, the plague is materialized, made visible by God in the house and it can take some time until we are ready to acknowledge it and ask for help.
In our parashah however, help is at hand in the person of a priest, who diagnoses the nature of the problem and then provides the people with a ritual. Transposed to modernity, once one diagnoses one’s ‘plague’ – the moral suffering, the neurosis, one may seek help from a therapist.
Similarly, the traditional Pessah cleaning of the house, can itself become a neurosis, as seems to have been the case in Line’s family. Ultimately, it resulted in the sensation of “diminishing the space” and stifling their freedom. Line’s personal haggadah is filled with nostalgia stuck in the layers of the wallpapers and while reading her story, we can feel how those layers overwhelm her.
Our own families carry the haggadot of previous generations, some of them are wonderful and some are tragic, some are useful and some may become our stumbling blocks. Even if we seem settled in a country and in a home, in our minds we may continue to wander with the suitcases of our forefathers and foremothers, to whose baggage we add our own.
Pessah and more specifically the Seder table is often the occasion of passing on these metaphorical suitcases of stories and memories, to the next generation, with all their weight.
We have to sort out our stories, and inwardly “digest” them, before we pass them on. Clearing, cleaning and cleansing may then take on a fuller meaning and be transformative. It doesn’t mean watering down our family story or our popular history, or indeed embellishing it. We simply have to follow them through to be released from the bondage of past generations.
Freeing ourselves is about being able to throw out all that binds us and “ferments” in our interior, be it our homes or our minds.
By so doing, we will eventually rid ourselves of fears and insecurity so as to be able to open our hearts, start anew, ready to be rather than to possess or to grasp, and thus fully enjoy the liberating message of Pessah.
Hag Pessah Kasher vesameah.
Daniela Touati Student rabbi
1 Line,a former high school colleague, of Jewish Franco-Moroccan descent, is now a senior lecturer in Spanish literature, in “Petites histoires de la rue Saint Nicolas” Edition ALLIA p.16-17, tran