This week’s Torah portion discusses tzaraat, a mysterious spiritual-medical condition that causes impurity and can manifest itself in one’s skin, clothes, belongings or even one’s house. Most commonly, it appears on the skin, and perhaps for this reason it is often mistranslated as leprosy.
While the skin manifestation is more common, tzaraat of the home is undoubtedly the strangest of the disease’s incarnations. What does it even mean for a house to contract a disease that renders it impure? Stranger still, the Torah tells us that tzaraat only afflicted homes in the land of Israel, and only right after the Israelites took possession of the land, as the Torah states: “When you come to the land of Canaan, which I give you as a possession, and I place a plague of tzaraat upon a house in the land of your possession…” (Leviticus 14:34).
One well-known talmudic explanation for this curious state of affairs is that God sent a plague on the houses captured by the Israelites in the land of Canaan so that they would renovate them, thereby exposing gold and treasure hidden within their walls. The Zohar, in its homily on this topic, cites this explanation and then resolutely rejects it. In its place, the Zohar offers a different understanding of the plague on Israelites homes.
It is written: “When you come to the land of Canaan … and I place a plague of tzaraat upon a house in the land of your possession” (Leviticus 14:34). Now, is this a good message — that such a plague should be found among those who merit entering the land? Rather, it has already been established: It was in order to uncover treasures hidden in their houses and thereby benefit Israel.
But come and see: It is written, “And all the women whose hearts lifted them in wisdom spun the goats’ hair” (Exodus 35:26). At the time when they performed the work, they would say: “This is for the sanctuary,” “This is for the tabernacle,” “This is for the curtain,” and so said all those artisans, so that holiness might rest upon their hands, and the work itself would become sanctified. When it was completed and rose to its place, it rose in holiness.
In the same manner, one who performs work for idolatry or for the impure “Other Side” — once he mentions that work (as dedicated to those things), behold, a spirit of impurity rests upon him. And when the work is completed, it ascends in impurity.
The Canaanites were idolators, all of them cleaving as one to the spirit of impurity in their worship. They would build structures for their images and their abominations, on the side of impurity of idolatry. When they began to build, they would utter words (of dedication), and once these were spoken from their mouths, a spirit of impurity would come upon them. When the work was completed, it was completed in a spirit of impurity.
When Israel entered the land, the Holy One, Blessed be He, desired to purify them and to sanctify the land for them, and to prepare a place for the Divine Presence, for the Shekhinah does not dwell amidst impurity. Therefore, through that plague of leprosy, they would demolish those buildings of wood and stone that had been made in impurity.
Come and see: If this matter were only for uncovering treasures, they should have returned the stones afterward to their places, and the dust to its place. But the verse says: “They shall remove the stones” (Leviticus 14:40), and it also says: “And other dust shall be taken” (Leviticus 14:42) — in order that the spirit of impurity be removed and eliminated, and that now it be sanctified as before. Then Israel would be found in holiness, and in a holy dwelling, so that the Shekhinah might dwell among them.
Zohar 3:50a
Translation based on the Pritzker edition.
Explore this passage in context on Sefaria.
In the Zohar’s view, the Talmud’s explanation that God sent a plague of tzaraat on the Israelites’ newly captured homes in order to expose buried treasure does not make sense. After all, if that were the case, why does the Torah relate that the building materials were discarded rather than recycled during the renovation? Wouldn’t it make more sense to repurpose them?
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The Zohar offers a different understanding of the plague, which explains why the materials were not salvageable: The quality of an architectural structure, says the Zohar, does not — as we might suppose — depend only on the excellence of its building materials. Nor on the precision of the blueprints, nor on the skill of the construction workers. From a mystical and spiritual perspective, the quality of the structure actually depends on the intention of those who build it. The question is not who created the house or how, but why they created it in the first place. A home that was created for negative or illegitimate ends can never be a quality home. It is unsalvageable.
The Amorites and the Canaanites, the Zohar explains, built their homes as places for idol worship. This imbued the structures with a spirit of impurity, and it also made them unsalvageable. The function of the house plague of tzaraat, it turned out, was to induce a kind of revelation. It made visible what the human eye could not previously discern: that the intentions embedded in the foundations of these structures were wrong. The houses, therefore, had to be demolished and new homes built in their place — homes that were consecrated from the first.
By contrast, the Zohar points out, the Torah tells us of the women who wove the tabernacle’s curtains that “their hearts lifted them up.” The purity and intention in those women’s hearts endowed the curtains of God’s home with sanctity.
The Zohar here is asking us to reframe the way that we judge building projects — and perhaps all human achievements. While two structures may look similar, there is a hidden metric that may distinguish them nonetheless: the intention with which they were made.
This piece was originally published as part of A Year of Zohar: Kabbalah for Everyone, an original series produced by My Jewish Learning and Sefaria. Sign up for the entire series here.
