ESSAY: Being the Kohen For Our Afflicted Parts (Parashat Tazria-Metzora)

These parshiyot deal with afflictions, primarily tzara’at, a skin disease commonly translated as “leprosy.”  What I want to highlight about the Torah’s framing of these afflictions is its essential optimism, its focus on the process of healing and purification.  The orientation is towards “getting better,” not being stuck or irredeemable, but getting better.  I want to consider how we can learn to adopt this optimistic attitude towards our own afflictions and suffering, both physical and emotional.  

Your Inner Kohen

Maybe one way to cultivate such an attitude towards suffering is to learn to inhabit our inner kohen (priest), to develop our capacity to be a divine representative on earth.  We were born to do this – we do carry the divine presence inside us – but usually we are not aware of it, so it takes practice to continually focus and invite this energy to grow stronger and to flow and spread through us so that we can lead our internal system from this divine kohen space.

It is from this kohen perspective that we can then turn to the tzaru’a inside us, to the part or parts of us that are afflicted in some way, either physically or emotionally, perhaps a chronic illness or pain or unhealed injury, or a sense of longing or loneliness or hurt or fear or anxiety, either something new or an old familiar ache.

Seeing the Affliction

The first thing the kohen does with the affliction is to SEE it.  Vera’ah hakohen. “And the priest shall see.” This phrase appears repeatedly in Parashat Tazria (and nowhere else in the Torah), practically every other verse, a total of 24 times, a kind of mantra: the kohen should see.  That’s his job – to really see what is going on, to care enough to see that there is suffering here. 

Can you do that inside you?  Be the kohen, remain in the fullness of your divine presence, and from that divine perspective, be God’s eyes on earth.  See the hurt, the ache, with the kindness, the compassion, the clarity, the tenderness, the wholeness of the divine.   See how much it hurts.  See how deep the cut is, what it feels like, how much suffering is here.  You are seeing as a kohen, with God’s eyes.  Look with gentleness and love.  And let the hurt parts of you know that you see them – yes, I see how much you suffer, I see your pain.   In this seeing alone, there is already great nourishment and healing, in the feeling of having our deepest pain acknowledged and brought into the light.  

Seeing Wholeness

And it’s not just the pain that is seen.   When the kohen looks at the afflicted person, he sees affliction but also wellness; even in this impure state, the kohen, looking from God’s perspective, can see the essential purity and wholeness that is just under the surface of the current imbalance, and it is though this seeing that the kohen gradually helps the person heal.  I see your suffering, the kohen says, but I also see your strength and vitality and potential for healing and health.   What the kohen does in seeing in this way is to help the person see themselves, too, as essentially strong and capable of healing; they begin to see themselves through the kohen’s eyes, and come to believe and grow into their own healing.  We can do that for our own afflicted parts and for one another, “see” ourselves into wellness. 

Optimism

Because seeing as a kohen, through God’s eyes, means seeing with optimism and confidence, knowing that this aching part can and will heal from this affliction, understanding that healing is part of how God created the world.   God always creates the cure before the disease, the rabbis say.  Already lying within the affliction is the capacity for healing.  When we look from the divine perspective, we can see both at once, the suffering as well as the wholeness that is also always present.  

This hopefulness is important because often, in addition to the affliction itself, we also suffer from a cloud of hopelessness that surrounds it, from a sense of being stuck in our hurt.  Perhaps we have tried for a long time to get better and not succeeded, and so, when we look at this affliction, we tend to look at it with eyes of despair and impossibility.  

What we need to do is to approach the despair, too, as another one of our afflictions.  We can take a step back from both the original affliction as well as the despair around it, inhabit our kohen persona and see them both through that lens, bringing in the divine attributes of trust, hope, faith and spaciousness, a sense of possibility.   It is through these kohen eyes that we view all of our afflictions, even the despair, inhabiting that wider kohen space, and knowing that healing will happen, trusting in the process of health and wholeness that always wants to unfold in God’s universe.   

We can help each other and our own afflicted parts see themselves as the kohen sees them, as only temporarily imbalanced, temporarily afflicted, but always essentially whole, essentially pure. 

Vetame ad ha’erev is another repeated phrase in our parshiyot.  Vetame ad ha’erev.  He is impure until nightfall.  Only until nightfall is he impure. We can heal.  We can move forward.  Vetame ad ha’erev.  The affliction, the impurity, is only temporary.   

Healing Takes Time

Of course sometimes nightfall is not enough; sometimes it takes longer.  Seven days, and maybe another seven days, or even longer; it took forty years in the desert for the community to heal enough from slavery to be able to enter a new life and land.  Healing, transformation, growth – they take time.  Here, again, we can put on our kohen glasses and look at the process from the divine perspective, a long range perspective, with plenty of patience.  Parts of you may want it to be over now, may want the pain to end, the anxiety and despair to disappear, the affliction to be healed immediately.  But the kohen understands that these processes take time.  Sometimes they are quick, and sometimes they take time.    

The important thing here is that we don’t give up on anyone.  The kohen returns to check, again and again.  We don’t abandon our hurt parts, we keep attending to them, we let them know we, in our kohen perspective, do not view them as hopeless or irredeemable.  We believe in them.  We will wait and stay the course.   God’s time is long and slow and patient.  

Rest, Too, Is Needed

And there is rest here, in kohen time.  We don’t normally take much time to rest.  But one of the things we learn in this parsha is that healing requires rest.  It requires maybe leaving our ordinary activities for some time, getting out of the frenzy of daily life, and pausing to take the time to heal.  The seven-day period of leaving the camp prescribed by the Torah has the resonance of shabbat; it is itself a kind of shabbat, a designated resting place set aside for healing.  We are in a rush to heal, but our afflicted parts require the spaciousness of divine time, long and patient and restful.  

Co-Regulation with the Kohen’s Nervous System

I want to offer our afflicted parts one other experience from the parsha.  Later in the process, when the kohen declares the affliction to be fully healed, the afflicted person comes to the sanctuary with certain animal sacrifices, and the priest stands with him in the doorway to the sanctuary – vehe’emid hakohen hamitaher et ha’ish hameetaher (Leviticus 14:11), the Torah says.   The person being cleansed is described as ha’ish hameetaher, “the one being cleansed,” and the kohen as hakohen hamitaher, “the priest who cleanses.”  The two words are very similar, meetaher and mitaher, written identically, with only slight vowel distinctions, as if to imply a symmetry between the cleanser and the cleansed, the healer and the healed.   There is a mirroring effect: The healer heals the healed one and in the process, the healed one also heals the healer.  There is a co-regulation, a mirroring of nervous systems between the mitaher and the meetaher, as, in the final phase of the process, they become re-integrated.  

You can practice this internally by becoming aware of your kohen persona, your largest divinely connected self, and at the same time also, of all those afflicted parts of you, gradually helping the afflicted parts co-regulate with the nervous system of the kohen.  At first the afflicted parts may feel jittery or collapsed in their energy, but allow them to feel the calm patient spaciousness of the kohen, and to slowly come to co-regulate, like two heartbeats that are now beating in a similar rhythm, mitaher and meetaher, very similar, the afflicted one coming into the taharah, the cleansed, pure, calm confidence of the kohen’s rhythm, and then the movement going back and forth, like a current between them, co-regulating, your kohen self and your afflicted parts together, relaxing, re-integrating and becoming whole again.    

Staying With Them

Of course the whole process takes time, and needs repetition and practice.  There is no rush to the finish line.  The main thing is to let our afflicted parts sense the faith we have in their ultimate healing, the optimism of the kohen view on things, and the loyalty, the steadfastness of the kohen’s returning again and again to attend to them.  Whatever state your tzaru’a parts are in right now, let them at least feel the nourishment of this attentiveness and this optimism.  They are not stuck or alone or hopeless.  We, like the kohen, have the confidence and the trust to stay the course with them.  

Photo by Josh Willink at Pexels