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Life and Death Are in the Power of the Tongue
- Rabbi Sarah Weissman
- Apr 17
- 5 min read
April 17, 2026
Leprosy. This week’s Torah portion is about leprosy. Or some other kind of skin affliction. In great detail, our portion outlines the process for the priests to diagnose the affliction, quarantine the individual outside the camp, and then perform the rituals and offerings needed to bring the afflicted person back into the community. It is probably the strangest and grossest parashah in the whole Torah. Biblical scholars have done their very best to make sense of it. They try to explain the concept of ritual purity and impurity, or attempt to accurately identify what disease is being described, or explore ancient understandings of illness and healing. But no one has yet adequately explained why the Torah’s authors felt it necessary to include this material in the Torah. What is a rash doing in our sacred scriptures?
Unlike modern scholars, the Sages take an entirely different approach to interpreting this parashah. Through a simple bit of wordplay, they turn this bizarre discussion of skin afflictions into something much more relatable. Here it is: the person with the skin disease is called a m’tzora, one who is afflicted with tzara’at. The Talmud teaches, “Reish Lakish says: What is the meaning of that which is written: ‘This shall be the law of the leper [metzora] in the day of his cleansing: He shall be brought to the priest’ (Leviticus 14:2)? This means that this shall be the law of a defamer [motzi shem ra]” (BT Arachin 15b). The m’tzora is now a motzi shem ra, one who gives another a bad name, a slanderer or gossip. If we read this parashah with Reish Lakish’s interpretation, it’s no longer an account of how to treat an ancient skin rash. It is, instead, a moral lesson about the dangers of evil speech.
Reish Lakish didn’t come up with this interpretation simply based on the wordplay of m’tzora and motzi shem ra. He also knew his Torah. Moses and Miriam are both afflicted with leprosy in the Torah, and in both cases, they have just engaged in lashon hara. In Exodus, when Moses encounters God at the Burning Bush and is trying to wiggle his way out of obeying God’s command to lead the Israelites to freedom, he says, “What if they do not believe me and do not listen to me, but say: ‘GOD did not appear to you?’” (Ex. 4:1). God responds by showing Moses several miracles, including giving Moses a leprous rash on his hand. The Sages read this as punishment for Moses badmouthing the Israelites, suggesting that they will be suspicious and mistrustful. Later, in Numbers, Miriam is afflicted with leprosy after she and Aaron are gossiping about Moses marrying a Cushite woman (Num. 12). And as it is described in our Torah portion, Miriam is isolated outside the camp for seven days before she’s allowed to rejoin the community.
Now, it’s obviously problematic to understand the Sages’ interpretation as a suggestion that people who get leprosy are being punished for gossip or slander. But we don’t have to read it that way. We can also read it as a suggestion of “what if?” Very often, those who spread rumors or slander others do so secretly or anonymously. But what if slanderers could be identified by sight, through an unpleasant and very visible skin rash? And what if the “cure” for such an ailment is to be temporarily removed from the community? The Talmud notes, “By speaking malicious speech he separated between husband and wife and between one person and another; therefore he is punished with leprosy, and as the Torah says: “He shall dwell alone; outside of the camp shall be his dwelling” (Ar. 16b). The punishment, in this case, fits the crime. The one who divides the community through gossip is himself separated from it temporarily. Hopefully he learns not to commit the same sin again.
The analogy of leprosy and lashon hara as it is described in our parashah also works in other ways. First, gossip spreads like a contagious disease. I’m sure we can all think of examples of how a rumor has been quickly passed around a community, often with harmful consequences. And that was true 1500 years ago, even before the invention of the internet. Second, the procedure for diagnosing and responding to leprosy is also appropriate as a response to lashon hara. As the Maggid of Dubno, an eighteenth-century preacher explains, the Torah says, “‘And the afflicted person shall be brought to the Priest.’ People treat lashon hara lightly because they do not know the severity of the matter or the crushing power of the mouth. They do not know how to evaluate the negative influence of evil speech. People think: ‘What have I done? I only uttered a sound from my mouth; these are just mere words.’ Therefore, ‘that person shall be brought to the Priest’ so they may see that the speech of the Priest decides their fate, for better or for worse. By the Priest's utterance of ‘Pure,’ the person becomes pure; by saying ‘Impure,’ they become impure. From this, the person will learn to value the immense power within speech for both good and evil….” The one who uses words maliciously or carelessly gets to see firsthand how powerful words actually are. And one final connection between the leper and the gossip: when the leper is done with his period of isolation, he has to offer two birds for his purification ritual. The Talmud explains, “The Holy One, Blessed be He says: He acted by speaking malicious speech with an act of chatter; therefore the Torah says that he is to bring an offering of birds, who chirp and chatter all the time” (Ar. 16b).
When we read our parashah through the interpretive lens of the Rabbis, the portion is no longer foreign or obscure, describing an ancient disease and its remedy. It’s about us. Lashon hara might very well be the most popular sin on earth. And so because lashon hara is both ubiquitous and pernicious, Jewish tradition speaks strongly against it, for example, by comparing it to murder because it can ruin a person’s reputation or livelihood, and by prohibiting speech that might even lead to lashon hara, however harmless it may seem. We need as many reminders as we can get to watch what we say, even if that reminder involves scaly skin diseases and strange purification rituals. But my favorite Jewish teaching about guarding our tongues comes not from the Torah, and not from my beloved Rabbis of the Talmud, but from a book called Ben Sira, written in the 2nd century BCE. He says, “Have you heard something? Let it die with you. Be strong: it will not make you burst!” (19:10).
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