The Jewish People loves holidays. This week’s parashah, Emor, reminds the Israelites of the yontif schedule: Shabbat every week, of course, and then the big ones: Passover, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot. Dayenu, that would have been enough.

In the summer of 1998, right before my senior year in high school, my sister and I went to Israel with NFTY, the Reform youth movement. We spent six weeks touring the country and spent some time with Israeli teens. One night, sitting around a campfire,

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...