Session 17: Parashat Tazria
Twenty-Two Days on a Chain Gang, Bayard Rustin, 1947
Chapter 13 of Leviticus lays out prescriptions for addressing certain skin conditions within the community. Leviticus makes the priests responsible for managing these conditions, suggesting that, for the biblical authors, physical afflictions had a spiritual dimension. Modern readers are likely to get caught up in the text’s descriptions of diagnostic and treatment methods, whichread more like superstition than medicine. For the Israelites, though, physical health was a manifestation of spiritual health, and there was a causal connection between sickness and sin.
By adopting this pre-modern frame of reference, contemporary readers can look past the superstition to see a society attempting to protect itself by implementing a thorough protocol for treating affected persons’ physical and spiritual maladies–lesions and sins. America’s criminal justice system can be viewed in a similar light–a complex system of protocols and processes for apportioning guilt and legal responsibility, administering punishments and treatments, and rehabilitating people who have been deemed unfit for the community. Bayard Rustin’s “Twenty-Two Days on a Chain Gang” draws attention to the human costs of these imperfect systems.
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