This parshah often gets read with another parshah, last week’s tazria. So much so that all of the commentaries in TQ AND on the Keshet website combine the two. But this essentially disappears this parshah, which is interesting and weird, describing ritual purification practices from the metzora and tzaraat and also touching on the practice of the mikvah.
I totally must be missing something about why these two portions are taught together , because all I could find was things like this- that they were combined “for good reason: together, these two parshiyot tell the full story of tzara'at,” which doesn’t make sense to me because MANY stories and ideas in the Torah are split up into multiple passages.
Right now the US is in a state of massive political divide, and transgender people seem to be caught in the middle- especially trans children- being used as a political tool. There have been nearly 240 anti-trans bills filed as of the end of May, and more coming all the time. Reading any lgbt news is really depressing, to say the least.
The new movie in the Harry Potter franchise is about to come out. (I’m not going to get into my issues with JKR int this post because it would get too long)This is relevant, sort of. There is apparently a ONE SENTENCE reference in the movie to Dumbledore being gay. One sentence. And I read the other day that they took it out when the movie went into China. And I said something to a friend about it, and she was like, well yeah, because of China’s laws. And I just thought- nope. Not OK. This isn’t me being overly sensitive. This is LITERALLY us queer people being erased. Just written out, over and over. And people just accept it. No problem. How an AMERICAN company could just say, oh yeah, that’s TOTALLY ACCEPTABLE for us to take that out of the movie… what message does that give? What does that say? I don’t mean in China. That’s on the Chinese government. But here. This is Warner Bros (I think that’s the HP company) – this is their choice. Period. They can choose not to take it out and not let China have it. They can make that choice. But they CHOOSE not to. They choose instead to say, nope, its OK to say that being gay, being queer is something that is OK to hide.
Anyway. That’s what my brain is thinking when I think about erasure right now. And things being lost. Maybe not so relevant. But