In the weeks leading up to my physical this week, I was a little nervous. I had noticed a bit of pain in a sensitive area on my skin that’s not easy to see, and I couldn’t figure out what was causing it. There was nothing debilitating or life-threatening, but it was on my list of things to talk about with the physician.
But then I made what those of us who grew up watching “The Princess Bride” might call “one of the classic blunders:” I googled it.
I don’t need to tell you what happened next. I found out all the possible things that could be bothering me. Dr. Internet told me I could have various types of rashes, infections, cancers. My breath became shorter, my heart started racing. You know the drill. After a minute or two I recognized my mistake, closed the browser window, and took a deep breath. Just wait for the doctor’s appointment.
My physician asked me some questions and did some looking around. “Well,” he told me, “it looks like you have a tiny little abrasion here that’s probably causing the pain you’re experiencing.” Aha. He asked a few more questions, did a couple more checks, and then prescribed the very complicated remedy of… vaseline. “You just need to let it heal.”
Later the same day, I came across an article on The Atlantic by Helen Lewis about a recent appearance by the conservative writer Douglas Murray on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Murray seems to have provoked something of a firestorm in the “Roganverse” by going on Rogan’s show and questioning the host’s platforming of Holocaust-deniers directly to his face.
“This is the crux of the argument between Murray and Rogan,” Lewis writes. “Does the latter’s huge success and influence confer any responsibility or duty on him to patrol the borders of allowable discourse on his show?” She explains: “Instead of making the eminently supportable accusation that the media and the scientific establishment both make mistakes from time to time, Rogan now disparages expertise as a concept. In the episode, Murray… [said], ‘it’s pretty hard to listen to somebody who says: I don’t know what I’m talking about, but now I’m going to talk.'”
I couldn’t help but think of my physical earlier in the day, and the difference between “doing my own research” and visiting a board-certified, state-licensed physician. Who knows what I would have done had I listened to the unfiltered advice of the internet. But my physician is someone whose expertise and judgment is legitimated by multiple institutions, who is accountable to those institutions, and who I—and the rest of us—can therefore trust.
Tazria-Metzora opens with a memorable if slightly uncomfortable scene: “When a person has on their skin a swelling, a rash, or a discoloration, and it develops into a scaly affection on their skin, the person shall be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons, the priests” (Lev. 13:2). It goes on to elaborate, in intimate detail, how the priest is to diagnose what he sees. But we can hover over this opening passage for a moment.
Abraham ibn Izra, the great 12th century commentator on the Torah, notes that the verse is directed at “a person,” which includes everyone, not only Israelites, because tzaraat, the skin disease in question, “is transmitted from the sick to the healthy,” regardless of their tribal identity. Further, he notes the Torah’s phraseology: the afflicted individual “shall be brought”—”with or without their consent.” Because, it would seem, this is not only a matter of individual health, but of general social well-being—what affects one may infect others.
As my own story illustrates—to say nothing of our collective experience of the COVID-19 pandemic—it’s not hard to imagine ourselves into this scene: You notice something on your skin, you wonder what it could be, you worry about what it could be—but also about what the consequences of “testing positive” might be for you (seven days of quarantine, maybe longer). You may have an impulse not to go to the authorities, to “do your own research” and make the decisions that you think are best for you—especially since the truth seems to be right in front of you, there on your little device.
Similarly, we can imagine authority could easily be misapplied (perhaps the priest proclaims a precautionary quarantine that has unintended significant adverse effects on mental health), how mistakes could be made (the priest misdiagnoses the case), or even how authority could be abused (the priest says, “How much is it worth to you for this rash not to be tzara’at?”). We can imagine that individual priests make mistakes or are indeed corrupt, and that the whole institution of the priesthood, our collective ability to place trust in the institution—which is what authorizes the institution to have authority over us in the first place—ebbs, fades, and erodes.
Lewis sums up the problem with this state of affairs: “Beyond decadence, this is nihilism.” Our ability to live together in society depends on our ability to trust one another, which is perhaps why the tradition understands such a strong link between the mysterious skin disease described in the Torah and lashon hara, unmindful and negative speech.
More than anything else, our worlds are made by our words: the words through which we communicate, make promises, and enact laws; the words through which a physician helps shape our reality by pronouncing a cut is a abrasion that needs vaseline and not a melanoma; the words through which an ancient Israelite priest pronounces someone is ritually pure or impure. And since all of us are images of the Divine and all of us hold a piece of the sovereign collective power, all of us have a responsibility to practice mindful speech, whether we are a podcaster with millions of followers, a physician examining a patient, or simply a citizen using their voice.