Shabbat Parashat Naso - 5781

Shabbat Parashat Naso - 5781

Rabbi Hal Miller

Command the children of Israel that they shall send away from the camp

everyone with tzara'at, everyone who has had a zav emission, and everyone

impure by a corpse. [Bamidbar 5:2]

Male and female alike shall you send away, to the outside of the camp shall

you send them so that they should not make their camps impure, within

which I dwell. [Bamidbar 5:3]

At first glance, our verses seem simple to understand, but the commentators

all ask questions. For example, what does it mean "send away", and what

exactly is "the camp"? Why does the Torah list these three, and does not list

any others? Other questions are also asked but we will stop here.

We know that all the people to which our verses refer have ways to reverse

their decree and re-enter the camp. Therefore "send away" does not mean

permanently. The verse gives us a reason, though, so we may be able to

understand the meaning from that. Sifrei explains, "He sits alone outside the

camp." Onkelos translates it as "quarantine", and Rambam seems to agree.

But quarantine who, and for what? Certainly, if the relevant people have some

contagious disease, that would make sense from a health perspective, but none

of these folks has anything that could be 'caught'. It seems that the quarantining

is of the rest of the nation, away from those who have these 'impure' statuses.

In other words, our verses are to keep pure people away from impurity,

rather than to keep the named folks away from the rest of the nation.

This is more apparent when we consider that nearly all of the commentators

write that these verses refer to three camps, not one, with a different 'sending'

for each of the three categories of people named. Most explain this in

reference to the order of march in the desert, with the Kohanim in the central

Divine camp, surrounded by the Levite camp, which is in turn surrounded by

the Israelite camp. Rashi, based on Gemora Pesachim [67a] explains that, in

order, one with tzara'at is sent outside of all three, a zav is sent out from the

middle two but may remain in the Israelite camp, and one impure by a corpse

is only sent out from the Divine camp.

In Ta'anit [21b], "R'Yose says, it is not the place which exalts the man who is

there, but the man who exalts the place." Apparently this is true in the inverse

as well, that someone who has a problem could be bringing that problem upon

the place he is, and for the protection of everyone else, he must be sent out.

What we learn from our verses is that some problems can be overlooked in

certain circumstances but not others, and some cannot be overlooked at all.