The Valley Torah Scroll

This week’s Parsha is Metzora, which focuses on many things. One very important thing that the Parsha discusses is the tzaraat: a heaven-sent disease that was inflicted upon people due to their misdeeds, most commonly Lashon Hara. To gain atonement for a sin so great that it deserved tzaraat, a person must vanquish himself totally of the moral underlying flaw inside of him that caused him to say Lashon Hara. The flaw, in this case, was arrogance: the arrogance in him made him talk about others in a degrading way, causing his physical and spiritual essence to be degraded as well. This is why we send him outside of the camp so that he can reflect on what he has done and try to totally destroy the remnants of the arrogance that once resided in his soul. Shabbat in some ways is like the person who had tzaraat. Every Shabbat, we are “distanced” from the rest of the world. A war or something totally unexpected could happen and we would have no idea. This Shabbat, while we are distanced from the world just like the guy with tzaraat, let us also look into the depths of our souls and try to reflect on what we\do every day. We should reflect on the feelings and emotions that pass through our souls and we should try and destroy the bad traits that we all may have. B’ezrat Hashem may we all merit to remove the bad traits that lurk in the depths of our souls.