The disease of leprosy has largely passed from the world. Jerusalem's Beit Hansen (the former sanitarium named for the Norwegian physician Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen, who first recognized the cause of leprosy in 1873, the disease has since been known as Hansen's disease) has been transformed into a thriving cultural center, with restaurants, performance spaces, and an art gallery.
In an ancient and historically deep culture like ours, expressions remain which relate ancient events using forgotten words. We use those words to describe new situations, with a very different interpretation, shaped by the march of time that cannot stand still.
The expression "leper" has come to symbolize that person who is excluded from society, a parasite, threatening to those in the vicinity. Nowadays, in Israeli society, so polarized and divided, the concept of otherness has disappeared. Instead, those we disagree with become "lepers," outcast. Any opinion that slightly differs from our own – becomes illegitimate, threatening, and deserving elimination, sometimes even with its speaker, or at least imprisonment, rather than be heard.
In times when leprosy was an incurable contagious disease, human society, in order to defend itself from contagion, had to cause injustice to the sufferers and isolate them from the public, although in several cultures there was also completely opposite behavior. In those cultures, leprosy was thought to be a holy disease, and sufferers, while isolated, were treated with the honor of holiness. In time, however, lepers became objects of fear and seen as public enemies. Exclusion of the sick and disabled from public view becomes a shocking testimony to a society's intolerance and anxieties. The more "advanced" a society is, it seems, the more comprehensive the exclusion of the atypical within it – including the chronically ill, the disabled, physically and mentally injured.
The traveler in India, for example, will meet people, disabled and crippled, amputees and the mentally challenged, all in public space, as natural parts of the variegated fabric of humanity. Is ours the enlightened society? Is Sparta the ideal model? Or New Delhi? There are many places in the world where the disabled take an integral place in society. Usually, these are the poorest societies. Is this what the Talmud preaches: "Take care of the children of the poor, for from them will come forth Torah" (Nedarim 81a)?
To build a healthier and more tolerant society, we must adopt daily practices of compassion to recognize human nuances and complexities, both physical and emotional. It takes practice to see humans as complete beings, despite their "imperfections".
A uniform society is not a healthy society. A uniform society is a rigid society, devoid of compassion and sensitivity, which despises complexity in favor of superficiality. In our complex, multicultural and multifaceted society, each of us must work to increase our range of tolerance, our range of emotions and their complexity. Keep company with different people, people who are different from you, physically and emotionally. This practice will increase your compassion, consideration and acceptance of others, and normalize your ideas about "normal" and "abnormal".
If the goal of our life is humanity, compassion, love for people in any form, let us live in a multi-faceted society, sharing space: able bodied people, disabled people, physically and mentally injured, together for our own mental health, for our own modesty and our own tolerance. Give us the company of "lepers". Do not isolate them and shut them up in special places. The quality of life for all of us will increase immeasurably.
Translation: Rabbi Daniel Burstyn
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Dubi Avigur, a humanistic Rabbi, lives in the Galil, is a member of the board of Rabbis for Human Rights and also serves on the board of "Lilach: to live and die with honor". He is a social activist, primarily in Arab-Jewish relations and Human Rights.
In an ancient and historically deep culture like ours, expressions remain which relate ancient events using forgotten words. We use those words to describe new situations, with a very different interpretation, shaped by the march of time that cannot stand still.
The expression "leper" has come to symbolize that person who is excluded from society, a parasite, threatening to those in the vicinity. Nowadays, in Israeli society, so polarized and divided, the concept of otherness has disappeared. Instead, those we disagree with become "lepers," outcast. Any opinion that slightly differs from our own – becomes illegitimate, threatening, and deserving elimination, sometimes even with its speaker, or at least imprisonment, rather than be heard.
In times when leprosy was an incurable contagious disease, human society, in order to defend itself from contagion, had to cause injustice to the sufferers and isolate them from the public, although in several cultures there was also completely opposite behavior. In those cultures, leprosy was thought to be a holy disease, and sufferers, while isolated, were treated with the honor of holiness. In time, however, lepers became objects of fear and seen as public enemies. Exclusion of the sick and disabled from public view becomes a shocking testimony to a society's intolerance and anxieties. The more "advanced" a society is, it seems, the more comprehensive the exclusion of the atypical within it – including the chronically ill, the disabled, physically and mentally injured.
The traveler in India, for example, will meet people, disabled and crippled, amputees and the mentally challenged, all in public space, as natural parts of the variegated fabric of humanity. Is ours the enlightened society? Is Sparta the ideal model? Or New Delhi? There are many places in the world where the disabled take an integral place in society. Usually, these are the poorest societies. Is this what the Talmud preaches: "Take care of the children of the poor, for from them will come forth Torah" (Nedarim 81a)?
To build a healthier and more tolerant society, we must adopt daily practices of compassion to recognize human nuances and complexities, both physical and emotional. It takes practice to see humans as complete beings, despite their "imperfections".
A uniform society is not a healthy society. A uniform society is a rigid society, devoid of compassion and sensitivity, which despises complexity in favor of superficiality. In our complex, multicultural and multifaceted society, each of us must work to increase our range of tolerance, our range of emotions and their complexity. Keep company with different people, people who are different from you, physically and emotionally. This practice will increase your compassion, consideration and acceptance of others, and normalize your ideas about "normal" and "abnormal".
If the goal of our life is humanity, compassion, love for people in any form, let us live in a multi-faceted society, sharing space: able bodied people, disabled people, physically and mentally injured, together for our own mental health, for our own modesty and our own tolerance. Give us the company of "lepers". Do not isolate them and shut them up in special places. The quality of life for all of us will increase immeasurably.
Translation: Rabbi Daniel Burstyn
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Dubi Avigur, a humanistic Rabbi, lives in the Galil, is a member of the board of Rabbis for Human Rights and also serves on the board of "Lilach: to live and die with honor". He is a social activist, primarily in Arab-Jewish relations and Human Rights.