If you were to ask most ‘sun-day christians’ what one of the most boring, and irrelevant, sections of the whole Book is – even if they never hear it read anyway – many might point to the part about what they call “leprosy.”

Which is a good reason to at least SUSPECT that there’s more to it.

But Mark Call of Shabbat Shalom Mesa fellowship suggests this week that there is a WHOLE LOT more to it: Not only is the section NOT at all about “leprosy,” or what we know as Hansen’s Disease, there’s a good case to be made, as he does, for the “why!”

The Erev Shabbat (Friday evening) of the two-part Double-parsha “Tazria,” then “Metzorah,” Leviticus chapters 12 through 15.reading again begins with what happens on eighth day — but this time it as after a woman “bears” a male child — and one more thing that just isn’t talked about much either:

Once again, and as seems to be so often the case, the Torah portion story this week has a relevance to current events that demonstrates the timelessness of the message, EVEN if it has to do with a malady that hasn’t been seen for well over a thousand years.

But if the “Evil Tongue,” (‘lashon hora‘ in the Hebrew) has something to do with the plague, Mark has suggested in the past that there may be a reason.

A fairly-standard warning about “gossip” [at least a subset of ‘lashon hora’] is that it kills three people: the one who speaks it, the one who listens, and the one about whom it is spoken.” And most discussion of the actual plague, called “tzaraat” in Hebrew, and there is no actual translation, tends to not only spiritualize, but personalize, the warning: ‘Don’t do it.’

But could the reason we don’t see that Divine Discipline manifested with people being marked as “unclean, unclean,” be an aspect of something much bigger?

And when did what has been referred to as “Supernatural Spiritual Discipline” actually come to an end? Or did it?

The combined two-part reading and Sabbath midrash: