The Discipline of Discernment

The Discipline of Discernment
Parashat Tazria-Metzora 5786
Rabbi Andrew Kaplan Mandel

There's a plague in our house.

That's the way a section of this week's Torah portion begins.

If we’re our ancestors, what are we to do? First, we are to say to the priest, "Something like a plague has appeared." Not, "there is a plague,” but “something like a plague has appeared.”

This is to counteract the WebMD effect: two minutes after a pain in my elbow, I’ve diagnosed myself with a rare tropical disease. We are to avoid professing certainty, not to deny what we see, but to speak with enough humility that we do not mistake our first perception for the full truth.

Then the priest looks for greenish or reddish streaks that go deep into the wall. Is this a surface-level problem, or does this reach down to the essence?

Then the priest closes up the house, and waits.

Rather than whipping ourselves into a frenzy, we isolate the problem, but resist an immediate solution. In this way, the Torah recognizes that what matters is not only what we see, but what unfolds.

After a short time, the priest returns to see if the plague has spread.

If so, remove the discolored stones.

We then need to scrape all of the walls, presumably knowing that the entire house has been at some level infected by the existence of the plague.

We next fill in the holes with new stones. Only then, if the plague spreads again, are we to tear down the entire house.

That’s the Torah passage, and it suggests a very surgical approach to removing the plague. We must be attentive and measured and ready to act. We don’t do more than necessary, but we also do not sit and do nothing. We don't throw out the entire structure because of a few bad stones, but we are also vigilant and responsive if the plague has compromised the whole enterprise.

We might use the built-in wait time to reflect on the cause of our troubles and what we might have done to contribute to them. The Talmud describes the owner of the home as someone who had hoarded property and therefore deserved to have his belongings scattered. Others cite lashon hara, harmful speech, as the origin of the plague.

Greed, or words: two very different diagnoses, two very different remedies. The discrepancy is itself a reason to stop and further examine the problem before acting.

One midrash shares something surprising: that the Canaanites had hidden treasure in their walls, and God set a plague upon these houses so that the Israelites would uncover these riches when they arrived.

What we perceive as a blight may in fact be a blessing, and disrupting what we have built might reveal something we could not have found any other way.

Some rabbis of old taught that this type of haunted house never existed — that the story is here purely to teach. So, what might we take away?

I’ve heard many concerns about streaks on the walls of our houses. In our Jewish communities. In our country. In Israel. Within our houses, we disagree, sometimes fiercely, about what is ailing us and why: some locate the problem in one place, others in another, and the distance between those diagnoses can feel enormous.

That alone should give us pause. Today, we see too many examples of action before analysis, of immediacy over effectiveness, of a rush to reject,instead of a discipline of discernment.

The Torah is describing a way of being, a spiritual practice. The humility to say “something like a plague.” The patience to wait before responding. And the wisdom not to default to using full force, but instead fitting the strategy to the need.

And that same discipline—of thoughtful rigor in the face of crisis—matters not only when something is breaking down, but when we’re building up as well.

As we approach Israel’s national holidays, I find myself thinking about a man named Simcha Blass. He was a Polish-Israeli hydraulic engineer, working in a young country where water scarcity threatened the survival of a rapidly growing population who needed to raise crops in the desert.

A farmer once showed Simcha a tree that was dramatically larger and healthier than all the trees around it, supposedly without water. Simcha investigated and discovered that a slightly leaking pipe joint underground
was slowly releasing water directly to the roots of that one tree. Not inundating. Not spraying. Just a slow, steady, almost invisible drip.

He filed this observation away and carried it for years. If he had rushed to market, the systems available at the time wouldn’t have worked; pipes would’ve clogged, water would have been lost, and the whole approach might have been dismissed before it had a chance to take hold. By the late 1950s, durable, affordable plastics were readily available, and Simcha began to explore what his observation could mean at scale.

He partnered with Kibbutz Hatzerim near Be'er Sheva, a community trying to coax life from the desert,
and together they developed the first practical drip irrigation emitter. Netafim was founded in 1965. Today it operates in 110 countries, and drip irrigation has transformed how arid regions around the world feed themselves.

Simcha didn't treat the symptom. He couldn’t flood the desert in hopes that something would grow. There wasn’t enough water for that kind of guesswork, and most of it would have evaporated anyway. So he traced a single anomaly to its root and asked: what does this teach us about the exact relationship between water and life? The answer was in the ground all along, waiting for someone to look carefully and patiently enough to find it.

Our tradition asks us to bring that same quality of attention to the houses we inhabit in our own lives and in our shared society.

We’ve faced this challenge before: remember wiping down every package of groceries at the start of COVID? We were doing our best with what we knew. And still, urgency has a way of pushing us to act
before we fully understand.

It is harder—and more faithful—to slow down, to look carefully, and to use the kind of judgment that meets the need without overwhelming it.

I believe that is why we are here on Shabbat, because, in order to respond wisely to what is happening around us, we must cultivate the kind of inner life that makes such a response possible.

We pause, consider what specifically from the week does not belong in the house we are trying to build, and what hidden gifts we may need to uncover and stop to appreciate, so that we can not only remove harm from our home, but live in strength and in peace.

Yes, we are dwelling amidst something like a plague. But we are not only those who live in the house; we are those entrusted with its care. And how we choose to see, to wait, and to act–not just urgently, but precisely–will shape whether this house becomes uninhabitable, or renewed, for generations to come.