I dreamt about houses last night. Actually, not houses, but one apartment building in Chicago on the corner of Rockwell and Catalpa in a neighborhood unfelicitously named Budlong Woods. It is where my grandparents lived in a little 1-bedroom apartment on the third floor, and my great-grandmother lived in an efficiency on the 2nd.
In the dream, I decided to make a documentary film about the building. I was able to jimmy my way through the back door that was just below my grandparents’ window. The small corridor inside was the same as it was in my childhood. But then beyond that it was different. Through the next doors I saw that the apartment building was much vaster than I’d remembered. It was practically a whole city. There were people living in the street, which were really hallways. And there was a huge banquet room for events. Passover seders and birthday parties that in the dream I suddenly remembered from childhood, even though in waking life no such room existed.
This building always interested me. It was a 1950s red-brick building, containing maybe 30 modest apartments. The hallways smelled of soup and paint. This was where I had my first solo elevator ride, and not intentionally.
I was surprised the building came to me in a dream; I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, certainly not with enough focus to remember its doors and halls and smells and feels. But buildings do have a kind of life of their own. They see the movement of people in and out. They absorb the smells and the sounds. Every argument and every peal of laughter creates soundwaves that hit the plaster and make their mark, even if the impact seems negligible to us. When I’m in Chicago I visit my family’s graves, but I also sometimes drive past their apartments, wondering if 10 coats of paint deep, there is still an imprint of their lives.
Houses can also get sick. This is something we learn in this week’s double Torah portion, Tazria-Metzora. The first half of the portion talks about the disease tzara’at, which gets translated as leprosy but might be something else. In our ancient times, when there was no distinction between the physical and the spiritual, and medicine was not yet divorced from religion, it was the kohen, the priest, who would come and examine someone who had symptoms of this very contagious disease. The priest might prescribe isolation for a week at a time until the symptoms cleared. In the extreme case where someone was quarantined outside the camp, there was also a ritual of purification and reëntry when the disease was finally past. Here is the ritual.
The priest would take two birds, some cedar, some hyssop, and some red pigment. One bird would be slaughtered over an earthenware bowl filled with fresh water. The other bird and the remaining ingredients would then be dipped in the blood of the first bird. Remember here that in ancient Israelite ritual, blood, the life force, is an agent of purification. It gets sprinkled on the altar to purify it; and here it gets sprinkled on the now-healed person, signaling their purification. Then the living bird is released in open country and flies away.
This ritual might remind you of the Yom Kippur ritual with the pair of goats, one of which gets offered as a sacrifice, and the other one, carrying the sins of the people, is released into the wilderness. In both cases, there is a kind of transfer of the malady, of the dis-ease, to the animals who then hold it energetically. The sickness, or the difficult experience of having lived with the sickness, having suffered through the sickness, is then in part expunged through the sacrifice of the animal, and in part sent far away to fly free.
So that’s the ritual. But now back to houses. Because just as there is procedure and ceremony for a person who becomes sick with tzara’at, so there is also for a house. Torah gives these rules prospectively, of course, since the people are wandering in the desert and don’t actually have houses yet.
So Torah describes what to do if a plague befalls a house – not the people in the house, but the house itself. Torah describes red and green streaks on the wall, which grow and spread, and which nowadays we might diagnose as some kind of mold or algae. But in Torah, it is not understood as an organism growing within the house, but as a symptom of the house’s own illness.
The house comes to be treated as a person, or at least as some sort of living being. And the medicine is similar. The priest comes and inspects. He might close the house for seven days. He might order stones from the house to be removed and set outside the city and replaced. He might order the walls to be scraped and replastered. If the disease returns or persists, the priest might order the house to be taken apart stone by stone, beam by beam, and the pieces removed to a place outside the city. And when the house is healed, there is that same ritual once again – birds, hyssop, cedar, red pigment.
I know these chapters are some of the oogiest parts of Torah, and you rarely hear me talking about them, because they are not beautiful stories or lofty ideas or celestial images. But this year, in the climate we’re living in, I was caught by this idea of a house being sick, because that’s what it’s feeling like to me in this country. And I don’t mean to be too insistent about the sickness metaphor, because I know there are those who would agree the country is sick and would point to my life as a symptom of it.
But there is something speaking to me here about how we need to hold the entire house as a kind of living being. Not just hold the people in it who are suffering or who are causing suffering or both. But being awake to the ways that this old house itself is suffering, is holding suffering, and is in need of healing. And, instead of engaging ritual to release it, to make the house healthy and liveable again, we have repeatedly whitewashed over it through history, replastering walls without removing the stones and beams that underly the affliction. And so the walls and ceilings and floors become thicker and thicker with layers of injustice, cruelty, and violence, painted over again and again.
We do not currently have rituals like the ones in Torah to heal the house and help it shed its traumas. I’m not certain what the modern analog of those rituals would be. But maybe while we are busy responding to and resisting the specific acts of specific people, we should not lose sight of the house itself, its sufferings and its needs. Maybe we can keep scraping off the layers of paint and plaster, remove the bricks that need to go, release the shmutz, create some proper ventillation. Maybe all we can do right now is to not give up on the house, not stop loving the house, despite it having become quite a seemingly hopeless fixer-upper.
In my dream last night, despite the dramatic changes to the simple apartment building I knew as a child, I still loved it, both in my dream and upon waking. And maybe for now, that’s enough. We all share this house, and this house has a life of its own, with its particular beauty and its particular suffering. And the trick is not to give up on it, to keep loving it, despite everything. And may it soon, very soon, be healed.