This week’s sedra reading is Tazria-Metzora. As with the names of a distressingly large subset of female academics and diversity hustlers, the hyphen alone gives me pause. As well it should: Tazria translates as “insemination” and metzora means “someone diseased.” Great, atta way to kill a boner. But really, the titles here do say it all.

Let me back up a minute to explain the hyphenation. The Hebrew calendar is lunar rather than solar, and that makes for a lot of complication and adjustment. For example, in (((our))) leap years, we get a leap MONTH, not just a single day. We all know how the dates for the Jew holidays jump around from (solar) year to year, dragging Easter with them. And because we have to read the entire Torah over the course of a year via the weekly sedras, but the number of weeks is variable, in non-leap years, we smash together some of the sedras so it all comes out even. And some bright rabbi at one point in our history no doubt decided, “Ya know what? Let’s do a mashup of leprosy, menstruation, childbirth, and jizzing. I think there’s some money to be made from this.”

The recurring theme in most of this portmansedra is being unclean, then being put outside the city, away from clean folk. There’s much ritual involved, and this covers uncleanies such as a guy who had wet dreams or jacked off, a woman who is on her period, and someone who has a mysterious Yahweh-concocted disease… the last, most of all.

The bulk of this sedra looks like a Cliff’s Notes version of a dermatology text, with a pile of scolding epidemiology aimed toward benefitting the priests. What you need to do (ritually) for white spots on the skin. For red spots on the skin. For white spots streaked with red. For red spots on the scalp. For white spots on the… well, you get the idea. All of that kinda got lumped together by some guy named King Jim who called it “leprosy.” It isn’t, but try telling the goyim that.

Oh, and it can also happen to clothing and buildings. Yahweh is nothing if not diversified.

The ritual that needed to be performed when the mysterious spotting disease ran its course is difficult to describe, but it involves two birds, a cedar board, water from a running stream, and a piece of red string. Use your imagination. But of course, as with everything else, there’s a sacrifice involved, with the priests getting the bounty.

There’s stuff in the beginning of the sedra about popping out fuck-souvenirs and how the priests might benefit from that as well. Interestingly, the time for ritual impurity is seven days for a boy, but 14 days for a girl. There’s a message in there. Hmmm, we might have to put in some language for gender-fluid, and of course here we can find the commandment to cut the end off a baby boy’s dick on the eighth day. Once the ritual impurity time is over, the woman must bring sacrifices to the priests. Notice a pattern? The rationale for this sacrifice is that while in the pain of childbirth, it is likely that the woman vowed never to fuck again. And she’s likely to violate that oath, therefore, ritual sacrifice is needed.

You can tell who wrote this shit.

Oh, and if you jizz, or get creampied or even take a load in the mouth, you need to buy a ticket to the mikvah (ritual bath run by… yep, the priests). It must have been fun back in the old days to walk past the bath and point and laugh at the folks in the jizz pool portion. It was dangerous to do the same to the women in the period portion. Trust me on that. In any case, facials hadn’t been invented yet, so there’s no commandment about what you do after washing up.

For some reason, this sedra is not discussed in great detail in Sunday schools.