The Power of Shame. On the 20th of December 2013, a young woman, Justine Saka, was waiting in Heathrow Airport

before boarding a flight to Africa. To while away the time, she sent a tweet in questionable taste

about the hazards of catching AIDS. There was no immediate response

and she boarded the plane unaware of the storm that was about to break. 11 hours later on landing,

she discovered that she had become an international cause celebr. Her tweet and responses to it had gone viral. Over the next 11 days, she would

be Googled more than a million times. She was branded a racist and dismissed from her job.

Overnight she had become a pariah. The new social media have brought about a return to an ancient phenomenon, public shaming.

Two recent books, John Ronson's So You've Been Public Shamed, and Jennifer Jackette's book

is Shame Necessary, have both discussed it. Jacket believes it's a good thing, it can be a way

of getting public corporations to behave more responsibly, for example.

Whereas Ronson highlights the dangers. It's one thing to be shamed by the community of which you're apart, quite another by a global network of strangers who know nothing about you or the context in which your act took place. That is more like

a lynch mob than the pursuit of justice. Either way, this gives us a way of understanding the

otherwise bewildering phenomenon of Tsarra-at, the condition dealt with at length in last week's

parisher and this. It's variously been

translated as leprosy, skin disease or scaly infection. Yet there are formidable difficulties

in identifying it with any known disease. First, its symptoms don't correspond to Hansen's

disease, otherwise known as leprosy.

Second, as described in the Terror, it affects not only human beings, but also the walls of houses,

furniture and clothes. There's no known medical condition that has this property.

Besides, the Terror is a book about holiness and right conduct.

It's not a medical text.

Even if it were, as David Svi Hoffman points out in his commentary,

...