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 celebres. 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. Over night, 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, so you've been publicly shamed, and Jennifer Jackett's book, His 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 Parishan 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 Torah 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, the procedures to be carried out don't

correspond to those that would be done if Tsarayat were a contagious disease. Finally, Tsarerat as described in the Torah is a condition that

brings not sickness but impurity, tumour. Health and purity are different things altogether.

The sages decoded the mystery by relating our parcia to the actual instances in the terror where someone was afflicted by Tsarat.

One happened when Miriam spoke against her brother Moses. Another occurred when Moses at the burning bush said to God that the Israelites wouldn't believe in him.

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