ABSTRACT
In her classic study entitled Illness as Metaphor, the anthropologist Susan Sontag, notes that it was not only in “the speculations of the ancient world” that diseases were “most often an instrument of divine wrath.” The understanding of illness as divine and punitive in origin seems to generate many profound insights and to solve various exegetical problems in Torah reading. Not only can the individual strive for a desired relationship to God through Torah and the community that teaches him or her Torah, but the community can and must be supportive of its members through Torah. Parashot, as understood by sages and commentators, teach the person who experiences life in community but has experienced angst and solitude and suffering. All diseases may indeed be seen as natural, requiring examination, and, at times, quarantine.
