אדם כי יהיה בעור בשרו

The maamar opens with the verse that begins the laws of nega’im, the skin afflictions of the Torah, where the afflicted person is called adam. Adam is the highest name for a human being because it means “the completeness of all”: one who contains every quality, Chesed (kindness), Gevurah (restraint) and compassion, and every trait and mode of conduct a ruler needs.

A ruler must be able to answer every situation with kindness, severity or compassion as each is called for. One who is bound to only one or two of these qualities, however lofty, lacks that completeness, and so is not called adam.

Moshe is called ish (“Moshe the man,” “the man of G‑d”), not adam; the Zohar on Parshas Tazria explains that he is called ish because he is called the King’s servant, while adam is “the completeness of all.” So although Moshe’s level is exceedingly high, the level of adam, which contains all things, is higher, and through his affairs and deeds such a person can raise everything upward.

Because adam contains everything, he can both raise things up and bring them down, and the whole world depends on him. The parenthesis points to the Zohar at the start of Parshas Mishpatim, where one who merits most is called adam “in the manner of Atzilus” and has dominion over all the hosts above and below, and to the Midrash on “One adam out of a thousand I have found,” which reads this adam as Moshe.

Now the maamar turns to the nega’im themselves. A person on the level of adam may have refined all his higher faculties, yet in “the skin of his flesh,” his lowest and outermost layer, evil and dross may remain unsifted; that residue then shows itself as physical signs in his flesh that do not come about naturally.

Ordinary skin ailments were understood to come from the body’s fluids (the “humors” of the old medicine), but nega’im do not. The Alter Rebbe cites the Rambam that the mitzvah of nega’im no longer applies after the Destruction because such a change in the flesh itself, with no fluid behind it, whose white looks deeper than the skin as sunlight looks deeper than the shade, no longer occurs.

So nega’im are miraculous. They come to one who, in his spiritual service of G‑d, has already sifted the evil from the good in everything, leaving unsifted only the dross at the very end of his “garments,” the outermost layers that clothe his inner self.

Because the inner work is complete, the last residue surfaces outwardly, in his flesh. A second point follows: nega’im are lofty in themselves, since by law a nega makes a person impure only when the kohen declares it (as Rashi on the verse puts it, citing the Sifra, the impurity and purity of nega’im depend only on the word of a kohen), so until then it is not impurity at all.

Before the kohen speaks, the nega is a supernal light, a “harsh judgment of holiness”: a severity that belongs to the side of holiness. Etz Chaim says that the nega is not impurity itself but harsh, holy judgments from which the impure forces draw nourishment, and the Ramaz on the Zohar likewise stresses that the impurity of tzaraas is unlike all other impurities.

The verse continues, “And he shall be brought to Aharon the kohen.” The kohen embodies supernal Chesed, which the Tikkunei Zohar calls “the right arm,” and kindness can sweeten severe judgments: when he pronounces the person pure, the nega itself is purified and turned into complete good. Some nega’im, however, are beyond the kohen’s power to raise and sweeten.

This explains why nega’im are not found in our times. A nega can appear only when the evil has already been cleared from the inner dimension of body and soul and remains only on the outside, where it can surface on the skin.

In our times even one who is righteous and good still has a little evil in his inner dimension, so the condition for nega’im is missing. The text points to the end of Torah Ohr’s discourse “For You are my lamp” (Miketz), which contrasts the lofty souls of earlier generations, who could master the evil in themselves, with the later generations of the “footsteps of Moshiach,” who need great toil; and to Tanya, chapter 10, on the tzaddik who is not complete, in whom a tiny measure of evil remains, subdued by the good.