Most of Tazria deals with a variety of skin complaints. In each case, a priest was to come, make a diagnosis and then take action to isolate the diseased part or individual, if required. Of interest perhaps to dermatologists, the rest of us - me included - struggle to find some spiritual meaning in this.
But then I remembered the enigmatic Sefer Yetzirah, "Book of Formation". Sometimes attributed to Abraham, or even Adam, this text probably comes from some time between the third and sixth centuries CE. Much of it is given over to the notion that the world and all its contents were brought into being by God producing combinations and permutations of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This seems designed to explain what Genesis means when it says that God produced the world through speech; for example, "Let there be light" (Genesis 1:3).
It points out that sometimes the same letters in different combinations mean quite different things. In one place, Sefer Yetzirah (2:4) offers the example of nega (or naga), "disease", and oneg, "pleasure". In Hebrew both words consist of three letters: gimmel, nun and ayin - but combined in two different ways.
In principle, dis-ease and pleasure are opposites. In real life, they are intertwined, part of a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of emotions that we all experience throughout life. In other words, nega and oneg form a continuum and we continually shunt towards the one or the other, sometimes with dizzying speed.
How are we to cope? Sefer Yetzirah implies that both come from God. Perhaps, if we can understand this spiritual truth deep in our hearts and souls, we can find a central point of equilibrium, what our mystics call hishtavut, "equanimity", where calm reigns, where we are neither depressed by nega nor elated by oneg.