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Weekly Davar - Life is all about perspective

Tazria

(Leviticus 12-13)
31st March 2011
25th Adar II 5771

Good Afternoon!! My good afternoons have been quite serious recently so I thought I might balance things up with this. It’s one of my favourite jokes so you might have heard it from me before: A woman is being sentenced in court for shoplifting. The judge says, ‘let’s see, you stole a can of peaches. There were 6 peaches in the can, so I am going to sentence you to 6 days in prison – one for each peach that was stolen’. In the back of the courtroom, her husband stands up. ‘Excuse me, your honour’, he says, ‘I believe that she also stole a can of peas’.
 
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Torah Portion

The focus of this portion is tzoras, a physical disease that would afflict a person who transgressed the laws of speech. It would progressively afflict home, clothes and skin. It is often mistranslated as ‘leprosy’, but that’s clearly incorrect as leprosy only affects the body.

There are two types of speech transgressions: firstly, loshon hora, literally "evil tongue" ?? making a negative statement about another person, even though you are speaking the truth. (It is interesting that one of the most common rationalizations one hears for speaking loshon hora is “I am only telling the truth.” That reality is that it is loshon hora precisely because it is true! If it were not true, it would be motzai shem ra, slander, which is a great deal worse). The second transgression is rechilus, ‘mixing’ – telling someone the negative things another person said about him or did against him.

Davar Torah: Life is all about perspective

An old friend and colleague of mine, Rabbi chananya Silverman, pointed out something beautiful when I heard him speak this week.

In this portion, the word negah, ‘affliction’ comes up over and over again in talking about the affliction of tzoras (see above). Let’s examine this word negah for a moment.

The Hebrew language is remarkable in that it is not simply random sounds and syllables that are used to represent concepts and objects. In Hebrew the letters that create the words have meaning and this word negah is a wonderful example.

There is another word in Hebrew with exactly the same letters, only in a different order. The word is oneg meaning enjoyment. It’s fascinating that the word for affliction and the word for enjoyment should be made up of the same letters. In fact, two of those letters, the nun and the gimel stay in the same place; it is only one letter, the ayin, that moves. Ayin is the 17th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, but it is also the Hebrew word for ‘eye’.

So now let’s take a look at what we have here. The word for affliction and the word for enjoyment are exactly the same – only the ‘eye’ moves.

In other words, affliction and enjoyment are made up of the same components; it’s only our perspective that changes. A child screaming us awake at four in the morning is an affliction – if that’s how we choose to see it. But it is also a pleasure – the pleasure of commitment to another human being in need of our love. The need to work to earn our daily bread is an affliction. But it is also an opportunity to assert our independence, to achieve and accomplish. Again the choice is ours. Religion is an affliction – a cause of war and strife for centuries. And religion is a blessing – the source of values and morals that have made our world a much better place to live in. It all depends on where we look, on where we put our ‘eye’. Circumstance is neutral. The choice of how we experience it is ours entirely. There is nothing in this world that is not an affliction if that is how we see it. And equally, there is nothing in this world that is not a pleasure when we choose to see it that way.

So often, we believe if only things were different, if only I had more money, if only I was married, if only I wasn’t married, if only I was younger, if only I was older, if only, if only, if only. In truth, there is only one ‘if only’ in life. If only I would allow myself to see things differently. If only I would put the ‘eye’ in a different place. If I only I saw the pleasure instead of the affliction, then life would have so much more to offer me.

Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Shaul Rosenblatt

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