Eliezer Meir Saidel: Achrei Mot.... and ....... Emor

 Acharei Mot-Kedoshim  -  Eradicate Hate

Our parsha instructs us (Vayikra 19:17) that if a fellow Jew has wronged you in any way, for example – insulted you, embarrassed you, betrayed you, harmed you physically, financially, emotionally or in any other way, it is forbidden to hate them.

What constitutes hate, according to the halacha? One or more of three behavioral patterns:

1. You do not speak to the person for three days or more
2. You seek to cause the person harm
3. You are happy at their misfortune

A few examples for clarification are in order:

1. This is not speaking to the person for three days or more, not because you are away on vacation and don’t happen to see them, but because when you do see them, you purposely do a U-turn or a detour to avoid having to greet or speak to them.
2. You have slaved for the last 15 years establishing a pedicure/manicure business and last week, a new family moved into an apartment building directly opposite yours and had the “chutzpah” to open a competing pedicure/manicure parlor. It is a small neighborhood and, you think, not large enough to support two businesses of that type. The new manicurist has gone round the neighborhood posting flyers on noticeboards and lampposts. When you came home from shopping yesterday, you saw her flyer on your building’s noticeboard. After looking around to see that nobody is watching, you removed her flyer from the board.
3. A co-worker in your law firm is always belittling you and making snide remarks to the other people in the office about you behind your back. This morning he accidentally spilt a cup of coffee over his clean suit, 10 minutes before having to appear in court. You think to yourself “Yes! That is karma baby! What goes around comes around.”

If you behave in one or more of the three ways above, you are guilty of the Torah prohibition of hate.

That person chas v’chalilah just got you fired, shamed you in public, informed on you to the IRS, swindled you out of a million dollars, poisoned your dog!!! And you are not allowed to hate them?

Judaism is not like other religions – there is no turning the other cheek. You are allowed to pursue any legitimate recourse stipulated by the Torah for protection/justice/restitution. If someone is trying to hit you, you are allowed to protect yourself. You are allowed to take them to court and seek compensation. But you are not allowed to hate.

If someone has wronged you, the Torah gives the remedy, go to the person and rebuke them “What did I ever do to you that you did this to me?” In the best-case scenario, the person will relent and repent and then you are obliged to forgive them (you may still claim restitution for damages caused to you).

There are also halachic criteria for rebuking:

1. The person must be “rebukeable.” If they are mentally unstable or rebuking them just makes them intensify their harm to you, they are considered unrebukable.
2. You may only rebuke them if you yourself are not guilty of the same wrongdoing they have done you.
3. You may only rebuke if you witnessed the wrongdoing with your own eyes, not by being told about it from a third party.

If you rebuke the person (according to the above criteria) and the person is unrelenting and unrepenting, then and only then are you allowed by the Torah to “hate” them. What does that mean? You are allowed to cut yourself off from them and not speak to them for three days or more (1. above). But you are still not allowed to seek them harm or rejoice in their misfortune (2, 3 above). The Torah allows you to disassociate yourself from them, to “hate” their evil deeds, not hate them as a person, to protect you from getting swallowed up in their evil. If, however, that person ever does teshuvah, you have to forgive them and you are again forbidden to perform 1,2,3 above.

The Torah (Shemot 23:5) takes this one step further. You are walking down the street and you see your best friend walking with his donkey that is straining under the heavy load. On the opposite side of the street, you see your enemy who is loading his donkey, no strain yet on the donkey. The Torah tells us that we must first help our enemy to load his donkey before we help our best friend, even at the expense of causing pain to animals.

The bottom line from all of this is that – the Torah forbids us to hate a fellow Jew – period. In the worst-case scenario, we are allowed to hate – the evil deeds, but not the person and even then, we are commanded to give precedence to our enemy over our best friend – to totally stamp out hatred amongst Am Yisrael.

Am Yisrael is not a nation of hate. Even with our arch enemy, Amalek, the Torah commands us to wipe out their memory, but not to hate them.

What it is about hate that the Torah so despises? What is hate?

Hate is all about anger. When the yetzer hara wants to make a person sin, one of the best weapons in his arsenal is anger. Anger is manifested in two ways – rage and hate. Rage is violent and visible/audible. Hate is violent and surreptitious – it poses under the veneer of civility but is as deadly as rage.

Hate and rage are emotions, perhaps the strongest emotions of all, but they are part of our animalistic nature. We are human, we cannot escape our emotions. When somebody wrongs us, we feel hurt, anger, rage, hate. The Torah does not deny us our emotions, it allows us these emotions, but for no longer than three days. After that we are required to use the Torah to control these emotions. This is what separates Am Yisrael from the other nations – that we try to elevate ourselves above our animalistic nature and conquer our yetzer hara, using the Torah.

 

Parshat HaShavua Trivia Question: What is “Pigul?” (Vayikra 19:7)

Answer to Last Shiur’s Trivia Question: What is the shortest chapter in the Torah? Vayikra, chapter 12 – only eight verses.

Small Eyes  –  Parshat Emor

Parshat Emor is the second-most “mitzvah-rich” parsha in the Torah (after Ki Teitzei) with 63 mitzvot, 24 of which are positive commandments and 39 are negative commandments. One of these positive/negative mitzvot pairs is Chillul (profaning) Hashem and Kiddush (sanctifying) Hashem.

There are very few people who epitomize the mitzvah of Kiddush Hashem more than Rebi Akiva. As we all know, Rebi Akiva suffered a horrendous death at the hands of the Romans, who peeled off his skin with steel rakes. Just before his last breath, he cried out Shema Yisrael.

In light of the above, the whole story of Rebi Akiva’s students dying because they did not respect one another seems incredulous. How could students of a Gadol HaDor of that stature (Tanna’im all), contemporaries of Rebi Shimon Bar Yochai (whose yahrzeit we celebrate next week), not respect each other?

The major source of the episode in question, quoted ad nauseam, is from a Gemara (Yevamot 62b). There is, however a second source, in the Midrash (Breishit Rabba 61, 3), which describes the story a little differently. Unlike the Gemara, the Midrash does not say anything about “not respecting” one another, instead it says “Shehayta eineihem tzara eilu l’eilu,” they their “eyes were small” to one another. What does that mean? This Midrash ends with Rebi Akiva’s admonition to his five remaining students “Make sure you don’t repeat their mistake. Fill the country with Torah.”

Another Midrash (Kohelet Rabba 11, 6) states this in a slightly different way, “Shehayta eineihem tzara ba’Torah zeh lazeh,” their “eyes were small” in Torah to one another.

From above two Midrashim, it appears that the sin of Rebi Akiva’s students was Torah related. So how do we understand this?

Rebi Akiva and his students were the pinnacle of Torah study in Eretz Yisrael, the top of the top. If Rebi Akiva was learning reams of halachot from every “extrusion” on the letters in the Torah (if you examine the Torah script, you will notice some letters have extrusions above them) then the Torah of Rebi Akiva was not only the 63 Masechtot of the Mishna we have today, but probably ten times that, or more.

If someone wanted to send their son to study in yeshiva, Rebi Akiva’s yeshiva was the elite, the cream of the crop. Only the best students went there, were accepted there, were capable of understanding what they were learning there, were capable of keeping pace with the study there. To be a student of Rebi Akiva, you had to be extremely gifted and super intelligent. There were other yeshivot, other rabbanim, but none matched Rebi Akiva’s for level of study and for number of students.

Aside from yeshiva students, the majority of Am Yisrael were working folk, not yeshiva material.

What are the Midrashim above are telling us is that the talmidim of Rebi Akiva had “small eyes” when it came to their Torah study. After the tens of thousands of his students perished, Rebi Akiva’s advice to his remaining five students was “Don’t follow those that died, fill Eretz Yisrael with Torah,” meaning that the students that died did not fill all of Eretz Yisrael with Torah. They sat in their ivory towers of learning and spearheaded the forefront of Torah study, but this Torah never got to the rest of Am Yisrael – they never shared it, they kept it to themselves.

How could this possibly be? A teacher of Rebi Akiva’s stature and students, Taana’im, of that stature? How could they possibly be so selfish?

Perhaps we can understand it from another Gemara (Bava Metzia 62b). If two people are stranded in a desert and only one has a bottle of water to drink. If they both share the one bottle, they will both die of thirst. If only one of them drinks the water, he will survive and make it back to civilization. What to do? Ben Petorah says “Better that they both drink and both die rather than one seeing his friend perish.” Until Rebi Akiva came along and taught “Your life is more important than the life of your friend.” If the bottle of water belongs to you, you must drink it all and survive and your friend must die. The halacha is like Rebi Akiva.

Rebi Akiva’s students heard this ruling about the bottle of water and took it one step further. If someone owns a “bottle of water,” Torah (compared to water), he has two choices. If you are a top-of-the-top student, the pinnacle of Torah study, a student of Rebi Akiva and you have 24 hours in the day, how do you spend them? Do you spend them using your incredible talents to research and uncover more hidden secrets of the Torah, or do you split your time between research and teaching what you already know to others. If you do the former, you will exponentially expand the Shas, but only an elite few will understand it and know it. If you do the latter, more people will learn and understand these Torah secrets, but you will miss out on discovering other, new secrets.

They came to the conclusion, based on Rebi Akiva’s psak above, that it is better for the owner of the “bottle” to drink and survive – not waste his limited resources on his friend, but rather reach his maximum potential in his lifetime.

As a result, Rebi Akiva’s students, instead of going down to and mingling with the rest of Am Yisrael, on a lower level, and teaching what they had discovered, preferred to remain in their ivory towers of study and push the envelope to the next level.

Rebi Akiva’s Torah that interpreted each and every extrusion on every letter has been lost – his students never taught it to anyone else, they had “small eyes” with their Torah. But more importantly, Rebi Akiva never taught it to the final five students! Perhaps his reasoning was that this level of study was too dangerous and too destructive. The fact is, we no longer have it, it did not survive.

 

Parshat HaShavua Trivia Question: How much flour (Solet) is there in each loaf of Lechem HaPanim?

Answer to Last Shiur’s Trivia Question: What is “Pigul“? A “disqualified” Korban, one that cannot be offered or eaten, for one or more of a variety of reasons.