I’d like to share with you the following powerful, true story I stumbled across not so long ago:
“I remember a mini-paradigm shift I experienced one Sunday morning on a subway in New York. People were sitting quietly – some reading the newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. It was calm, peaceful scene.
Then suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed.
The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people’s papers. It was very disturbing. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing.
It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too. So finally, with what I felt was unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?”
The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, “Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came form the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”
Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted. Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn’t have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behaviour; my heart was filled with the man’s pain. Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely. “Your wife just died? Oh, I’m so sorry! Can you tell me about it/? What can I do to help?” Everything changed in an instant.”
And now for how this is connected to the Sedra! This week’s Torah reading (and next weeks) is dominated with the topic of Tzora’as (a spiritual skin disease) The ‘Cohen’ played a major role in determining whether or not a person had Tzora’as, because it was only through his seeing, assessing and then declaring the person, item or house as impure that meant you were ‘infected’. So important is the Cohen’s viewing of the infliction that a total of twenty eight times the verb ‘to see’ is used in these two Sedras!
In the very first instance that the Cohen comes to see a potentially inflicted person, the verse reads, “The Cohen shall look at the affliction on the skin of his flesh …. The Cohen shall look at it and make him impure”. Surely the Cohen has already looked at the affliction at the beginning of the verse, why the repetition, asks Rav Zalman Zorotzkin [1881-1966]?
I would like to suggest an answer based on a very similar difficulty. We read about Avraham sitting outside his tent awaiting some guests. We are told, “He lifted his eyes and he saw; and behold! Three men were standing over him. He saw, so he ran toward them from the entrance of the tent”. Many commentators are bothered by the ‘double vision’ of Avraham.
The Medresh and virtually all the Commentators explain that the second ‘seeing’ is a reference to something deeper than the first ‘seeing’. The way Rashi [1040-1105] puts it is that first he saw in the literal sense, the second seeing was more of a perceiving. My Father-in-Law expressed this idea from a slightly different slant. Ones first impression is never good enough to draw conclusions – one must always take a second look. Did I really see what I thought I saw? I may have seen correctly but was my inference right? Certainly nothing changed in what he physically saw when the kids were running around the subway car – but without a second look; a more understanding look – the inference was totally wrong.
Just as Avraham took a second look before he snapped into action, and the man on the subway car was given a second viewing of the situation, so too the Cohen in this weeks Sedra who is heavily involved in ‘viewing’ the Tzora’as has to be forewarned from the onset, to always have a second look. Never to jump to conclusions before being double sure that he saw what he saw.
“Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently.”
Good Shabbos, Yaakov