Yaakov Hibbert Presents… Growing Pains

One of the offerings that is discussed in this week’s Parshah is the ‘Thanksgiving Offering’. One would bring such an offering if one had been spared from danger such as recovering from a serious illness, travelling by sea or through the desert, or being released from prison. With the misfortune over, a person would express his gratitude to Hashem for saving him.

Unique about this offering is that it is accompanied by an unusually large amount of bread and matzah. What is it about the thanksgiving offering that it warrants this stress on the bread that accompanied it?

The K’sav Sofer [1234-1234] asks a fundamental question – why indeed do we celebrate being saved from an illness or the like, surely it would be better to have been spared the suffering than to go through it and pull through?

He answers by quoting the Panim Yofes [1234-1234] who notes a subtle change in the description of the offering. The verse reads, “When you offer a thanksgiving offering, ‘lir’tzon’chem’ – according to your will it should be offered up”. What does this phase “according to your will” mean; surely a person who is coming to show gratitude over all the good that he has experienced in his recovery will do so willingly?

Says the K’sav Sofer: this is the very point of the thanksgiving offering – it must be “according to his will”, because many people will ask, “Why must I bring anything to Hashem? I would have been better off not being exposed to this danger, than to be exposed but to survive”. To negate this question the Torah writes you have to bring the offering “willingly”, i.e. with full desire. How does one indeed bring the offering with full desire? What is the answer to the penetrating question, “Would it not have been better to avert any illness from the start?

I heard the following beautiful thought: there is a fundamental difference between what is normally brought as an offering – an animal, versus the bringing of bread as a sacrifice. When you bring an animal you simply take the animal and give it to Hashem – the only preparation needed is to kill the animal. Bread on the other hand involves a more complex process. Firstly you have to plough, sow, reap, and harvest the land, and then you have to winnow the wheat, grind the kernels, make the dough, and finally bake in the oven.

This process parallels the person who is bringing the thanksgiving offering. Just as there are several stages in producing the bread, all of which involve hard work, so too a person who has reached the point where they have survived an ordeal remembers the hard work involved in every stage. But more importantly, just as the beautiful finished product is a result of the different stages, so too a person who emerges from a life ordeal with a new appreciation for life, or with a new perspective, only does so because of what he went through. The poor little kernel indeed was beaten and squashed, but this produced the fine flour – so too life may sometimes be a little uncomfortable but it’s precisely these processes that can produce a finished product – better then what we were pre the ordeal.

This is why there is a focus on bread when someone brings a thanksgiving offering, because after an ordeal has passed the person will realise that the very ordeal that he originally shunned was a source of inspiration and opportunity for personal growth. The person who survives an illness may very often have taken upon themselves to do things during his illness that he didn’t know he was even capable of doing.

This is the explanation of the verse we sing in Hallel, “the stone that the builders despised became the cornerstone”. The very challenges that a person sought to avoid, retrospectively produced his biggest growth spurts.

Perhaps with the aforementioned we can answer our original question. We asked how we bring this offering “willingly”; surely it would have been better to have avoided the encounter with near death. However we can now see how faulty this is – on the contrary we bring the bread and say thanks to Hashem for helping us survive the ordeal, and yes thanks for giving us the ordeal, because the ordeal itself, like the beating of the kernels to get the flour, was the process that made me actualize my potential and developed me into the better person I am today.

The Gemora discusses the order of the books in the TaNaCH. The book of Job is placed after Psalms even though chronologically it came first. Why is this? Since Job is a book about misfortunes we don’t want to place it first. However, the Gemora asks – doesn’t the book of Ruth open with the  tragedy of Naomi losing her husband and two sons, and a famine? The Gemora answers that the misfortunes that begin the book of Ruth end off happily ever after with the birth of the Moshiach dynasty – and is therefore not considered a misfortune at all.

How does a nice happy ending change the current situation which is bad? With our new awareness of the bread that accompanied the thanksgiving offering we can see that the Gemora is telling us that when any misfortune is understood as something that is just growing pains, then even the hardship itself is transformed into good fortune. The process that started with the death of Avimelech and his two sons and the famine which led them away from their homeland, was the beginning of the sprouting of nothing less than Moshiach himself!

Remembering the message of the bread that will accompany our great thanksgiving offering that we will bring when Moshiach comes will help us endure our trials and tribulations NOW as we appreciate that all our troubles are really ones that will end happily ever after.

Good Shabbos, Yaakov