The Book of Vayikra opens with the laws of Korbanos – offerings. There is an enigmatic phrase that is the subject of much commentary. The verse, translated according to the comma which the cantillation notes provide reads, “a person, who brings from you (literally: from yourself), an offering to Hashem”. Based on this reading the Seforno understands “who brings from you” to quite literally to mean that a person has to sacrifice himself through confession and submission.
Similarly the Alshich explains that the process of an offering is one where the animal takes the place of the sinner i.e. the sinner confesses his sins on the animal and then instead of the person being killed the animal is. Thus the person watching this process is meant to imagine as if he himself was being sacrificed. This is the intent of the “a person brings from yourself” this is a description of what should happen – you yourself should be the offering.
However RaMBaN (Nachmondies) bases his translation on inverting the verse as if it had written, “a person amongst you who brings”. Indeed the Gemora based on this way of reading the verse expounds, “from (amongst) you but not all of you”. From here we derive the law that we do not accept an offering from a Jew who has rebelled and become an idol worshipper or has transgressed various other serious Mitzvahs.
Reb Yoel Teitelbaum asks why is it that we do not accept the offering of an apostate – one who has shirked his Judaism yet we do accept offerings from a gentile who worships idols. Both the Jew and the gentile are forbidden to worship idols, so why is the Jew worse off in this respect?
Reb Yoel suggests an answer that teaches us a fundamental lesson for life. He bases himself on the RaMBaM (Maimonides) who tells us that we deal with an apostate and the like in a stricter fashion than we do towards non-Jews. This is because we are worried that the ‘off’ Jew is likely to influence other Jews to follow his path of rebellion. Not so with the non Jew. This is because a person is more influenced by people similar to him.
If we take an extreme example to bring out the point we will readily understand that if we see the elephant in the zoo behaving with a lack of manners and pushing its friend out of the way so that he can get to its food this is highly unlikely to make us behave in that manner. But when likeminded humans behave badly then we run the risk of following the bad behaviour.
This idea is so fundamental because it teaches us both a leniency and a stringency. When dealing with people who are less like ourselves we need to be less worried that we will be influenced by their bad behaviour. But when dealing with people who are of similar standards to ourselves we must make doubly sure not to allow any lowering of standards however subtle.
Rabbi Falk makes this very same point with regard to the halachos which govern the way a Jewish woman dresses. He comments that women may often claim, “why do we need to dress in such a refined way, surely the street is full of women dressed in the most inappropriate way. Men are therefore accustomed to this and it is insignificant for them to keep such a high standard”.
In his third answer to such a claim he writes, “If a Jewish woman dresses inadequately and with that provokes the attention of a Jewish man, the impact on the man or youth is much more powerful than when a non-Jewish female causes a similar provocation.” Why is this? Because we are drawn to people who are similar to us. People who come from a totally different fraction of society and are culturally on a different page make much less of an impact on us.
He brings proof from Queen Esther about whom it says, “and Esther’s appearance appealed to all who saw her”. On which the Gemora comments “this means that whoever saw her thought that she belonged to his own nation”. Esther did not reveal her national identity and therefore each country claimed that she is one of ours! Since she appealed to everyone and people are not usually charmed by those who are of totally different background, the Gemora understood that every individual felt that she was one of theirs. In the words of another Gemora, “every birds dwells with its own variety, so too people are attracted to their own type”. Therefore he concludes the lack of refined dress from a Jewish female is far more provocative and does more harm than the same behaviour from elsewhere.
Let us close with one final example of this idea. When Avraham is looking for a wife for Yitzchak he is adamant that he is not to take a wife, “from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell”. Reb Zalman Zorotzkin sees this final clause “among whom I dwell” as being part of the reason why Avraham was so adamant not to have a wife from the Land of Canaan. Yet Canaan was the very land that Avraham himself had chosen as the only one appropriate for the Jewish Nation!?
Avraham was ideologically on his own and the girl who was to join the family was going to have to undergo a full conversion. Avraham was therefore worried that if she would be anywhere near her family of idol-worshippers then she would be influenced towards them. The only option was to find a girl who would sever her ties from anyone who shared her family home and background. The local idol worshipping Canaanites where he lived however posed less of a threat to the girl because she was not one of them. Such is the power of being influenced by those with whom we affiliate ourselves.
Good Shabbos, Yaakov