Thoughts
on The Parsha
Parshas
Nasso
Capitalized
Coincidences
By: Daniel Listhaus
וַיְדַבֵּר
ה'
אֶל
משֶׁה לֵּאמֹר:
דַּבֵּר
אֶל בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וְאָמַרְתָּ
אֲלֵהֶם אִישׁ אוֹ אִשָּׁה כִּי יַפְלִא
לִנְדֹּר נֶדֶר נָזִיר לְהַזִּיר לַה':
מִיַּיִן
וְשֵׁכָר יַזִּיר חֹמֶץ יַיִן וְחֹמֶץ
שֵׁכָר לֹא יִשְׁתֶּה וְכָל מִשְׁרַת
עֲנָבִים לֹא יִשְׁתֶּה וַעֲנָבִים
לַחִים וִיבֵשִׁים לֹא יֹאכֵל
“Hashem spoke to Moshe,
saying, “Speak to the B'nei Yisroel and
say to them: A man or a woman who shall set apart by taking a
nazarite vow to set apart to Hashem; from wine and hard drink shall
he abstain, and he shall not drink vinegar or wine or vinegar of hard
drink; anything in which grapes have been steeped he shall not drink,
and fresh and dried grapes he shall not eat.”
-Nasso 6:1-3
After describing the
degrading process that the sotah must
go through, the Torah begins to teach the seemingly unrelated topic
of one who accepts upon oneself to be a nazir,
and proceeds to relate the
relevant halachos (laws).
Rashi1
is bothered with the fact that these two different subjects are
taught right next to each other in the Torah. Why is it that the
parsha of nazir
is discussed immediately after
the parsha of sotah?
Rashi writes that the
reason the Torah put the topic of nazir adjacent
to that of sotah was
to teach us that anyone who sees a sotah in
her state of disgrace should take upon himself to abstain from wine
by becoming a nazir.
The
question we could ask on this Rashi is
why is it that one who saw the sotah should
become a nazir? What
does the fact that an unfortunate episode happened in someone else's
family or life have anything to do with me? Had I happened to live in
a different community, or happened not to turn on the news that day,
I would not even know of the event with the sotah.
The episode is completely independent of me. It would have happened
whether I lived nearby or not, it would have happened whether I would
have heard about it or not. How could the Torah expect me to see the
sotah and as a
response limit myself from the pleasures of this world? Let me live
my own life with my own worries. Why does a trouble in someone else's
life demand a response from those who, by chance, happened to hear of
it?
There
is no doubt that the logic behind this question is one which drives
many people's decisions in life. For example, imagine one day you
sleep through your alarm and end up going to the next minyan
in shul
because you missed the earlier one you usually go to. After the
minyan, the president
of the shul gets up
and asks the congregants present if everyone could please help gather
the sefarim (books)
laying around the shul
and put them back on the shelf. There are some people who in such a
situation will think to themselves, “I was not even supposed to be
at this minyan, so
there is no way that I could be expected to help out. Furthermore,
the announcement would have been made whether I came to the minyan
or not.” The person then leaves without helping. However, to put
this logic into perspective, let us compare it to a situation where a
manager finds himself with two meetings scheduled for the same time
at work. He looks at his schedule and sees this and decides to go to
neither. After all, the people at meeting A will think he went to
meeting B, and the members at meeting B will think he joined meeting
A. There is no question that such a mentality is crooked and just as
this manager will end up knowing nothing, so too the person who
allows such irrational logic to make his decisions for him will miss
out on the countless lessons of life. This is what I call the
“absence fallacy” – falling into the trap of believing that
because one chooses to be absent from two events, one could play them
off each other and be exempt from both of them. A person who falls
into such a trap of thinking that the events that are part of his
life – even if only indirectly – are irrelevant, will never grow
to one's potential that is obviously expected of him from the fact
that he was put into such a situation.
There
is no such thing as coincidence. Every single situation we find
ourselves in is part of a hashgacha p'ratis (individual
providence) design for us to each be put into an environment from
which we are meant to grow. Sometimes things occur that seem like
gifts, sometimes they come in the form of challenges; sometimes these
things happen to us directly, and sometimes indirectly. However the
thing we must constantly keep in mind is that the way that something
effects our life is the way Hashem intends for us to need to deal
with the situation – specific to our level and to what He wants us
to be able to learn from it. If we ignore the messages Hashem is
constantly sending us in the occurrences that make up our lives, we
will never become a greater person. We must learn from everything
that happens around us and capitalize on the opportunity to learn.
When
something occurs in our circle of life we are indeed expected to take
action. Whether it be something in our family, our community, or the
world at large, if the message has reached our ears there must be a
reason we were meant to hear it. This is the lesson of the nazir.
The person who decided to become a nazir had
nothing to do with the sotah,
perhaps never met her in his life, and might very well think that the
nisayon (test)
that the sotah's
family went through is one that
would never occur in his own. All these things may very well be true.
However, what we must keep in mind, as this nazir did,
is that things that we witness, events that we are involved in –
whether directly or indirectly, and even things which occur in our
community or the world are all things that by definition become
relevant to us because they are things that Hashem caused to be a
part of our lives. For some people the message may be louder and
closer to home, and to others it may be more distant and the message
more through the grape vine, but either way there has to be something
that we do to change and learn from what is going on around us.
May
Hashem help us better be in-tuned to the constant stream of messages
He sends us in the hashgacha p'ratis way
that He deals with us – whether it be the events that occur to us
directly or indirectly.
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