Friday, May 29, 2015

Parshas Nasso - Capitalized Coincidences

~ 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).

            Rashi[1] 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.



[1]    Bamidbar 6:2

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