~ 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.
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