We continue to quote from Chacham BenSion’s sefer, Or L’Sion. On page 168, it says that if someone sees his friend doing something wrong to God, of course, there is a Mitzvah of rebuking him, because you want him to do what is right. But what you should be really thinking, he says, is that you don’t want the person to get punished. He says that if a person doesn’t rebuke him, it seems that he doesn’t really love him, because if he really loved him, why would he want him to be punished?
He says that sometimes what stops the person from giving rebuke is embarrassment. But, in his words, “That is an invalid embarrassment.“
There is a time to be shy, and there is a time to not be shy. This is not a time to be shy. Of course, you have to do it gently. And furthermore, he says that when a person sees someone else doing something wrong, what he should really be thinking is, how can I apply this to myself? What do I see that I can fix in myself? If Hashem caused me to see this, it is there to teach me a lesson for my own situation.
When he talks about embarrassment, he says that a lot of times, people are in need. They may need funds for a wedding or anything else, and if you really loved the person, you would help them. But he says, don’t say that you are embarrassed to collect for him. If you were collecting for yourself, that might be embarrassing, but when you’re collecting for somebody else there’s nothing to be embarrassed about.
My father-in-law Rabbi Scherman told me a story about Rabbi Shmuel Scheiner’s wife, Rebitzen Scheiner. She used to sell raffle tickets for many kinds of fundraisers, going back over 50 years. She would ask her grandchildren to sell the raffle tickets to their friends. One of her grandsons was embarrassed and turning all kinds of colors.
She asked him if he was embarrassed and he said that he was. She asked him why he was embarrassed, if he was not collecting for himself. That is good training and good hinuch. (We won’t get into the aspect of whether it is right or not to teach children to collect), There are many Yeshivot which teach the children to collect money on Purim and other occasions, for the very purpose of training them not to be embarrassed in that situation. We have to overcome that. One might say, “I’ll write a check but I won’t collect the money,“ but that is the wrong attitude. Everybody has to get over that, and help collect money. People may have differing opinions about children collecting, but as you get older, embarrassment is certainly not an excuse, says Chacham BenSion. You aren’t collecting for yourself, and you have responsibility to help people.
He says that there are certain shuls that have a group called, “the group that is there to help their friends,” and when someone has a problem they go there, where their job is to help their friends.