We are now on Middah number nine. As we said yesterday, eight and nine are connected. Eight is Noser Hessed/ God watches over kindness. Nine is L’Alafim/ for 2000 generations. How is that a separate Middah?
The answer is that although we read them as once sentence- Noser Hessed L’Alafim/God watches kindness for 2000 generations, there is a difference between God's watching the kindness versus God watching sin.
The pasuk, when it refers to sin, says,
“God remembers the sins of the fathers on the sons, and on the grandchildren, for three generations and four generations.” So God remembers the bad for four generations (that is, if we continue sinning, of course) until He punishes them.
So Rashi looks at the ratio of four generations to 2000 generations, and calculates that, “God's good measure is better than His bad measure by a 500:1” ratio, because it says, “God remembers the good for 2000,” whereas “God remembers the bad for four.” So four to 2000 is a 1:500 ratio. And that's Middah, number nine. When a person does good and bad to us, sometimes we focus on the bad. But we shouldn’t. We have to turn it around. We have to focus on the good much more than we focus on the bad.
Imagine a magnifying glass or reading glasses with different strengths from 1-4. You put on thr reading glasses, and you can see the bad four times greater; you focus on the bad a little bit. But when it comes to looking at at the good, you have this microscope that is able to enlarge things 500 times the amount. That's the difference of how you focus in the bad versus how you focus on the good,.
There is a psychological term for this concept, as it applies to our brains, called unhelpful thinking styles, involving something called a mental filter, whereby people pay attention to failures and not to successes. When applied internally, certain people feel down because they notice their failures but not their successes.
This mental filter works externally as well; when we look at other people. Do we use our mental filter to focus on one thing over the other?
There are other psychological terms that apply- magnification and minimization. We sometimes blow things out of proportion or inappropriately shrink something to make it less important. These are styles of thinking, and we're supposed to use these thinking styles in our Middat of Rachamim. We're supposed to have the thinking style that minimizes somebody's bad and magnifies his good. I'm supposed to have a mental filter and notice the good things he does to me, and not the bad.
Another unhelpful thinking style is called disqualifying the positive- disqualifying the good things that people do for us, that have happened or that we’ve done ourselves, thinking, “That doesn't count.” What counts is the bad things.
These are all what we call thinking traps that interfere with us internally, but they can also interfere with the way we act toward others.
And that's this Middah of LaAlafim- we're supposed to have a mental filter to focus on the good things that people do for us, much more so than the bad.
And again, the more we do this with people, the more Hashem does it with us.
Have a wonderful day.