Quite often, I share thoughts that I’ve seen or heard over the weekend. So, while they might not be based on the week's Parasha, they're all important lessons. This Friday night in Yad Yosef we had Rabbi Meir Wizman, a rabbi in the Yeshivat Birkat Ephraim in Bnei Brak.
He shared a beautiful thought, which I'm going to discuss over the next day or two.
He started off with a question that goes back a few weeks, which is a well-known question.
How is it that the brothers had so many indicators that Yosef was Yosef, and yet they didn't see it?
We can say, well he had no beard and now he does. But I’ve seen a lot of people that I knew without beards and now they have beards and I recognize them. Furthermore, he had so much information about them. He knew their birth order. He sat alone with Binyamin, “Because I'm alone I have no mother, and you have no mother.”
He slaughtered the animal and showed them that it was properly ritually slaughtered. What Egyptian knows about ancient ritual slaughter of the family of Avraham Avinu?
It was just too odd.
Lastly, he added that it says that great Sadikim were able to look at a glass or a plate and know whether it was dipped in a Mikvah or not.
They were able to know if an item had purity or not. Yet the Shevatim were looking at Yosef, and they couldn’t see that he looked different than a regular Egyptian? They couldn’t see his aura, they couldn’t see his presence?
When you see a Gadol B’Yisrael, you know you're seeing someone great. They couldn't see anything on Yosef? How strange!
There are different answers. One of the answers is more of what we'll call a psychological answer.
You only see what you want to see. And since the last thing that they wanted to see was that Yosef was the viceroy, they couldn't see it, even though it was staring them in their faces. Their bias would not them allow them to see it. This is called confirmation bias, when you see things that agree with your philosophies, but you don't see things that are counter to your philosophies. And that could be true. But Rav Haskel Levenstein gives a phenomenal answer: If God doesn't want you to see something, you're not going to see it. That's the answer.
A lot of times in life, we go through things, and then we look back and say, “Why did I do that? How did I make that decision? I'm always more careful than this. Why did I share my social security number with him? How did I do that? How did I fall for that?”
The answer is, if Hashem wants something to happen, it's going to happen. There's a D’var Torah from the Baal Shem Tov, about the Gemara that says, The wicked are full of regret. The question is, if they're constantly regretting their sins, why are they wicked? That's very righteous. The simple explanation is that they regret like a drunk regrets getting drunk, but then gets drunk again. They're always regretting what they did, but they never quite stop.
But the Baal Shem Tov says it doesn't mean they're regretting their sins. They're regretting the decisions they made. That's the wicked man, who looks back and says, Why'd I make that decision? Why'd I do that? Why'd I buy this? Why'd I sell that? They're always regretting their decisions, not realizing that ultimately, it's Hashem that makes things happen.
Rabbi Wizman went on to add a beautiful thought that was his own: It says that when Adam HaRishon was destined to have his wife come from him, God put him to sleep in a very deep sleep, then He removed the rib and built Chava. The question is, why did he have to go into a deep sleep? Why not give him a local anesthetic? Why a general anesthetic? One of the answers is, it says, because if a person watches how food is made, sometimes you get turned off. Sometimes you watch a cake being made and see how much sugar or oil they're pouring, or you see a butcher slice up the meat, and you lose your appetite. So therefore, Hashem did not want Adam to see Chava being formed, because he would lose his appetite. That's one answer the Gemara gives.
But he gave the following answer that the lesson is that in a shidduch, Hashem blinds the couple so that they don't see each other; they don't see the other’s faults, they just are blinded. Sometimes people say they are blinded by love. But it's not that. They’re blinded by Hashem, who says, I want this shidduch to happen. And therefore, whether you like it or not, you're just not going to see those things. You're not going to notice those things.. Afterwards, you might say, “How did I not realize that? Doesn't everyone know this family has X,Y and Z issue?” Well, you are not going to know, because you're supposed to get married. If Hashem wants something to happen, it’s going to happen.
This is part one of a two-part on class on this topic.
Have a wonderful day.