Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily. Yesterday we spoke about the traumatic impact of graphic images. So how do we undo that? Is there a way to undo that? I'd like to suggest an approach. The Torah, in Bereshit, tells us that when Yosef HaSadik took his brother Shimon captive as a bargaining tool, so to say, to make sure Binyamin came back, it says “And he locked him up, l’einehem/to their eyes.” What does that mean?
Rashi says he locked Shimon up, but once they left, he fed him and gave him to drink and took him out of captivity. The commentaries apply this as well to a pasuk in Devarim, where Moshe Rabbenu describes the breaking of the Luchot. It says, “I took the two tablets and I threw them from my two hands, and I broke them leinechem/to your eyes.”
That means It looked like I broke them. I didn't actually break them, because the Midrash says that before Moshe Rabbenu broke the Luchot, the letters flew off and they were no longer the Luchot. They looked like the Luchot, but actually they were already dead. Nothing happened to them. We find a similar concept when the enemy destroyed the Bet Hamikdash. The Gemara says, “You ground flour that was already ground.”
That means the Bet Hamikdash was dead before the enemy entered. The holiness had gone. So it only looked like they destroyed the Bet Hamikdash.
This is an important concept.
Sometimes we see horrific things, but what we see is not necessarily what's really happening.
There’s a very interesting Teshuva from the Maharam M’Ruttenberg, a Rishon who was the teacher of the Rash, Rabbenu Asher, who lived about 600 years ago.
He writes in his teshuva that people that die Al Kiddush Hashem do not feel any pain. Even though it like they're in pain, they're not in pain, God takes away their sense of feeling and they don't feel the pain. (Now, there's no way to know, because you can only know if it's happening to you.)
So this is a little comforting. Sometimes we see horrific acts, but we don't really know the full story.
Shimon Schwab shared a beautiful thought at the ninth Siyum HaShas. He said a little boy was taken away with his father, by the Nazis. When they were getting ready to shoot them, the little boy said to his father, “Daddy, I never did anything wrong. I went to school. I was a good boy. Why is this happening?”
Those were his final words. He was killed by the Nazis.
Now, if we were standing there, it would look horrific, which it is. But he says, we don't see the second half of the story. We don't see that Hashem is holding this little boy in His hands and taking him in to Yeshiva shel Mala into the classroom of Hashem’s teachings. This young boy is the new student in the class. But we don't see that. What our eyes see is not necessarily what's happening. Someone told me just one of the current Korbanot killed in the attack at the festival was a boy who was once religious. He went to Yeshiva in Tifrach and went off the Derech. He was obviously not very committed if he was at this event on Shabbat. His old Rosh Yeshiva went to visit the father, who's still religious, to give him hizuk/strength.
But the father told the rabbi, “You don't need to give me any hizuk. My son came to me in a dream, his face was shining, and he said, ‘I'm now learning in Yeshiva shel Mala.’”
So what we see on our end is horrific. But we have to tell ourselves that our eyes don't always see things correctly.
Great people look at things through Torah lenses. The Gemara in Masechet Gittin tells us that Rav Yochanan Ben Zachai was smuggled out during the second destruction of the Bet Hamikdash, to meet the general that was laying siege. When he met the general, he said, “Peace be upon you, Oh King, peace be upon you.” The general told him he was deserving of the death penalty for calling the general king -that's rebelling against the king. But just at that moment, a messenger came from Rome and said the Caesar had died, and they were replacing him with the general as the new Caesar.
They asked Rabbi Yochanan how he knew this, and he said, the pasuk says, “VHaLevanon b’Adir Yipol”
Simply, this means, “Lebanon will fall by the hands of a great one.”
But Rabbi Yochananben Zachai knew how to learn a pasuk, and he said the word Levanon was really referring to the Bet Hamikdash. Why? Because it whitens our sins and Adir means the king, from another pasuk. Therefore, Yerushalayim is going to fall into the hand of the king. And therefore you must be the king.
The rabbis ask, why was Rav Yochanan ben Zachai risking his life like this? Just call him general. He doesn't know that he's the king! And the answer is that Rav Yochanan ben Zachai doesn't look at life through regular eyes. He doesn't say, ‘I see a man in a general's outfit, so he’s a general.’ No. “What I see is a king, because the pasuk says he's a king.” We have to say to ourselves that what we see is people dying Al kiddush Hashem, and we can't fathom what's going on with them and where they're sitting, the zechut that they have for causing us to do teshuva and for all the things that we're doing in their merit.
So, one of the ways to heal ourselves from these graphic images, is to tell ourselves that what we see with our eyes is not necessarily what's really going on.
Have a wonderful day.