This week’s parasha, Parashat Korach, teaches us a very important lesson about how
one’s Emunah and Bitachon outlook will impact their ideologies and how they view things. It
connects with last week’s
Parasha as it discusses the Mitzvah of Tzizit. There, it says, “Do not
follow your heart and your eyes.” The question that the commentaries all deal with is that it should
say Don’t follow your eyes, and
then say, Don’t follow your heart, because first,
your eyes see something, and then you want it.
So why does the pasuk say, don’t follow your heart first?
The answer, an important lesson for us, is that your heart impacts what your eyes see.
Two people can see the same event, and
view it differently. Your heart drives what you see. Your Middot and Hashkafa
impact what you see.
On a very simple level, a family can be looking out a window. The
little boy might see a barking dog, the father might notice a fancy car, and
the mother might notice a stain on the window. They are all looking at the same
window, but they are all seeing different things, based on what’s driving them.
Korach, because of his jealousy and arrogance, saw things
differently. He saw Moshe Rabbenu taking all the positions and giving
them to his brother. What Korach saw was
based on his
own lenses, and his biases. That’s why it says about Korach, “His eye caused him to sin.”
He saw things and misinterpreted them.
This is where Emunah and Bitachon play a role. If you have Emunah
and Bitachon, you see things in a different light. There is a story in the
Gemarah that illustrates this point. It discusses a once-great man, a
Tanna, who went off the path of
religion. His name, originally, was Elisha Ben Abuya , but he got the name Acher/ Other one, because he
became someone else. He changed.
The Gemarah goes through different reasons for his change.
What was the trigger for this behavior? One of the causes was that
he saw a father tell his son to climb up a tree to send away a mother bird and
bring the eggs back down. This boy was actually involved in two Mitzvot, Kibud Av V’Em ( respecting one’s
parents),and Shiluach
Haken
(sending away the mother bird). Both of these Mitzvot promise long life. Yet, on the way down the tree,
the boy somehow slipped, fell, and died. Acher said, “If this is what happens, then the Torah isn’t true. It says that if you respect your parents, you will live a long life and that if you
send away the mother bird,
you will live a long life. This boy did both, together,
and he was sent to his immediate death?
I’m out!”
On the other hand, the
Gemara discusses another rabbi, called
Rabbi Yaakov, who saw the same event, yet
he came away with the following
statement. “How do we know that there is an Olam
Habah? Because I saw this boy climb up the tree and he fell to his death. He
was supposed to live a long life. So it must be that, “a long life“ refers to
the world that is forever long- Olam Haba.
Two people saw the same event. It triggered one of them to leave the religion, and the other walked away with strengthened believe and
faith. Why? Because there is something driving what we see. What we see is
based on what is inside of us. That is why the first thing that we have to fix is our
hearts- our understanding and the way that we look at things. That is why, the
Torah first says, “Don’t stray after your heart,” and then says,”Don’t stray after your eyes. When you have Emunah and Bitachon glasses on, you see
things differently.
Two people can see the very same thing, yet see it totally
differently. There is a beautiful story that I heard about Rabbi Eliezer Silver that
illustrates this.
There was a great rabbi who was involved in saving people from
concentration camps. He met a man in the displaced person camp, who later
became a great activist and Nazi hunter, but who had gone off the Derech. He once asked
the man what caused him to leave the religion (this was not a judgmental
question; of course we are not to judge anyone who went through the Holocaust).
The man said that he had been in a concentration camp where there was only one
siddur, which belonged to a man who rented the siddur to people for bread
rations. The man wondered how it could be that a Jewish, religious man would stoop so low as to take food away from people because they wanted to pray. “If that is what religion is, then I am out.” Rabbis Silver replied that it was quite the opposite, “Look at all the
people who were willing to give up their bread in order to pray! I see
something totally different. I see the
self sacrifice and faith of everybody else, who was willing to pay.”
I myself wonder about the story. They were in a concentration camp. They borrowed the siddur from a scoundrel, but they
didn’t have to return it. There was no police officer guarding it. And yet all
of those people gave up their rations, and they returned the siddur!
Different people can see the same event, and interpret it differently. Korach saw that he was not appointed.
He could have thought, “I didn’t get appointed, maybe there is
something wrong with me. Maybe I have to fix myself.“
Instead, he said, “There’s
nothing wrong with me. If I didn’t get appointed, it must be that Moshe Rabbenu
is
making these decisions on his own!”
So, what you see,
and how you interpret it, all goes back to what is going on inside
of you. That’s why, when we work on emunah and Bitachon, we are not just working on the
moment. We are using our Emunah and Bitachon in the moment, as a tool to rely
on Hashem to get what we need. But e
also use our Emunah and Bitachon glasses to influence how we look at life, and all of our decisions.
As we have
quoted in the past from the Bet HaLevi, “Emuna and Bitachon have immediate
gains,
and they have ripple effects on many
of our Middot as well-one such middah is jealousy, which is the one that Korach fell
in.
So appreciate how you are not just working on the momentary gain of
Bitachon, but also on the long-term
impact, of how you view and look at
things throughout life.
Have a wonderful day and a
Shabbat Shalom.
