Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
Yesterday we spoke about the living human document, the concept that a human being is no different than any Gemara or topic that must be learned in depth. In Depth, we believe, has four layers in Torah, and those same four layers exist in a human being.
Someone asked me to explain exactly what that means.
So I’ll use the example of a mother-in-law. A young 21 year old has her first baby, and her mother in law buys her an elaborate baby carriage. She doesn't ask her daughter in law first, and she doesn't necessarily like this brand or style, but she buys it for her.
What's the pshat? What's the simple level? The simple level is that you have a nice mother-in-law who is excited about her first grandchild and wants to buy her daughter-in-law a carriage. That's face value. A simple, innocent story. That's what we call pshat. It’s simple.
Let's go for a Remez. Is there a hint of anything here? Well, she bought it so fast that nobody else could even think. She ordered it before the baby was born, after the first sonogram. So maybe there's a touch of a remez/hint of, “I know best.” She didn’t say it. It’s definitely not on the surface level, but that's a hint of what's going on.
Now let's make a Derasha-let's compare it to something else. (A derasha is when you see one word here and one word there and you compare one to another.)
Well, let's go back to when she had her first child. When she had her first child, her mother-in-law was sitting shiva for a relative, lo alenu, and nobody really paid attention to her new baby. So she feels a need to make up for that lack of excitement over her first child. She's reliving her first child, with her first grandchild.
Wow. That's far away from the simple story of ordering that carriage from Amazon on the day of conception. It looked like a simple act, and maybe there was a hint of, I know best, but once we start peeling off the layers, we see that wow, there's something here that definitely does not meet the eye. That's like tefilin. When we say,ltotafot ben enecha/between your eyes, it sounds like it should go between your eyes, but it's actually supposed to be on your head between your eyes, which we know because it says someplace else that ‘pulling out hair from your eyes over a dead one.’
So, we go to a whole different case, and we compare the two. That's a derush. You're definitely not going to see that unless you start delving a little bit.
And then we have the Sod. The Sod is the secrets, like the Kabbalah. These are things that Kabalists know. The person himself might not even know what's going on.
If we look deeper, maybe this mother-in-law has a lack of self-esteem that came from grade school, from her older sister always making her feel less than. So now she has this need, that she wouldn’t even be able to tell you about. She could tell you about how there was not a lot of excitement over her first baby. She is cognizant of that. She might not have said, ‘That's why I'm doing this,’ but deep down, there are some secrets that maybe she even doesn't know, that are driving her.
That's what it means that for any action that's done by a person, there are a lot of things that are driving the action.
Every behavior serves a purpose. What purpose is it serving? Is it serving the lack of self-esteem? Is it serving the need to celebrate? Is it serving a simple desire to be generous?
Is it serving a need to show, ‘I know better?’
It could be all the above, none of the above, some kind of combination, or something else.
That's what it means to truly look at a person and look at his acts with multi-layers. It's not one or the other. They are all true. Every single thing that we said in our little made-up story was true.
And all of those factors are contributing factors to what happened. Therefore, any one thing that you say is not correct or incorrect.
That's the depth of the human being.
Have a wonderful day.