You can’t miss it. Today, we are going to look at another example of how our great rabbis put effort into seeing not only the creation, but also the kindness of the creation, even in things that people may not recognize on a simple level.
If I were the creator of the world, I probably wouldn’t do that. Nobody wants to be in that situation, but if you’re in that situation, you wouldn’t appreciate this. Why did it have to smell? For what reason did the body of a human have to smell?
Well, the Gemara says that not only is it not accidental, but Hashem actually decreed that it would happen. It sounds like even against nature: normally, things don’t smell like that. Why all of a sudden does the human body smell like that? Animals don’t smell like that when they die. But Hashem specifically said that when it comes to humans, we need this body to have a terrible odor. Why? For what reason?
So Rashi tells us it is because if Hashem wouldn’t do that, the relatives of the dead—the relatives of the person who passed away—would want to hide the dead body. Which means they would see their pain, or the source of their pain, constantly in front of them. Human beings very often do something that they think is good for them, but in reality is detrimental.
Rashi says we know this from many examples. Here is one example: by nature, when a relative passes away, someone who loves that person is very, very sad and in a lot of pain. It’s very hard for them to let go. Imagine they would be able to leave the body somewhere, in one of the rooms in the home, and look at it. They would be able to look at it.
It may sound a little weird to leave a dead body in the house. But think about all the pictures that people take. People love looking through pictures. “Oh, that was my father. That’s my grandpa. That was my grandmother.” People relish them. They’re in a different world when they see pictures of people they love, even people who are alive. They love seeing pictures of things that happened. But seeing pictures of somebody who isn’t here, someone you miss very much, brings back all the beautiful memories. It brings back certain emotions. We all know the value of pictures and albums, especially of people who have passed on, especially people we never met. Your mother tells you, “You know, that was your great-grandfather.” “Really? Let me see. What did he look like?” We appreciate pictures of people who preceded us because, in a certain way, we’re able to connect to them when we see their picture. Clearly, it’s not like talking to them. It’s not like shaking their hand. It’s not like hearing them give us words of wisdom. But there’s a certain connection when you see someone’s picture. You can’t deny it.
If you tell me, “You gave that my grandfather,” or you show me my grandfather, it’s a different story. If you give me a video of my grandfather, it’s an even better story. There’s a certain feeling of kirva (closeness) that a person has. Imagine you would be able to save bodies, and you would be able to actually see the actual body.
Now again, this might sound a little weird to us, maybe not so natural. But that’s only because of Hashem’s decree. If there were no decree that a body would smell, then it would be a very, very prevalent custom among humans that when they lost a relative they loved so very much, they wouldn’t put them in the ground. Why would they do that? Why would they bury them? They would leave them right there in their home, close the door, and visit every so often. It’s better than a picture, maybe even better than a video. You’re seeing the live person. This is what humans would do, which seemingly is good for them. Why would they do it if it’s not good for them? They want to be able to preserve the relationship. They want to be able to preserve the feelings. That’s what everybody would do.
Hashem specifically went out of His way to make the body of a human smell—not animals. Animals’ bodies don’t smell when they die. Only humans. It’s out of nature. It’s a miracle, because Hashem doesn’t want us to suffer. He doesn’t want us to suffer. What do you mean? We want to keep the body around so we can enjoy the company in our home. No, no. You might think it’s good for you to have the body there, but really what you’re doing is extending your pain. In the short term, you think you’re taking care of your pain by having the body around. But in reality, you’re prolonging the tza'ar (pain). The person has passed away. You have to move on in your life. Yes, there’s a certain time when you need to be crying, and a certain time when you have to be sitting. But at some point, you have to move on with your life.
We’ve seen people who, unfortunately, could not move on. They’re still suffering from pain that happened to them 20 years ago. They can’t move on. And if you can’t move on, you can’t live. And if you can’t live, you can’t accomplish. You must move on. Nothing in life should hold you back from living a life of accomplishment. And to accomplish, you have to be happy.
So a person who loses a close relative experiences tremendous pain. That state of pain doesn’t allow a person to accomplish as much as he could. So he needs to move on from that pain. But a human would not be able to let go so easily. That’s how we are. We don’t think of the long term. Very often, we think about what’s bothering us now. “Right now, I miss my father. Right now, I miss my father. Right now, I miss my grandpa.” So right now, I want his body next to me, in the next room. But you’re not thinking. Hashem says this is not good for you, because in the long term, you’re extending your pain. So you might be putting a Band-Aid on a big, big cut. But that cut needs to heal, because you’ve got to move on. You’re not going to allow the cut to heal because you’re going to continuously put that Band-Aid on. Hashem says you’ve got to get rid of the body. You’ve got to bury the body.
Now, He could command us to do this, which He did. The Jewish people, Am Yisrael (Jewish people), have a commandment: when a body leaves, when a human leaves this world, we’ve got to bury him right away. It’s a mitzvah (commandment). But Hashem, in this situation, didn’t leave it only up to a command. He basically forced our hand. From Adam HaRishon (the first man) until today, even those who were not commanded understood: you’ve got to get rid of the body. You can’t leave it in your house. Hashem made it so that you would have to do it. There’s no choice, because He made the body smell so bad that there’s no option to leave it around.
What looks like something terrible, something that maybe we would not do if we were the creator. You know, by nature, we always think that if we created the world, we would do a better job. Now, maybe I didn’t say it the way you would say it or others would say it. But whenever we complain about certain situations that occur in life, that’s really what we’re saying: that if we ran the world, we would do a much better job. We would know how to do it.
So, for example, if you asked somebody, “Let me ask you: if you made the world, would you make a human body smell?” “No, no. For what? Why? What reason? It just makes things unappetizing. It makes things not so pleasant. Why would I do that?” But the creator of the world has much greater thoughts and sees much longer and better than us. So even things that maybe look like they’re not good, when you break them down, you see they’re there for your benefit, for my benefit.
That’s what the Gemara says: Hashem decreed that the body of a human needs to smell so that you can get rid of him. You get rid of him as soon as you can, because you need to move on. And the longer he stays around, the more difficult it will be for you to move on. That’s one decree the Gemara speaks about.
The Gemara continues: Ve'al ha-met (And concerning the dead). Another decree that is relevant to a dead person. Hashem made another decree: she-yishtakach min ha-lev. That he will be forgotten. An amazing miracle. Think about it. Let’s think about this. Think about a person who doesn’t have the ability to remember. Remember that memory is a creation of the creator. You don’t just remember things. It doesn’t just happen.
Today, in the age of computers and hard drives and memory, you want memory in your computer? You’ve got to pay more money. “Oh, you want more memory? You’ve got to pay more money.” The more memory, you’ve got to buy it. There are machines that are able to remember what you did, what you put in. You don’t just have memory in a computer. So how does the human have memory? Hashem created memory chips that are sitting in our brain right now as we speak. Before He made us, He already thought about this. He already thought about the value of giving a person memory.
Could you imagine a human without memory? Think about what would be with us if we didn’t have memory. We would basically cease to exist. We have everything. Hashem gave us all of our faculties. Just the chip of memory is lacking. That’s all. You can’t do anything. You can’t have a family. You wouldn’t remember your wife if you saw her three minutes ago. No memory. You couldn’t remember your children, even if you were with them for the last 25 years. You have no memory. You can’t do business because you don’t remember any of your customers. You can’t remember if anybody owes you money, or somebody you owe money to. So you can’t do business. You wouldn’t be able to walk around the corner to get milk because you would forget where the store was. You wouldn’t remember your father or grandfather, or where you came from. Experience in life would no longer be relevant because you would forget everything that happened to you. Think about a life without memory. What would it be? A human would basically stop existing in the normal way that we see humans.
So Hashem can give me every single one of my body parts, and they would be at the top level of health and quality. Top brain power. My eyes are gorgeous, beautiful, 20/20. My muscles are strong. My legs, powerful. My stomach, working beautifully. My teeth are running wonderfully. My nose is smelling great. My ears are hearing perfectly. Everything is running perfectly. You go to the doctor. He says, “Wow. I’ve never seen a healthier human than you. You are gorgeous in every way.” But there’s a little chip, a little, little chip, that’s sitting in our brain right now. All the chip does is memorize what happened in your life.
By the way, you don’t have to buy an expensive extended version or an upgrade for this chip, because somehow this chip is able to hold pictures and videos in color—not just from yesterday. It’s able to hold all the videos and pictures in color, and conversations you’ve had from the day you were born. Do you know what kind of computer you would need today? What kind of massive hard drive you would need to hold videos of everything that’s ever happened to you from the day you were born till today? The human mind never forgets, ever. You never forget the people you met. You never forget the conversations you had. And even when sometimes we don’t remember 100%, it doesn’t mean that the information is gone. That’s not what it means.
I’ll give you an example. You meet somebody, and you’re looking at him. He tells you, “So, you remember me?” It happened to me a few days ago. Actually, I said, “No, I don’t remember.” I’m looking. I really don’t remember. I don’t remember the person. “I never saw you.” Then he starts telling me who he is. We went to elementary school together. He tells me his name, and all of a sudden it’s coming back to me. “Oh yeah, right. Of course.” All of a sudden, as he’s talking, I’m putting things together. I’m remembering where he sat in the classroom. I’m remembering the time I played ball with him. I’ve got it all together now, all of a sudden. What’s that? Where was that information two minutes ago? I thought I forgot it. I never forgot it. The mind has everything stored. Sometimes we lose the ability to access it. That’s what we call it when we forget, but we really never forget anything.
Imagine how much information that little chip in our brain is carrying with us right now. So nobody could deny the great value of memory, the great kindness of the Creator in giving us this little chip so that we’ll be able to live our life and accomplish. But then He also created something called shikcha, forgetfulness. So obviously, if memory is a great kindness to humanity, the opposite of memory, which is to forget, is a terrible thing. It’s the opposite of memory. It’s the opposite of the best thing. If memory is so great, then forgetting is not so great. It’s the opposite. It’s terrible.
The Gemara in Masechet Pesachim (Tractate Pesachim) says that Hashem came and made a decree. Made a decree means He went against nature. By nature, we remember everything. Hashem came and made a decree that a dead relative, a dead person, should begin to be forgotten by the person. Which means that when a person passes away, especially a close relative, especially someone you interact with on a daily basis, someone who’s such a big part of your life that you don’t go an hour without thinking about them and their presence, and all of a sudden that person passes away—sometimes tragically, sometimes less tragically, but it’s always tragic.
When a person who is so close to you passes away, in your mind you feel, “How can I ever move on? How can I move on without my father? How can I move on without this relative? How?” Initially, when a person loses a loved one, they can’t imagine living a normal day again. The sadness, the pain, is so overwhelming. They can’t imagine how life could ever be normal again.
Could you imagine that feeling being bottled up and staying with the person their entire life? The person can never live a normal life. It’s over, because he will remember those feelings and he will remember that day and that moment for the rest of his life the same way it happened. When you have memory in your hard drive, there’s no difference between day one, when you entered the information, and day 10,000. It’s the same. The information stays in there the same way. Nothing happens to it. It’s the same color, the same high definition, the same everything. Whatever you put in your mind—in your chip, excuse me, in your computer, in your hard drive—it stays the same. It doesn’t make a difference when you access it. That’s the way it should be with the human as well.
Hashem gave us a chip, a memory chip, and we remember everything. So therefore, my logic is that that day of your pain should continue because that knowledge is in your brain and stays with you always. So therefore, your emotions and your feelings should continue for a day, three days, three years, ten years. It doesn’t make a difference, because the memory of it is still here and it’s still clear.
The Gemara says that Hashem made a decree. It says, yes, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be that way, where you just remember everything because you have the memory chip. But Hashem came and decreed that a person who is dead should be forgotten from the human heart, from the human mind. Which means that Hashem created something called forgetfulness. It’s something very interesting, because you really never forget. You never forget that someone passed away. Never. But somehow there’s a certain creation of the Almighty that you kind of forget what happened without forgetting what happened. It’s something very interesting. I mean, it’s one thing to delete the information, which doesn’t happen. But the information is there, but it’s not really there. It’s there, but it’s not as clear. It’s there in the mind, but it’s not in the forefront. It’s there in the mind, but it’s distant. That’s a creation of Hashem, that you’re able to forget.
Obviously, if you didn’t forget, you couldn’t move on. You couldn’t live life. So therefore, Hashem did something that may not look so good, like forgetting, but actually it’s there to help us live life.
The Hachamim (sages) are pointing out to us: look at the miracle of shikcha. They took things—two things so far that seem to be not such positive things. A human body starts to smell, not so positive. A person forgets, not so positive. These are two negatives. Chazal (the Sages) say, “Look, look how the creator of the world, even in things like this that you thought were maybe things to complain about, actually made them to help you.” Initially, when you see them and think about them, you say, “For what? Why do we have that?” And then you realize, “Oh wow, this is actually for my good in the long term, in the short term.”
One more example the Gemara gives: Hashem decreed that food rots. That’s a decree. We’re used to it. We think it’s just nature. But by nature, really, if you have wheat, bread, cereal, milk, bananas, fruits, vegetables, corn, by nature, the way they were created, they should stay that way. Just like rocks. Rocks don’t decay. Rocks stay the same. Wood stays the same. It doesn’t rot unless something happens to it that’s not ordinary. By nature, you leave wood where it is, it stays wood. Metal stays metal. By nature, things don’t rot. Why should they rot? Nothing’s happening to them.
But when it came to food, Hashem decreed—the Gemara says He decreed—that food must rot. Your orange juice must expire. Your food is not going to stay fresh, and the process happens very quickly. Now, that’s a terrible thing, isn’t it? If I made the world, if I were the creator, would I make food rot? You bought a truckload of food. You come back in a few weeks and it starts to rot. You feel bad. Why? For what reason does food have to rot? What a headache.
You open the milk bottle, the carton—it smells. For what? I would never make milk spoil. If I were the creator, I would give people milk as is. It would never spoil. My orange juice would never spoil. My bananas would be yellow forever. My bread would never get hard. If I were the creator, I’d make everything perfect. What reason do these things happen? Terrible things. Food rotting is terrible.
Take an interview with people on the street right now. “Sir, what do you think about food rotting?” “Oh, it’s a terrible part of creation. It’s unfortunate. It’s the unfortunate reality.”
The great wisdom of our rabbis says, “Wait, no, no. You should know that by nature, really, things shouldn’t rot, as we see in the world. But Hashem stepped in specifically when it came to food, and He says, ‘I want you to rot. You get to rot.’” Why? Why would He do that?
Chazal say it’s because if Hashem didn’t do that, all the wealthy people would store food, and they would bring hunger and famine to the entire world.
Let’s think about this for a second. There’s nothing that people need more, and are guaranteed always to need, than food. That’s for sure. People buy real estate. They call it real estate because it’s real, because you have something. You know, you buy a company, you’re buying stock, you’re buying paper. You have currency; it’s paper. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow’s currency will be half the value it is today. Maybe the company you’re invested in will no longer be worth anything tomorrow. Who knows? But you buy real estate—oh yeah, you have a piece of land. You have a building. You have something real.
And I ask you: when you want to invest your money to make sure that your money stays real and relevant, and you want to make sure your children will have money safely, you want to store money for yourself and your kids, and you’re blessed with a lot of money, would there be a better investment than just buying food? You know how much money we spend on food? Could you imagine guaranteeing that your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren will always be fed? The best investment: you’ll take all your money and buy food, buy cereal, buy bread, buy bananas, buy it all, and put it in a warehouse so that 300 years from now your great-great-grandson will have something to eat. Guaranteed.
Real estate might go down. Currency might go down. But food will never go out of style. Food is food. Since Adam HaRishon until today, it cannot go out of style. Everyone’s got to eat, no matter what happens in life, no matter what businesses are down. Here we are in a pandemic. People who make food are not suffering. Their business is fine, because people have to eat. Whether they’re home or they’re not home, they’ve got to eat.
The best investment for someone who has money, the safest investment, long term or short term—it’s all there for you. So what would happen if food didn’t rot? Every person who has money would start building warehouses and collecting the world’s food.
Now, somebody who’s not so affluent wants to buy food, but he can’t find it. “Oh, you want food?” He goes to the rich man. The rich man says, “Okay, no problem. Pay me X amount.” Food will be so expensive that people will not be able to afford it.
Now, you might think that’s a little bit like—really? Would that really happen? Anyone who lives in Brooklyn, and I’m sure there are other areas like that as well, could appreciate this very much. Go try to find a house in Brooklyn, in the area that we live in. Try to find a 25 by 100 lot. Two million dollars. You can go to Nebraska and they’ll give you half a city for two million dollars. They’ll literally sell you half the city. Two million dollars, you get half the city. You get acres and acres and acres and acres. You won’t know what to do with it.
But if you want a 20 by 100 in Brooklyn, you can’t get it. Now, part of the reason is that people who have money are buying houses for themselves, for their children, for their grandchildren. They buy. Anyone who has money, you come to buy a house, the guy outbids you because he has money. What better investment than to buy a house for your children and grandchildren? So now a regular guy wants to live there, and he can’t afford it. It’s a reality. That’s not far from understanding. It’s a reality of life: if something is so good, so safe, and so long term, a person will want to invest in it. And once the investors come in, regular people can’t have any access. Simple mathematics.
How will people eat when all the food is being stored away by all the rich people? So in order to make sure this doesn’t happen, Hashem decreed that food will rot. Food cannot be a long-term investment. You cannot store it. He forces them to sell it, because if you don’t sell it, it will expire. You have no use for it a week or a month from now. You have to get rid of it. This way, the price goes down. This way, people are able to afford it. People are able to eat.
So what seems to be, “Oh wow, food rots. What a terrible thing. Terrible thing.” If food didn’t rot, there’d be no food in the world for regular people. People would starve. The Gemara says people would go—there’d be a famine in the world.
Again, another example of the wisdom of our great rabbis, who studied each part of creation and did not say it’s an accident. It’s not an accident that food rots. Actually, it’s a miracle that food rots. And what seems to be a terrible thing has actually saved humanity. Food rotting—next time you see a banana rotting, no, this banana and this cycle of things that rot is saving the world. When you smell that spoiled milk, no, that’s saving the world. What seems to be terrible, Chazal look at and say, “Look, it’s actually saving your life and the life of your children and your family.”
That’s something Avraham Avinu (Abraham our father) was able to see. He was able to see even the difficult things in life and even the negative things in life. But when you look a little bit more into them, you realize they’re a lifesaver. They make your life better.
Today we learn about three of them. We learn about the body of a human that begins to smell so that you can have forgetfulness. You can put them out of your life so you can continue on living. We spoke about the power of shikcha, the power of forgetting, so a person can move on. We spoke about food rotting and the great value it has for all of us.