This is a repeat from a Shabbos email from 2014, and it came out not long after my first son, Binyamin, was born, following four wonderful girls!
For the past few months, the most common question I get is, “So, what’s it like having a boy in the house after four girls? It is really different?” My answers vary day by day, but here are some of my most common answers:
“Not really, he’s only 5 months old and he pretty much does exactly what his sisters were doing at 5 months; eat, cry, sleep…”
“Of course! Just having ‘My Lil’ Man’ around fills me with Daddy-pride!”
“What? I had a boy?”
“Of course it’s different! They all wore pink, and he wears blue!”
And the truth is, they’re all true to an extent. Having a baby boy is pretty much the same as having a baby girl, they do wear different clothes, and I am filled with pride over finally adding some diversity to the family. But he doesn’t really do anything significantly different; he doesn’t play with trucks instead of dolls, he doesn’t dress up like a “police mans,” and he doesn’t try to make guns and swords out of Legos, kliks, household appliances, or anything else he can get his little hands on. For the first few months of his life, all he did was sit there, and let us all serve him, swaddle him, feed him, pet him, clean him, bathe him, soothe him, and read him his copy of the Wall Street Journal (maybe that should have given him away as a male!).
But recently, thank G-d, he seems to have reached a new milestone. He has taken on all sorts of important jobs, and watching him perform with such seriousness and gravity is quite hilarious. He crouches in his exer-saucer and manipulates all of the balls, wheels, flip-books, and flags with a focused earnestness for hours on end. Every once in a while, I presume on his discovery of a new law of physics or perhaps a novel understanding of how dark matter interacts with swirly balls, he is overcome with elation, and begins jumping up and down energetically in his three point harness seat.
Then there are his dictatorial moments. He sits in his car seat, resolutely lifts a fully extended arm up in the air and brings it crashing down to his side, again and again. His brow is furrowed, an air of great solemnity on his face, and I can almost hear him saying, “I ordered all military units deployed at the border, and I gave that order yesterday! I don’t want to hear your excuses, just get the men to the border, and ready to attack!”
He is also quite scientific at times. He can lie belly down on the shag carpet in our living room, and delve deeply into the sophisticated realm of carpet science for twenty minutes straight. He grabs one twisted strand at a time in his tiny little fingers, studies it for a while, and then throws it away to study just how different the next strand is.
But perhaps what is most important to him in his new Era of Exploration is gears (or interlocking wheels if you will). We have a purple plastic board that has protrusions upon which you can put a series of toothed wheels of different colors and sizes. When the wheels interlock, all you have to do is turn one of them, and the rest of them turn in tandem. Lil’ Binyamin loves to spin those wheels, and can sometimes do it for the entire duration of dinner. This is an amazing development for me, because I no longer need to hold him during dinner, which frees up my hands for another important task that I used to be able to do at dinner; eating. So while we eat, he turns wheels with great deliberation and purposefulness.
Occasionally, my wife and I will stop and watch lil’ Binyamin absorbed in some project of his, and laugh. He’s so serious, so earnest, and the look on his face says, “Don’t bother me, I’m saving the world with these gears.” The contrast between the weightiness he puts on the tasks he does, and the real value of those tasks is simply hilarious to us.
But last night, as we got a hearty laugh out of his interest in carpet science, I started thinking to myself, “Maybe someone Up There in heaven is looking down at all us adults and laughing at us!” Maybe He sees us playing Candy Crush, updating our status on Facebook, making March Madness brackets, reading thrillers, arguing about what boots look best with our outfit, and He laughs, or more likely He cries.
Maybe our Bubbes and Zeidies are looking down at the weightiness we ascribe to our clothes, our car, every detail in our homes, our knowledge of sports, fashion, politics, or design, and they are ironically laughing at how much we care about the things that are so unimportant in the grand scheme of the world. To them, watching us spend fifteen minutes figuring out what to wear to a wedding, or watching us spend three hours to watch a game of college basketball which will have absolutely no affect on our lives, is probably the equivalent of watching my son spend seven minutes turning wheels on his tray table. The only difference is that we actually have better things to do with our time.
If you want to understand a person, watch what he does with his free time. What a person does at work does not necessarily define them, most people don’t have the freedom to do whatever they want at work. But what a person does with their free time? That is indicative of who they are. Do they use it to pursue a greater purpose? Do they use it to connect with others? Help others? Do they use their free time in various escape worlds? Running away from connection with others? Absorbed in relatively useless pursuits?
This is not to say that a person can’t relax for a few moments after a long day doing something simple like sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of green tea with milk, and reading an interesting article in Popular Science or simply quietly contemplating their day. That is actually a must for most people, and should be embraced. We do need to wind down sometimes if we want to hold on to our sanity. But there is a fine line between relaxation and laziness.
The Path of the Just, the 18th Century masterpiece of Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato, tells us that each and every night, before going to sleep, we should take inventory of the day’s actions, just like a store owner takes stock each evening of the day’s transaction, and a bank manager reconciles each teller’s cash draw at the end of the shift. And perhaps, we should look most closely at how we spent our time during the previous time, because time is the most precious commodity in the world, the only thing Bill Gates can’t buy more of despite his billions. How did we spend our time? What percentage of it was used for meaningful purposes, and what percentage of it was used spinning gears on a purple plastic tray?
The upcoming holiday of Pesach is called Zman Cheirusainu, the Time of our Freedom. We now have the freedom, and indeed with the favorable economic conditions and protections of the US government from anti-Semitic attacks, Jews have rarely had this much freedom in our 2,000 years of Diaspora. But what are we using that freedom for? Are we using it to develop ourselves into the giants we can all be, or are we using it to study the carpet?
I’m not sure if I see the real difference between having a boy or a girl at this stage in the game, but I do know that my Lil’ Man sure did teach me a huge lesson yesterday! Thanks, son!
Parsha Dvar Torah
The portion of Tazria includes a detailed discussion of an affliction known as Tzara’at, one of the most misunderstood concepts in the Torah. Because Tzara’at afflicts the skin, it is commonly mistranslated as leprosy. Nachmonides explains, however, that Tzara’at was not a physical malady, but a spiritual ailment that manifested itself physically on the person’s body. This affliction was the result of committing one of several transgressions, the most common of which was lashon hara, or gossip, and slander.
The Torah goes into great detail when discussing the various forms of Tzara’at that may exhibit themselves on a person’s body. Should a person discover a suspicious-looking patch of skin, a Kohen must be brought in to examine the affected area. There are several stipulations that must be fulfilled in order for the Kohen to declare the person spiritually impure and afflicted with Tzara’at, and there are times when the individual must be quarantined and then reexamined. However, one situation is absolutely clear-cut: If the Kohen looks and sees that the person’s entire body is covered with what appears to be Tzara’at, the law is that the Kohen must declare the person pure.
At first glance, this seems completely counter-intuitive. If a small patch of Tzara’at renders a person impure, certainly this should apply when the person’s entire body is covered. On closer consideration, it becomes clear that the Torah is teaching a fundamental lesson about the Kohen’s relationship to those in need of spiritual guidance. If the Kohen sees someone as totally blemished, without even a single redeeming speck, he must not be seeing the person properly, and therefore is not in a position to declare him “afflicted,” or, even more significantly, to help him. Only when the Kohen sees some healthy skin, i.e., some good in the person, may he then declare him “impure.” In such a case, the declaration is the beginning of the individual’s journey back to spiritual health, rather than a permanent judgment about his status.
A great Chassidic Rabbi used to lead his congregation each Yom Kippur for the Kol Nidre prayers. One year, everyone stood quietly waiting, but the Rabbi wasn’t moving from his place. He seemed entirely lost in thought, and no one dared to disturb him. Finally after a protracted wait, he finally began in his usual manner. His followers were intrigued. After Yom Kippur, a few of them approached the Rabbi to ask him what caused the long delay. The Rabbi explained:
“I try to never lead the Kol Nidre prayer until I can find one area in which each person is better than I am. Only with the recognition that we are all flawed, and that some of us are greater in some areas, and some in others, can I approach G-d with my prayers. This year, just before I was about to begin, someone walked in who behaved so rudely that I simply could not find any redeeming qualities in him. After thinking about it for a while, however, I realized that he was in fact greater than I in one respect: If I was as rude as he is, I would never come for Yom Kippur services! Once I came to this realization, I was able to begin the prayers!”
In one way or another, each of us serves as a mentor or guide to someone else at some point in our lives. It may be to our children, a younger co-worker, a study partner, or friend. Sometimes we come up against a situation in which the other person appears beyond hope. However, this week’s portion demonstrates that the status of being beyond hope is more of a problem with the mentor than the person in need of guidance. If our view of someone else is so tainted that we cannot find any redeeming qualities, it is a sign that we are not viewing his situation – or our relationship with that person – properly. Finding the good in a person is the seed from which all of our efforts on their behalf can bear fruit.
Parsha Summary
This week, we will read from two scrolls. From the first we will read this week’s parsha, Tazria, which begins with laws of impurity associated with childbirth. The idea is that life alone in not an end, rather life’s purpose is that we elevate ourselves. To this end, when a child is brought into this world the mother goes through a process of impurity which then leads to purity. This mimics the type of life she wants her child to lead - one of growing, and elevating themselves from their basic state to a higher state.
After that, the Torah launches into the laws of tzara’at (see above) for the rest of the Parsha. It talks about the different forms of tzara’at, the way the Kohen makes his diagnoses, and what the metzora does after being diagnosed. One major part of his “medicine” is the law requiring him to sit in isolation for a week. This is supposed to help him realize how he made others feel when he spoke negatively about them, and caused rifts, dissension, and isolation.
The last section of the parsha deals with tzara’at that appears on clothing. (No, that reddish or greenish blotch on that suit is not the latest styling from Versace, it is actually a spiritual disease manifesting itself on clothing!) Our Sages explains that because of G-d’s great compassion, one does not immediately get tzara’at upon his body. Rather, he first gets it on his house, as is described in our second Parsha, Metzora. Hopefully, he learns his lesson and stops gossiping and slandering, however, if he doesn’t, it starts to afflict his clothing (a little bit too close for comfort). If the person continues to ignore these blatant cues telling him to shape up, he then gets the full force affliction on his body, for which the atonement process is the longest.
From the second scroll, we read Parshat Hachodesh, in which G-d commands the Jewish people to set their calendar by the moon, the celestial being that goes through constant renewal. May we combine the lesson of renewal with that of humanities goal of constantly elevating ourselves, and may we energize ourselves to go through frequent bursts of renewal, ever striving higher!
Quote of the Week: Friendship is honey, but don’t eat it all! – Moroccan Proverb
Random Fact of the Week: Our sense of smell is 10,000 times stronger than our sense of taste!
Funny Line of the Week: I saw this wino, he was eating grapes. I was like, "Dude, you have to wait."
Have a Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Shabbos,
R’ Leiby Burnham