“Mommy,” calls my eight year old as he heads down the stairs, “What’s for dinner?” Evidently, a few seconds of foreknowledge makes all the difference when it comes to the dinner menu. “Lasagna, salad, and fresh fruit,” calls back my wife. Lasagna is enough to unglue me from the computer, and bring me shuffling to the kitchen.
The table is set splendidly. In an attempt to encourage our children to eat more fruits and vegetables, my wife has been setting them out in beautiful and colorful arrangements, so on the table is a plate with tri-color peppers sliced into spears, and another one with kiwis and mangoes. Standing next to them is a green salad in vinaigrette, adorned with almond slivers, craisins, baby corn, and sprinkled with feta cheese. Next to each plate is a full cup of water, a colorful napkin, and cutlery, while dominating the center of the table is a steaming pan of lasagna, fresh from the oven, melted cheese floating generously across the surface. I’m about to dive in when I stop and pause to contemplate the blessings before me.
My greatest blessings are clearly the people in the room, not the peppers. Making the time to sit down with them for dinner, while tricky due to everyone’s constantly evolving schedules, is one of the best investments I can make on any given day.
Then I move onto the food. The first thought that strikes my mind is that 500 years ago only the top .1% of society would even dream of having such food at their table. The variety, the freshness, the flavors, the quantity, would simply be unimaginable to average folk. Kiwis from New Zealand, mangoes from India, peppers from Mexico, almonds from California, craisins from Wisconsin, feta cheese from upstate NY, all on my table in Michigan, flavorful and delicious as ever!
And how did they get there? Let’s look at the almonds. Eighty percent of the world’s almonds are cultivated in California. However, left alone, almond trees won’t produce almonds. To pollinate the trees, over a million bee hives are trucked each year to California from as far as Vermont and the Carolinas. The beehives are stacked throughout the orchard, and the bees perform their own little miracle. Bees have an electrostatic charge which makes pollen cling to their legs as they dance among the flowers eating nectar. After they are coated in pollen, they rub up against the flowering part of the tree, and deposit the pollen, giving the tree what it needs to produce the almonds sitting on my table in Michigan, delicious as ever!
What about those mangoes from India or the kiwis from New Zealand, both coming from over 8,000 miles away? They’re picked before they are fully ripe, as they would spoil in the transportation process if they were ripe and squishy. In their pre-ripe state they are packed in crates and flown halfway around the world to the fruit companies’ huge US distribution centers. There, they are sprayed with ethylene, a gas that coaxes them to achieve their full ripeness. This of course ensures that when they are sitting on my table in Michigan, they’re delicious as ever!
Then there is the tomato sauce and baby corn, from produce that may have been picked over two years ago, but still taste ever so fresh! That feat is due to an invention by Nicolas Appert, a French brewer, in response to a 12,000-franc award offered by the Napoleonic government. Napoleon found his military campaigns being limited to the fall and summer due to short food supply, so he offered that enormous sum to anyone who would invent a way to preserve food for a long time. Nicolas discovered that using boiling and sealing techniques, one could preserve food for years. Today, canning has become eminently more sophisticated; in some cases, preserving the nutrients better than fresh food (canned tomatoes have more lycopene than fresh ones). This allows me to have two year old baby corns in my salad, that taste like they were picked last week!
What about the yellow cheese floating on the top of the lasagna, or the ricotta, cottage cheese, and white cheese, nestled between multiple layers of pasta? They came from an animal that by placidly munching grass somehow produces 20,000 pounds of milk a year! How do you get milk from grass? That milk, besides being one of the most nutritious liquids in the world, is transformed into dozens of products we all love, including butter, sour cream, yogurt, and tens of varieties of cheese, from moldy blue to briny feta, hard cheddar, soft brie, gouda, camembert, Parmesan, havarti, and my favorite, gournay. The versatility of milk is astonishing! Besides keeping our bones strong, it keeps our palette from ever getting bored.
Now that we’ve marveled over the source of all the products on my table, let’s focus for a moment on what they contain. The cornucopia of fruits and vegetables I’m having for supper contain dozens of vitamins (short for vital minerals). These vitamins, which the human body can’t produce on its own, are essential for healthy living. They ferry items around our cells, act as chemical mailmen transporting messages throughout the body, work as policeman neutralizing harmful free radicals, keep our vision sharp, tell our baby cells what type of cells they should grow up to be, and even help us conquer our acne! Contained in the foods on my table are large quantities of Vitamins A, C, D, E, and K, all ready to scurry around to every nook and cranny in my body, working tirelessly to strengthen my toenails, push hair out of my head and everything in between!
Of course, we can’t ignore the billions of molecules floating out of the hot lasagna and around the kitchen, stimulating my olfactory nerves and sending messages to my brain that translate into the heavenly lasagna smell (and greatly aiding the process of taste). Neither can we forget the hundreds of thousands of taste receptor cells on my tongue which, despite each one being limited to tasting only one of the five primary tastes (sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and savory also known as umame), send enough messages to the brain that it creates a comprehensive taste profile, thus allowing me to appreciate the full flavor of everything I eat.
All these thoughts are just a fraction of the blessings that flood my mind as I survey the dinner table, massive blessings that most often pass us by without even getting a trace of recognition.
There are two ways we can live our lives, being blessed or being troubled. The difference between a blessed life and a troubled life depends on where we are looking. There are always going to be difficulties that one can focus on. “Man was born for toil” (Job 5:7), we are going to have challenges thrown our way all the time. This adds flavor to life, and gives us our mission of elevating ourselves by climbing the mountains confronting us. But at the same time that we are challenged, we are also blessed.
We are blessed with life. We are blessed with five extraordinary senses. We are blessed with an average lifespan nearly double what it was for most of history. We are blessed with a great variety of inexpensive and accessible food. We are blessed with heat in our homes in the winter and cooling in the summer. We are blessed with electricity. And the blessings go on endlessly, as long as you look for them.
People who spend their lives focusing on the vast blessings in their lives will live as thankful people. They realize that nothing is owed to them, and that all their blessings are gifts from G-d. They are appreciative for what they have, and feel motivated to give back to others. People who spend their lives focusing on the troubles in their lives will live as bitter people. They feel that they deserve so much more than they have, and walk around feeling slighted by life. They are much more likely to retreat into a shell overwhelmed by their difficulties, or take out their frustrations on others.
So how do we foster in ourselves and our children a sense of thankfulness, a sense of being blessed?
One of the easiest ways is to regularly verbalize those feelings. That’s one of the purposes of reciting blessings on foods. Before one bites into that lasagna he should express his thankfulness, before one smells a delicate lily he should express his thankfulness, and before doing a mitzvah one should express his thankfulness for such a great opportunity. So, ramp up your blessing experience, whether it means starting to make one blessing a day, or concentrating more on the blessings you already make.
But even outside of blessings one should work to verbalize their feelings of thankfulness. Before you sit down to an incredible dinner, you can exclaim to your wife and children just how thankful you are to G-d for creating such wondrous fruits and vegetables and how appreciative you are to your wife for putting them all together in a gourmet dinner. While taking a walk with a spouse or a friend you can pause for a moment and talk about how blessed you are to be able to walk briskly in the crisp spring air, the trees blooming in color, cool breezes providing the ultimate walking weather. Just getting out of bed and going to work is a blessing!
“Behold, I set before you today a blessing and a curse.” (Deut. 11:26) The commentaries explain that G-d is referring to the same thing, and whether it’s a blessing or a curse is up to us. Let’s choose the blessed life!
Dvar Torah on the Parsha
The two Parshas read this week, Tazria and Metzora, deal primarily with an affliction called Tzara’at. As Nachmonides explains, this was not a typical form of leprosy (which could be healed easily with some Noni juice and a little ginko-biloba, the common cure for pretty much everything) but rather a spiritual ailment which manifested itself on the person’s body. This affliction was the result of committing one of several transgression, the most common being Lashon Hara, which is gossip and slander.
It is fascinating to see how today, in the USA, there are dozens of magazines which make their entire livelihood by putting out gossip about other people, besides all the gossip carried by “mainstream media.” We live in a society that sees nothing wrong in maligning others, both behind their backs and in front of them. In Judaism, however, it’s seen as such a severe offense that it had its own spiritual affliction to heighten awareness and foster avoidance,.
When discussing the various forms of Tzara’as we find a very peculiar law. The Torah tells us that if one has the marks of the affliction (different shades of whitened skin in this case) the Kohen has to come to inspect it to determine if it is indeed tzara’as or not. The Kohen is like a spiritual Dr. and he has the ability to diagnose the affliction and help the healing process of the afflicted one. Now, the interesting thing is that if this mark covers the person’s entire body, it is not considered tzara’at and he does not become impure, but if a small amount of healthy skin begins to show through the mark then the person is declared to have tzara’s and becomes impure. That seems baffling! When the person is covered head to toe in tzara’as he should for sure be considered to have the spiritual affliction!
While I was in Social Work school, we discussed a famous question in a few different classes. Are people created bad, good, or a little of both. (Being that many of the students were training to be conflict resolution therapists, you can imagine that many people said “a little of both” right off the bat!) I personally believe that we are created with both good and bad, also known as the Good Inclination (the guy with the flowing white robes, the halo, and occasionally a harp) and the Evil Inclination (the guy in your head with the red pointy pitchfork). On one hand there is a verse that says “Yetzer leiv ha’adam ra mi’neurov,” the inclination of the heart of man is bad from its youth, while on the other hand we have a soul inside each of us that is lofty, pristine, and cannot be fully sullied no matter what evil we do.
People who do a lot of gossiping and slander are usually the people who focus on the bad side of others, while people who your mother would call a “mentch” see the good in others and don’t want to talk bad about them. However, sometimes there are people that almost everyone sees as bad, and we just can’t seem to find a single redeeming quality in them.
The message the Torah teaches us by tzara’as is that if you see someone as totally covered from head to toe in spiritual blemish, you are not seeing properly and you cannot call him afflicted and try to help him. Only if there is some healthy skin i.e. you see some good in the person, can you call him impure, and begin to help him on the path back to spiritual health. The lesson is powerful. We cannot help people until we can clearly see the good in them, because the goal of helping is to make the positive qualities within grow until they take over.
As long as you see anyone as 100% bad, not only can you not help him, but even more, it should be a sign for you that you are not seeing properly. And isn’t it amazing that this exact lesson is taught to us through the medium of dealing with the Metzora, who is afflicted because he talks bad about others which is as a result of focusing on the bad in others! So let’s try to focus on seeing the good in others (that doesn’t mean that we are blind to reality, but rather that we concentrate on the good) and through that we will be able to build each other up, and bring our nation closer to each other and closer to G-d!
Parsha Summary
The first of the two Parshas we read this week, Tazria, 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 leading to purity, thus mimicking 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’as (see above) for the rest of the Parsha. It talks about the laws of the different forms of tzara’as, 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 and dissension amongst friends.
The last section of the parsha deals with tzara’as 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’as 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 own body, for which the atonement process is the longest.
Parshat Metzora begins with the sacrifices brought by the metzora on the completion of his isolation and repentance process. He brings two birds to remind him that his excessive chirping like birds caused him to get tzara’at. (P.S. if you know of any metzoras, please send them to my house, we have a few birds that wake me up real early and I wouldn’t mind donating them to any local metzoras!) He also brings a piece of cedar wood (a very tall tree) to remind him of what his haughtiness caused, a hyssop (low bush) and a tongue of crimson wool (in Hebrew this translates into a word that also means worm) to remind him that he can remedy it by being humble like the hyssop and the worm. The metzora then waits another week and brings a second round of sacrifices to the Temple, after which he is finally clean and pure, and he can go back to rejoin society – hopefully, a transformed man.
The Torah next discusses how tzara’as can afflict a house. In addition to the Sages’ view of the affliction of the house mentioned above, there are other commentators that note that affliction of the house was actually a gift from G-d. When the Cannanites saw the Jews coming to conquer their land, they hid their money in their walls. Since part of the purification of a house with tzara’at involves cutting out the afflicted parts of the wall, the occupants would then discover the hidden treasures!
The last part of the Parsha deals with different kinds of discharges from the human body that are spiritually contaminating to different degrees, and the various purification processes used to rectify the contamination. Being that today there is no tzara’as to keep us in check, let us try to be more vigilant of the way we talk about others, and ensure that our tongue is never a weapon, only a tool!
Quote of the Week: A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read. – Mark Twain
Random Fact of the Week: Americans purchase over 20 million tons of Candy Corn each year.
Funny Quip of the Week: My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them.
Have a Preternatural Shabbos,
R' Leiby Burnham