Audio Shiur: Parshat Tazria-Metzora: There Will Be Blood

Audio Shiur:
Parshat Tazria-Metzora: There Will Be Blood

While most of the parshah deals with tzaraat in many forms and its ramifications, the double parshah both begins and ends by describing the ramifications of uterine bleeding. What is the difference between niddah and zivah? Why does a woman become impure after childbirth? And what does all this have to do with original sin?

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Stopping Lashon Hara - A Powerful Thought from Rabbi Nachman of Breslev for Metzora (and Tazria)

This week, between Minchah and Ma'ariv at the Carlebach Minyan at Bobby Rosenberg's house, Bobby welcomed Rav Erez Moshe Doron, who has just moved into Yad Binyamin and is apparently extremely well-known across Israel as a big teacher of Rabbi Nachman's teachings. (I had no idea) Rav Erez shared a powerful thought about lashon Hara that I'd like to share with you. (By the way, if you happen to live in Yad Binyamin, Rav Doron will soon be giving a shiur on Shabbat afternoon on the teachings of Rabbi Nachman. For details contact Bobby directly.)

It's well known that tzara'at emanates from the speaking of Lashon hara - slanderous speech. Yet, with all that we know about the prohibition of slander, and the damage that it causes, we never ask the next question: why do we speak lashon hara? Why is slandering a fellow Jew so powerfully enticing? Why do we like speaking evil about others?
Rav Erez suggested that the principle begins with a famous Mishnah in Negaim. (That's the masechet that deals with tzara'at.) The Mishnah teaches,

כל הנגעים אדם רואה, חוץ מנגעי עצמו.

A man may see every ailment, other than his own.

In the context of the Mishnah, we learn from this that a Kohen can declare all incidents of tzara'at as impure, except his own. Yet, commentators have a field day with this Mishnah, and especially the unusual language of רואה, meaning, "he sees," deriving the obvious truism that, "a person sees all blemishes, other than his own." While everyone else can see my faults clear as day, for some reason I can't see them. How true it is!
Yet, Rav Doron answered our lashan hara question by reading the line only slightly differently:

כל הנגעים אדם רואה חוץ, מנגעי עצמו

Every blemish that a person sees external to him - comes from his own blemishes

Read this way, the Mishnah communicates an even more powerful truth: when I see faults in others, I'm really seeing my own faults without even realizing it. Others' failures that match our own, trigger an instinctive desire to criticize ourselves. Yet, because I refuse to at least consciously acknowledge my own faults, I can only criticize the faults I see in my neighbor.
Why can't we - or at least won't we - see our own failings? That's due to a deeper problem. Quoting Rav Nachman of Breslev, Rav Doron said that deep down, we won't look at ourselves because we really believe that we're bad. We're evil. So I don't want to look at myself, because I'm afraid of what I'll truly see.
But, said Rav Nachman, we're wrong. We're not evil. In reality, we're good - very good, and our failings stem from an unwillingness to believe in and look at ourselves. Because if we really thought that we were good, we'd have no problem seeing the "dirt" in our personalities and trying to clean it. After all, I'm generally clean. All I need to do is brush off a little "stain." But because I think that I'm really bad, I don't even want to look at myself in the mirror, so I look at others around me. I see my own failings in them. And I speak loshon hara.
What's the solution? How do I stop speaking slander about others? The first step is seeing the good in myself, and understanding that we really are good people. This, said Rav Doron, is actually a verse in Tehillim that we all know by heart.

מִי-הָאִישׁ, הֶחָפֵץ חַיִּים;  אֹהֵב יָמִים, לִרְאוֹת טוֹב. 

נְצֹר לְשׁוֹנְךָ מֵרָע;  וּשְׂפָתֶיךָ, מִדַּבֵּר מִרְמָה.  

Who is the man that desires life, and loves days, that he may see good therein?
Keep thy tongue from evil, and thy lips from speaking guile.

Again Rav Doron reread the first verse:

מִי-הָאִישׁ, הֶחָפֵץ חַיִּים, אֹהֵב יָמִים - לִרְאוֹת טוֹב

Who is the man that desires life and loves days - let him see the good!

If we want to keep our tongues from evil and stop saying lashon hara we must first fulfill the previous verse: לראות טוב - to see the good within ourselves. Once we understand just how good we are, we can aspire to imagine how much better we can truly be.

Audio Shiur: Parshat Tazria 5771 - Through the Darkness

Audio Shiur:
Parshat Tazria 5771 - Through the Darkness

Reading through Tazria for me is an exercise in frustration. We simply have no idea what the Torah describes. We believe in Tzaraat - we know that it's real. But we have no idea what it is or should look like, despite the fact that we read about it year after year. Sometimes Judaism today seems like that; for all we know, we're still walking in the darkness. In light of a number of difficult tragedies that took place this week, the shiur focuses less on what we do know, and more on what we don't.

Click here to download the shiur, or here to navigate to the shiur on YUTorah.org.

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Violence in our Culture: An Old Drashah, Still Relevant

On my commute, I enjoy listening to podcasts. (I love my iPod. It's an amazing invention. One day soon I'll post about my Nike+Ipod. Amazing.)
Among a number of different podcasts I subscribe too, I really enjoy two Slate podcasts: the Political Gabfest, and the Culture Gabfest. I recommend both.
This week's Culturefest contained a segment about a newly released movie, whose title I'm not even comfortable writing in full on this blog, called Kick-***. You've might have heard of it, as it was the top grossing film in the United States last weekend.
What's got people talking about the film apparently, is a supporting character called Hit Girl. In the film, Hit Girl is exactly that: an eleven-year-old, foul-mouthed (apparently really foul), martial-arts assassin. She literally kills dozens of people in the movie.
Now, I like a good Jackie Chan movie as much as anyone. In his (really negative) review of the movie Roger Ebert wrote,

Shall I have feelings, or should I pretend to be cool? Will I seem hopelessly square if I find “Kick-Ass” morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let's say you're a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the movie does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in. A movie camera makes a record of whatever is placed in front of it, and in this case, it shows deadly carnage dished out by an 11-year-old girl, after which an adult man brutally hammers her to within an inch of her life. Blood everywhere. Now tell me all about the context.

Many people really do feel that a line has been crossed. But I often wonder: where do you draw the line? What violence is truly innocuous, and what's harmless. Where's the point beyond which we say: you know what? At some point some child is going to start trying to be like Hit Girl in the real world?
All of this got me thinking about a drashah that I gave at YIOP three years ago. Following the shocking deadly rampage at the University of West Virginia, I gave a drashah about our society's addiction to violence, connecting the theme to the topic of Tzaraat.
Reading it again this week, following the release of Kick_***, the drashah seems as relevant as ever. Maybe more so.
Click here to download the drashah.

Audio Shiur: Parshat Tazria-Metzora: Ear, Thumb, Big Toe and the Jewish Community

Audio Shiur:
Parshat Tazria-Metzora: Ear, Thumb, Big Toe and the Jewish Community

One of the primary challenges in reading about tzara'at is finding relevance in a "disease" we've never seen and cannot relate to. By analyzing both the sacrificial process that purifies the Metzora, and the causes of tzara'at listed in the Midrash, we find that tzara'at speaks not only to our actions and behavior today, but tells us a great deal about how we must behave to build the idea Jewish community

Click here for the audio link, or listen in the handy audio player supplied below.

Personal Parshah for Tazria Metzora - Understanding Tzara'at

Understanding Tzara'at
Tzara'at is difficult for us to understand and appreciate. We'll look at the deeper message of tzara'at, and a critical lesson it has to teach us especially today.

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