Rabbi's Corner

In this week’s parashah, Parashat Naso, we find the following: “’However, if you have gone astray while married to your husband and have defiled yourself, if a man other than your husband has had carnal relations with you,’… the Kohen shall make the woman swear the oath of the curse, and the Kohen shall say to the woman, ‘May HaShem make you a curse and an imprecation among your people as HaShem causes your thigh to sag and your belly to distend’…And the woman shall say “Amen!  Amen!’” (BeMidbar 5:20-22) This passage of the parashah speaks to what will happen measure for measure regarding a woman whose husband suspects her of having committed adultery.  If one gets past the language, what can be found is a unique teaching: the same exact limb can be used either to perform a mitzvah or to perform a sin.  The entire passage revolves around the guilt or innocence of the suspect woman.  If she is guilty, she will suffer an agonizing death after drinking the mixture described in the Torah.  However, if she is innocent, our Tradition teaches that she will give birth to the most healthy, the most beautiful, and the most gifted child she has given birth to up to that point.  Ultimately what happens rests in the actions she has taken be they good or bad.

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov speaks to the principle of using one’s powers for good.  He writes: “Sometimes when people dance and rejoice, they grab a person from the outside --- someone who is sad and distressed --- and they bring him into the circle of dancers thereby forcing him to rejoice with them.”  Rebbe Nachman proceeds to explain that there are two important ways to overcome sadness and depression.  (1) A sad person can chase away sadness by immediately doing something that makes him/her happy.  After all, he says, sadness and bitterness “run away” at the first sign of happiness, (2) A person can take the power of sadness or depression and bring it directly into joy thus causing the power of the negative emotion to become a positive emotion.  Says Rebbe Nachman, instead of chasing the sadness away, we should run after it and harness its power for good.  You may ask, “How can this be done?”  Perhaps the following Chasidic parable will provide the answer:

Stanislav was a strapping Polish dairy farmer whose shoulders were almost as wide as the road between Lodz and Lublin.  Although he was not overly bright, he was joyful all of the time.  When he was not milking his cows or churning butter, he would be guzzling a glass of his home-made vodka or raisin wine and taking his fiddle off the shelf to play a polka.  Stanislav’s cows gave more milk than anyone else’s cows.  Even more, their milk made the best butter.  Everyone joked that his cows were always happy because their master was never angry.  Instead, he was always singing and dancing.  “Let them make fun of me,” Stanislav would tell himself.  “They are all suffering, and I am not!  They always have a bitter taste about life while I walk around with the taste of sweet butter in my mouth.  ‘Better butter than bitter,’ I always say.”  He would laugh with amusement reveling in his own good humor and thankful of his own good fortune.

One bitterly cold Polish evening, Stanislav lit his kerosene lamp and went out to the cowshed to milk his cows.  He sat down on his milking stool, took his pail, and began milking the first of his cows.  Suddenly, a tremendous rat darted across the floor, right between the cow’s front legs startling the otherwise tacit Stanislav.  He kicked the pail of milk which, in turn, knocked over the kerosene lamp.  Before he could react, the entire barn caught fire.  Quickly assessing the situation, he consoled himself by saying, “I can always build a new barn.  First, however, I must save my cows!”  Once all seven cows had been led to safety, Stanislav breathed easier.  After a few minutes, he thought to himself, “Brrrrr, it is cold tonight!”  He had moved away from the still burning ruins of the barn.  “Why should I be cold?” he asked himself.  Because the cowshed was a total loss anyway, Stanislav saw no reason why he should not warm himself by the burning embers of the charred clapboards that were once the south wall of the cowshed.

Smelling the smoke in the air and seeing the glow of the blaze in the January sky, Stanislav’s neighbors raced in the direction of his homestead.  How amazed they were to find the brawny dairy farmer with a bottle of his home-made vodka in his hand dancing a polka and warming himself by the smoky aftermath of what was once his barn and cowshed.

In this parable the burning barn and cowshed are symbolic of sadness and depression.  It would have been very easy for Stanislav to sit on his milking stool and cry out, “Woe is me!”  Our Tradition relates that giving in to such emotions is giving in to the Yetzer HaRa (the Evil Inclination), a move (or lack thereof) which never results in anything good happening.  When Stanislav took action and saved his cows from the burning barn and cowshed, he was turning toward the Yetzer HaTov (the Good Inclination), a move that ultimately resulted in a positive outcome in spite of his loss.  How can we turn from the Yetzer HaRa to the Yetzer HaTov?  This is most easily and effectively done through tefilla (prayer) and reciting Tehillim (Psalms).  In the darkest and most dreadful hours of our history, Am Yisrael (the People Israel) have always done so, turning sadness into happiness and happiness into holiness.  May we, too, always turn to the “bright side” of our Tradition.