Parshat Bechukotai
May 27, 2000
Rabbi Shalom Fishbane

Have you ever watched someone in shul start a conversation with you in middle of kriat Hatorah, and when you politely decline to respond you become the object of ridicule—“that frummie”?

What causes people, who normally adhere to Halachah (as evidenced by their attendance in shul), to react in such a way?

Rashi lists the seven sins that could bring to bear all of the terrible calamities that G-d threatens upon the Jewish nation in the Tochachah, the Admonition. They are: not studying Torah; not performing mitzvot; abhorring others who perform mitzvot; hating Torah scholars; preventing others from performing mitzvot; renouncing the mitzvot; denying the fundamental truth of Judaism.

This list comprises not only sins of inaction, but sins of negation. In other words, it is not enough to simply drop observance; one must denigrate others’ observance in order to justify one’s own actions.

“Once you have ceased to observe the laws in practice,” Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch notes, “your conscience will give you no peace until, in order to justify your behavior, you will be able to rationalize your disobedience as ‘progress,’ to look down upon loyalty to the law as an outworn idea.”

This denigration presents itself in many forms, some seemingly benign. We sometimes hear comments, for example, that donors only give money for the honor they receive.

We find a similar thought hidden in the seemingly unrelated laws of sanctified animals at the end of the parshah. The pasuk says that once an animal is sanctified to be offered to Hashem, the donor “shall not exchange it or substitute it whether good for bad or bad for good.”

Why would the Torah forbid replacing a bad animal for a better one?

The Rambam explains the psychology of this halachah: If you allow the donor to begin making changes, then if he changes his mind and wishes to keep the animal he has designated, he will convince himself that it is inferior and that he has a better one to offer. The human mind is elastic in its capacity to distort reality in order to benefit one’s own self-interest. He can take the good and declare it bad.

Thus, the tendency to see the unfavorable side of others is often done as a justification for one’s own shortcomings. I once observed a yeshiva bachur politely ask someone not to continue the lashon hara that he was speaking. The speaker’s response amazed me. He went from publicly making fun of this “fanatic” to saying it was a mitzvah to degrade the subject of his story.

Sometimes we will make light, or worse, ridicule people who are more pious in the detail of Halachah. We learn from our parshah that this comes from our longing to be as close to G-d as he is. If we recognize the source of our negativity, next time instead of degrading, we will hopefully try to emulate.

Rabbi Shalom Fishbane

Rabbi Fishbane is rabbi of the Saranac synagogue in Buffalo, New York.