Thoughts on parashat Shoftim 5784
Menachem Mirski
A week ago I had a dental emergency. My tooth began to hurt, on Thursday evening, just a little, but on Friday, during the day, it began to hurt more and more. I led evening prayers while on strong painkillers. However, they soon stopped working because the pain became unbearable, (8-9 on a scale of 1-10) – so unbearable that I went to the ER in the middle of the night. I spent about 4 hours there and they did basically nothing. If I didn’t ask for local anesthesia at the end, this visit would have been a complete waste of time. Using this local anesthesia again and again I survived till the morning. Then I called about 15, maybe 17 dental clinics and one finally accepted me, despite the fact that they were already booked for the entire day. I scheduled an appointment, the dentist opened my tooth, removed the nerve, applied temporary filling and scheduled root canal treatment in three weeks. I went home. The pain was gone! I spend the rest of Shabbat sleeping in my bed.
Right after Shabbat I opened my laptop and read terrible news. The news we all heard that day – that Hamas brutally murdered, executed 6 of young hostages shortly before the IDF arrived with a mission to rescue them. I was shocked and I wasn’t at the same time because we all know that Hamas represents pure, absolute evil. Nevertheless, another nightmare became reality, another painful reminder about atrocities of October 7th. I had no words, no opinions to express at that moment but my feelings, thoughts and prayers went immediately to unite in pain with those who suffered the most – the families and loved ones of those murdered. Then I realized how small was the pain I was experiencing just a few hours before.
The first kind of pain – the physical pain I experienced – was just a warning that something was going wrongl in my body. It was a call to action. If you don’t take any action while experiencing physical pain like that, it will likely lead to more pain or something really bad and dramatic, so you better act immediately to prevent it from happening
The second kind of pain is different; it’s an outcome of something terrible that has already happened, something that might have been avoidable but is not since it happened and painfully radiates from the past, something our parasha teaches us how to manage socially – how to separate unintentional killer from the effects from the revenge of the suffering relatives of the victim. This kind of pain is a warning too but of a different kind – it’s a warning that something went wrong or is deeply wrong with the world around you, society or system that allowed that terrible thing to happen.
But in the world we live in, bad things happen regularly, on a daily basis, and nobody is exempt from it. Bad things will happen ultimately to everyone – one day, everyone of us will lose someone we love the most and it is unavoidable. A belief that I will be somehow spared from them is a delusion. But this simple awareness that one day we will suffer too can help us prevent at least some bad things from possibly happening to us.
To quote one of the Polish philosophers, Tadeusz Kotarbiński – and perhaps many other philosophers expressed this idea – There is no point of experiencing in our imagination suffering that will come in the future. It’s meaningful and wise, however, to minimize the possibility of the suffering we know is avoidable. Therefore we should be happy and enjoy our life when everything is ok and there are no visible signs that something really bad is going to happen. And be at the same cautious regarding the dangers we know may bring pain or suffering.
I believe it’s important for us to be extra gracious to each other in these difficult times, to do our best to be less argumentative, and more agreeable, especially if we are able to control that and I believe that most adults are capable of it. We should be each other’s doctors more than critics, I believe, we are all in pain and should try to alleviate it, not add to it. This is, I believe, the universal, humane meaning of pain and suffering that is experienced secondhandly, namely, by seeing others experiencing it. It is also one of the fundamental markers of being human.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Mirski
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