Ve'Etchanan

This week's dvar torah is for a a refuah shelaimah for Rav Chiam Kanievsky- Shmaryuhi Yosef Chiam ben Pesha Miriam, who was rushed to Mayni Hayeshia Hospital.

The Blind Walk Through the Street:

There is a pasuk in Eicha (4:14) "The blind wandered through the streets..." keep this pasuk in mind for later. In this week's parsha (4:12) the pasuk says "... you were hearing the sounds, but you were not seeing a likeness, only a sound." The pasuk speaks of the Jews seeing sounds. We know there is a midrash that says that when Hashem gave the torah at har sinai He got rid of all diseases, He made the deaf be able to hear and He made the blind be able to see. There is a gemara in Eiruchin (daf 16) that asks "what are isurin (pains)? Trying to take out three coins but only taking two out." Rav Brevda in his sefer Yibane Hamikdash explains that that means that in an ideal world every single time a person tried to pull out three coins he would. Every time someone wanted to do something it would just work out every time. This is the optimal world. We could not imagine a world were everything just works but Rav Brevda explains that before Adam HaRishon sinned this is how the world worked. So too, when mashiach comes that is how the world will be again.

There is a famous chazal that everyone knows that we have 613 parts in our bodies each one attached to a mitzvah. It used to that people did not need doctors. If a certain body part was hurting they would know which mitzvah they have to fix and after fixing it the pain would go away.

I once heard Rabbi Nissel quote a very interesting Rav Amram Gaon. He asks what will the times of Mashiach be like. He answers that we must all imagine that everyone in the world was blind. Now everyone spends their lives thinking what life would be like if people could see, but since no one has ever seen it is all just speculation. Then, all of a sudden everyone in the world has the ability to see. There are no longer questions because everything is so clear. The times of Moshiach are like a time when everyone gets a sixth sense (partially the ability to see dead people...) and everything is so clear that there are no more questions.

After the beit hamikdash was destroyed we lost many of the mitzvot we used to do. There are seforim out called 44 Mitzvot For Today or 75 Mitzvot Done Today. But the point is that we are no longer anywhere near the 613 we used to be at. Once we lost all of those miztvot our body parts just stopped working as they used to. This is what is means in Eicha when it says that blind people walked through the streets. Because now that we lost the beit hamikdash it was as if we were all blind.

I started listening to Rav Kahn on the Gra on Mishlei. He explains that the Gra splits the sefer into 3 sections. The final section is called Torah. The meaning of this section is that the torah tells us what is wrong and was is right.

Rav Kahn explains that the worst type of prison is one where you believe you are in a palace. He brought a story. A king has a son who constantly gets drunk. The king decides that he will bring his son to the worst place in his kingdom where his son will see all the drunk homeless people laying on the ground. When the son gets there he is delighted and runs to the first man and asks him where he could get the whiskey he is drinking. The prince is so involved that he thinks this drunkard is the one that knows how to live. He is living in prison but he thinks he is in palace and that is the worst type of prison.

Nowadays, people think that we are living the good life. The only thing is that we have never lived so we do not even know what to compare this to. If we knew how people used to live we would not enjoy this life rather he would be disgusted by it and would yearn greatly to be freed from this prison.

The reason we cannot understand that we are truly prisoners is because our bodies are not working as they should. Let me give you some examples. The last perek of Avot speaks of a bat kol that comes out everyday from Har Sinai, yet we hear no bat kols... We know from this week's parsha that the Jews could see sounds yet our eyes cannot see any sounds... We know that humans only use about 10-15% of their brains ability... We have organs in our bodies that scientist have no idea what they do because they have stopped doing anything for us (your appendix)... The torah gives many many pasukim about our Leiv (heart) thinking but our hearts are just muscles that move our blood through our bodies...

We all think that we are living yet we have never experienced a single day of life. Without the beit hamikdash we live in a world that we think is a utopia but we do not know how bad it is because we cannot see what is right in front of us!