Your Precious Home
And so we come back now to this man in our parshah, this relative, a brother or cousin, whose mind was subjected to gentile influences. Of course it was. He lived among them; he lived in a gentile home and had a gentile master.
And now he wants to come back home; to return to his homestead and to his family. And so the Torah warns us to be very careful; beware, because your mind is too precious, too sensitive, to allow such a thing.
And it’s not only your mind. He should ‘return to his family’ means to return to a Jewish home. A Jewish home! That’s not something to sneeze at. If the mind is precious, then a Jewish home is much more precious because it has many minds, many Jewish minds.
It’s the minds of your husband and your wife. It’s the minds of your children, little children, older children, children that will one day be building their own homes. That’s something that requires a shemirah me’uleh, an especially high level of guarding.
It’s Not “Bubbeh Maasehs”
Now when we hear that it means very little to us. It’s like water off a duck’s back. And that’s because we’ve lost touch with the ancient Jewish home.
I say ‘ancient’. We’ve lost touch with the holiness of the Jewish home of even just a hundred and sixty years ago. Why do I say a hundred and sixty years ago? Because a hundred and sixty years ago the great majority of the Jewish homes answered this description.
The mashgiach of the Mirrer Yeshivah in Poland, Rav Yerucham once said – he said this about eighty years ago – he said “Mir kenen nisht farshtein unzer elter bubbas – We can't even understand the greatness, the holiness, of our great-grandmothers.” You hear that? Not the tzaddikim. Not the great-grandfathers. Our great-grandmothers! ‘Beyond our comprehension’, he said.
Now Rav Yerucham wasn’t a baal guzma. He didn't exaggerate and we have to take these words very seriously. And he said that because our ancestors, our great-bubbehs and great-zeidehs, had Torah minds, and they lived with an outlook on life that was a Torah outlook; they built holy homes.
Building Holiness
Now, how exactly they built their holy houses, how they built Torah minds, that’s another subject altogether. Creating a mind means learning all the attitudes that give you a new set of values, a Torah ideology. I can’t tell you on one foot, but if you’re interested I’ll be happy to help you. It’s a very important subject that can’t be spoken about enough. But before that, the first element, the foundation, is standing guard over your mind. Because there’s no use if your home, is open to everything.
And so, first of all, a person has to always remind himself that ָ ך ל מִ שׁ ְ מָ ר נְ צ ֹ ר לִ ב מִ כ. You must cut loose from all sources of influence from the gentile world. Otherwise, what is it worth? It’s like a man who took hold of a bush of thorns. He’s holding onto the thornbush and he’s crying out, “Ouch! Ouch! Bring the peroxide! Bring the Vaseline!”
