It is told about the holy Baal Shem Tov who once saw a Jewish man desecrate the Shabbos, and this upset him so much that he began to cry and do Teshuva as if he himself had desecrated the Shabbos. When they asked him why he was so upset, he was not the one who had desecrated the Shabbos? The Baal Shem Tov replied, “If it was worked out by Heaven that I should see this thing, it is a sign that I myself had a flaw in this matter and so I am upset.” He then did a self-examination until he found that he once heard people disparaging a talmid chacham, and he had not protested enough as he should have, and since a talmid chacham is classified as Shabbos, it was considered as if he had the flaw of desecrating Shabbos [chilul Shabbos].
The Torah commands us (19:33-34) 'וכי יגור אתך גר בארצכם, לא . כי גרים הייתם בארץ מצרים'.תונו אותו. – ‘When a convert dwells with you in your land, do not harass him... for you have been strangers in the land of Egypt.’ Rashi explains, ‘an imperfection that exists in you, do not say to your friend’, and in truth Rashi’s explanation needs examination, was it only because I was smitten in a particular matter, therefore, it is prohibited for me to shame someone else smitten with the same thing? If I were not smitten with that thing, I would be allowed to embarrass someone else? This certainly cannot be Rashi’s intent!
Perhaps we can say that Rashi is bringing here a novel basis on the matter of the sin of embarrassing someone. This is, whenever you have the urge to disparage your friend, you should know that that flaw is really relevant to you, and it is just for this reason that you choose to see it in someone else.
The holy Baal Shem Tov explains the teaching (Negaim 2:5) 'כל הנגעים רואה אדם חוץ מנגעי עצמו' – ‘a person can examine all symptoms except his own’, the person is like a ‘mirror’, and when he thinks and sees a flaw by someone else, he must know that this is a personal flaw, and since a person cannot examine his own symptoms, he shows his flaws to someone else.
We are now in the middle of Sefiras HaOmer during which 24,000 students of Rebbe Akiva died because they did not honor one another. If we must be careful with this all year long, how much more so now. If we internalize the rebuke that every flaw that we see by someone else is a sign that it is specifically this that we must improve, perhaps then we can correct the reason we are still in exile: sinas chinam – baseless hatred!
-Tiv HaTorah - Kedoshim
