It is truly hard to imagine just how biased we are in our view of life and This World. There are so many ulterior motives and agendas going through our minds all the time, making it truly very difficult to see what is real and what is true, what is sincere and important, and what are just the machinations of the yetzer hora and negative character traits.
When we hear something said to us, we tend to hear it based on our biased perspective. We hear what we want to hear, and we see what we want to see....
Rav Elya Boruch Finkel zt’l gives an incredible example of this from the Gemara (Gittin 45a). The Gemara tells us that Rav Ilish was, R’l, captured, and a bird came and began to chirp near where he was being held. A man there knew the language of the birds, and thus Rav Ilish asked him what the bird was saying.
The man then said, “That the bird is calling out, ‘Ilish, run! Ilish, run!’” And thus, baruch Hashem, Rav Ilish escaped. The Aruch on that Gemara says that Rav Ilish also understood the language of the birds; Rabbi Akiva Eiger then asks, if so, why did Rav Ilish need to ask the man what the bird was saying if he himself knew its language?
Rav Elya Boruch answers Rabbi Akiva Eiger’s question based on the words of Rav Chaim Shmulevitz zt’l: Rav Ilish did understand what the bird was saying, but he suspected that maybe he is only hearing what he wants to hear...and thus, he asked the other person to kindly tell him what the bird was saying, because he did not trust himself! Why? Because a person hears what he wants to hear!
How far does this principle go? One might have thought that it goes only as far as our flesh-and-blood eyes take it, yet when it comes to ruach hakodesh, we think that in our “spiritual eyes,” in a sense, the biases of the human frailties will not affect that holy view at all.
Comes our parashah, explains Rav Elya Boruch, and shows us that unfortunately that thought process is far from the truth. For as we see so clearly through Korach’s very grave error, even something that is seen through the lens of ruach hakodesh itself can be clouded by the biases of the yetzer hora within one’s mind!
Korach was a great man, who merited to have ruach hakodesh — and through that ruach hakodesh he saw that Shmuel HaNavi would be his descendant. What he failed to see was that the reason Shmuel came from him was not because of him at all; rather, it was because of his sons, who did teshuvah. His ruach hakodesh certainly saw far into the future, and it saw in the chain of his descendants the great link that was Shmuel HaNavi; but it did not observe what happened much before that: Korach’s very grave error.
But why did he only see far ahead and not that which was so much closer in time? Says Rav Elya Boruch, it is because the biases of a person are so very powerful that they allow a person to see only what he wants to see. Even if the seeing is with ruach hakodesh itself, the influence of a person’s mind can affect his full view of the truth in front of his eyes... wow!
That is why Rashi says so clearly that Korach’s eyes caused him to be mistaken. His eyes that were so great, but, R’l, did not let him see the full picture; while Moshe knew and saw it objectively, and he understood where Korach was making a very profound mistake. But, R’l, Korach was not able and ready to hear....
How powerful a lesson, how sobering a perspective, to learn and to absorb.... B’Siyata DiShmaya.
