Part II. The Real Pot of Gold
A Wife’s Reaction
Now when we hear this we get the impression that tzaraas is always going to be a telegram from OTB; a letter that you won the lottery. After all, v’nosati means Hashem is gifting us something; it seems that a house acquires the nega in order that you should find a chest of gold.
And so imagine now that a man and his wife came from the midbar to Eretz Yisroel, and now finally, for the first time in many years, they’re permanently settled in a real home with stone walls. No more tents like they lived in the Wilderness – now we have real walls. It’s a great happiness to live in a home! And they expect to be there for the next five hundred years at least.
And all of a sudden after getting settled they discover that there is a nega tzaraas on the wall. Tzaraas! And so they’re put out on the street and maybe they’ll have to raze the whole house to the ground. And so the wife is frantic. “Chaim! What are we going to do with the kids?” She’s wringing her hands! “Where are we going to live?”
The Wrong Reaction
So suppose he says, “Don't worry about it, dear. I remember Moshe Rabbeinu giving a shiur, a Torah lesson, in the Wilderness when we learned this parsha and he said that we’ll discover gold in the walls. It’s a besurah tovah.”
Is that how a Jew is expected to react when he finds a nega tzaraas on the walls of his home?
Of course not! It’s not that simple; not always were gold and silver found in the walls. Not every Canaanite had treasures; there were middle class Canaanites too – and even the wealthy Canaanite, maybe his wife was a high roller who squandered her husband’s money and didn’t leave anything to hide away. And so, as much as the lesson is true that sometimes what you imagined was a tragedy will lead you to a pot of gold, we have to understand it on a deeper level.
Chaim’s House Clearing
And so our Sages tell us that finding treasure in the wall is far from the whole story. Because there’s another Gemara that tells us something else. It’s a Gemara in Eirechin (16b) and it says that a nega tzaraas comes upon a person because of certain sins that a person did.
It says there, for example, that sometimes tzaraas comes because of tzaras ayin, because he was stingy to help his neighbors. Neighbors sometimes needed to borrow something and he was tightfisted with his things. When his neighbor knocked on the door to borrow a hammer or a saw, he said, “I’m sorry. I don't have a hammer. I don't have a saw.”
And that's one of the reasons why he has to carry out all of his stuff in the street. When a house becomes leprous the first thing the kohen has to do before he declares the house tamei is ̇ƒיַּבַה ̇∆‡ּוּנƒפּו ן≈הֹּכַה הָּוƒˆ¿ו – the kohen first tells you that you have to bring out all the things from the house onto the sidewalk (14:36). That's the din; before the house is declared tamei you have to clear out the house.
And now all the neighbors are gathered to commiserate, to participate in the plight of their friend, and they're watching, and they see now the man carrying out his things. “Oh,” they say, “look at this! Chaim does have a hammer! He said he has no hammer but he had one the whole time.”
Then he carried out a saw. “He has a saw too! All these years he told me he didn't have any saw. We see he has a couple of saws.” The neighbors are seeing he has everything! And poor Chaim, he was unmasked now; he understands right away that the tzaraas is coming to expose him, to punish him for being selfish.
Chaim’s Tool Gemach
So we see now an entirely different reason why the tzaraas came onto this man’s home; he’s supposed to see that he’s being punished for something.
That’s what the Gemara (Brachos 5a) says about tzaraas, about all misfortunes: יוָלָﬠ יןƒ‡ָּב יןƒרּוּסƒּי∆ׁ ̆ םָ„ָ‡ ה∆‡ֹרו םƒ‡, if a man sees tzaros coming upon him, what should he do? He shouldn't say, “Baruch Hashem, it's for a good purpose.” Certainly, it has a good purpose, but that’s not enough; יוָׂ ֲ̆ﬠַמ¿ּב ׁ ̆≈ּפ¿ׁ ַ̆פ¿י, he has to search his deeds. He has to say, “Why did Hashem do this to me?” And if he searches, he’ll discover.
Among the things he'll discover is that he didn't lend his things. He had tzaras ayin; he was stingy with his things. That could be one of the things he'll discover. Tzaraas is a punishment. Because Hakadosh Baruch Hu doesn't allow a man to camouflage himself forever. It's a principle with Hakadosh Baruch Hu that sooner or later the truth will come out. A man can put up a front for some time but there's a policy of Hashem to make him known. And so we see from this that the purpose of tzaraas is to expose this man, to show that he's been deceiving the people all these years. “I don’t have this,” “I don’t have that,” but actually he was just a stingy fellow who never worked on breaking the middah of being a tzar ayin. And now, because the tzaraas came, he's embarrassed in front of all of his neighbors.
That’s an opportunity, a wake-up call. Hashem is knocking on the door trying to wake him up. Because as much as he was embarrassed now, shame in the Next World is even worse. And so he gets busy doing teshuva. He’ll become a lender of his tools from now on. He might even make a gemach for tools.
Clean Out the Dirt
And so, we see now that tzaraas is not so that he should find the pot of gold hidden within the walls. It’s so that he should find the pot of dirt hidden within the walls of his heart, b’kiros libo. That’s the real pot of gold a person can find in this world. And so we can equate both statements about tzaraas – the first statement, that the purpose of the nega was to find a concealed treasure, and the second, that it’s to find your hidden sins.
That’s what Rabbeinu Yonah tells us (2:2): “If as a result of a misfortune a man improves, then he should always look back to this time with the greatest joy as if he had actually become wealthy as a result.” That's the pot of gold! There's no greater stroke of good luck than if a misfortune happens and because of that a person stops a bad habit, he changes a bad trait. If he can make even a little bit of teshuva and change himself, so he found a great treasure.
Because that's the greatest success a man can have in life. After all, what are we in this world for? To find hidden treasures? To collect ducats? To collect apartment houses? םָ„ָ‡ ל∆ׁ ̆ ֹו ָ̇ירƒט¿ּפ ַ̇ﬠ¿ׁ ̆ƒּב – When a man has to go away from this world, בָהָז ‡ֹל¿ו ף∆ס∆ּכ ‡ֹל ֹלו יןƒּוַל¿מ ין≈‡ – his money and his property do not go with him. „ַב¿לƒּב יםƒבֹטו יםƒׂ ֲ̆ﬠַמּו הָרֹוּ ̇ ‡ָּל∆‡ – Only the Torah that he learned and the mitzvos and good deeds that he performed (Avos 6:9). They're the real wealth of a person.
How to React
And so, the good fortune is before you find the gold, when you're worried about the nega on the wall and you’re thinking, “Why did Hashem bring this upon me?” If you’re searching out your ways, that's the best fortune you could find; when you change, when you improve. There's nothing in the world as valuable as getting better.
And that’s why in his Shaarei Teshuva when Rabbeinu Yonah introduces us to his program for making teshuva and he tells us that we have to look for incentives – as life goes by, day after day and season after season, people tend to relax into a lethargy and they fall behind in their program of accomplishment and so we need incentives – and so he gives us six opportunities which we could utilize as stimulants, as reminders to bestir ourselves and get busy and accomplish.
And haderech harishon, says the Shaarei Teshuva (2:2) – it means the first opportunity, the most important, the most common stimulus that we should utilize to get better is the following. In translation: “When there happens to a man some misfortune, he should take it to heart, and he should say, ‘This is only because of my own misdeeds’.” That’s how he should react to any misfortune that comes to him.
Higher Atheism
And that's the great principle, a very important principle that's neglected by almost everybody. It's a way of life that was practiced by our forefathers from the very beginning of our history and it's repeated again and again in the Torah. Throughout Jewish history it was always “ּינוƒרָמּוּנו¿עַׁ ָּ̆פּנו¿חַנֲ‡ - We’re guilty”. “הָרֹ ̃¿חַנ¿וּינו≈כָר¿ּ„ הָׂ ̆¿ּפ¿חַנ - Let us search out our ways and investigate our failures, let us return to Hashem”. Again and again, in the times of the Tanach, in the times of the Gemara, always, our forefathers only attributed their misfortune to their sins.
And that’s because they understood a great principle of our emunah; that there are no accidents in the world. That's the first lesson a Jew has to learn: Hakadosh Baruch Hu is in charge! Shema Yisrael Hashem Elokeinu Hashem Echad, means He is the only One Who controls the affairs of the universe; whatever happens comes directly from Him. And if that's the case, everything has a purpose.
You know, when a person attributes some happening merely to natural causes, it’s a sublimated form of atheism. Could be you’re a frum Jew – you have a beard and peyos, even a long coat, but there’s...
