דָ ם, צְ פַ רְ דֵ עַ , כִ נִ ים, עָ רוֹב...
Blood, frogs, lice, wild animals...
At one point in my life, things were very hectic. My family had just moved from one apartment to another in Jerusalem. I was also soon expecting to have my third child and was feeling very ill from the pregnancy. Upon returning home after having been out of the country for a family simcha, we noticed a funny smell in the apartment. The first few nights we were home, we in fact heard a scratching noise in our bedroom. I never met the creature, but it was clearly something of a sizeable proportion. Moving the couch, we saw that it had made a hole and built a nest close to the wall. To our distress, we had rats in our apartment.
Unnerved, we contacted a fumigation company who later informed us that the biggest rat was the size of a small cat. This was not a comforting thought considering that we had two little children running around the house. We locked our bedroom door and slept in the kids’ room, and all I could do was panic.
Spending as much time as I could out of the house, one afternoon as I was sitting in the park, I simply broke down. I was really having a hard time. The fumigation company was making little progress, and we felt like victims in our own home. But then, a woman who I hardly knew walked over to me and sat down. By the look on my face she could tell I was sulking and that something was wrong.
“What happened?” she asked. “We have rats in our apartment and we need to get rid of them,” I half-heartedly said. “Oh rats! That’s terrible. I myself learned a lot from rats. I remember how two weeks after I gave birth to one of my children and my family had moved apartments, we also discovered we had rats.” Listening to this woman’s similar predicament, I sat there intently. “Someone then told me to look up the rat in Perek Shira, where every creature in the world is described as singing its own unique song of praise to Hashem. You should also research the rat in Perek Shira. If this is the creature you are plagued with, you ought to find out what its message is to you.”
I was very intrigued. Heading home, I began sifting through my books on Perek Shira with its commentaries. When I found out what the rat’s praise to Hashem was, I was very humbled. The rat says, “Every soul will praise Hashem, Hallelukah!” Taken from the culminating lines and crescendo of Tehillim, the highest praise of Hashem emanates from the rat. This was particularly meaningful to me.
This song is said by the rat because the rat has the lowliest kind of lifestyle on earth. It lives in the gutters and sewers where even air is hard to come by, and toxic if any. But the rat appreciates its life and feels that it is worth living. Despite its struggles to stay alive and low quality of existence, it doesn’t give up. That is one lesson we learn from the rat: any type of life is worth living.
As I read this, I was very moved. I was experiencing a hard time adjusting to our new apartment and dealing with my pregnancy and had forgotten to focus on this one simple thought: the greatest gift we have is life itself. I then proceeded to write an entire page of everything I ought to be grateful for. I was alive, carrying a healthy baby, and living in Israel with a roof over my head.
While I may have wished that the rats never entered my home in the first place, in hindsight, they taught me an invaluable lesson I will always remember.
Every experience we have in life is there to teach us a lesson. While we may sometimes have to search high and low to find some meaning, we can be assured that nothing is coincidental. Even a lowly rat has a profound message to teach us.
