I’ll tell you a story from the Chachomim (Avos D’Rabi Nosson 16:2) about that. Rabbi Akiva was traveling and he visited a certain monarch, a king. Rabbi Akiva was an important personality so the king put him up in a special place and two women came into his place of lodging. Rabbi Akiva took a look at them and began spitting. He was retching. He couldn’t hold his food down when he looked at them.
So they came to the king and said, “What kind of man is that?”
The next morning the king asked Rabbi Akiva, “What happened? What went wrong?”
“What could I do?” Rabbi Akiva said. “Their smell came to me like dead rats. They smelled like dead rats.”
Imagine a dead rat lying in the July sun for a week on the sidewalk. You have to make a big detour around such a thing. Rabbi Akiva trained himself all his life, what’s not according to the Torah smells bad. Whenever he passed a dead rat he practiced that; he was thinking, “That’s that! That’s that!” So he trained himself and, therefore, he learned the attitudes of the Torah. That’s called סָ‡¿מƒנ יוָינ≈ﬠ¿ּב ה∆ז¿בƒנ – What Hashem scorns is disgusting in his eyes.
