CAN THEY BE FINAL WORDS?

Abie and Sadie had worked for years in the shmata business. Finally, they made it big, very big, and to get a little legitimacy they give a big gift to the local orchestra. As a thank you for their contribution, they are invited to a very fancy dinner party.

At the party, Sadie looks around for an entrée to this most impressive crowd. Hearing a group of ladies discussing Beethoven, she senses her chance. “Beethoven?” She says,

“Happens I know him very well. In fact, just the udder day I saw him on the number five bus going to the beach.”

There is a hushed silence. Everyone is embarrassed by Sadie’s faux pax. And then they all burst out in laughter.

Abie feels utterly humiliated. Back in the car, on the way home, Abie says to Sadie, “Vat’s the matter vit you? You couldn’t sit quietly? You had to open your big mouth?
“But what’s wrong with what I said?” Sadie wonders. “Why were they laughing? I do see Beethoven on the number five bus going to the beach?!”
Abie responds You, ignoramus! Don’t you get it? Everybody knows that the number five bus doesn’t go to the beach!”
This Shabbat is Shabbat Mevarchim blessing this coming month of Adar the month of joy. It is a stunning verse in this week’s portion of Mishpatim:
You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
You shall not ill-treat any widow or orphan. If you oppress him, for if he cries out to Me, I will surely hear his cry.
It is one of those classic examples where the English translation fails us. Here is the accurate translation:
If oppress you will oppress him, [beware,] for if cry he will cry out to Me, hear will I hear his cry.
There is a reason it is not translated this way—for it defies the laws of grammar.

As I typed this sentence, my spell check sent me a message, “delete repeated word.” We simply don’t write this way. Indeed, nowhere in the entire Torah do we have a verse like this—where the three keywords are repeated. This is the only such verse in the entire Torah where every keyword is repeated, for apparently no good reason. The exact same message could have been conveyed by using each term once.
But there is a deep and subtle reason for this redundancy. Millennia ago the Torah intimates what we have learned today in neuroscience.

The Torah is intimating the results of physical or verbal oppression to orphans, widows, and all people who are vulnerable.
When I mistreat someone, physically, emotionally, or verbally, or insult someone who has a nurturing environment, the actions or remarks may cause a bruise, but they will not be tattooed into the brain of the victim.

A parent who is deeply connected to the child and knows how to be present for the inner world of the child will make the child feel that the insult or hurt was just that—another person expressing his or her pain or rudeness.

But when I do not have a nurturing environment to come back to after I was scared, either because I am an orphan or a widow, or even if I have parents and a spouse, they do not know how to be here for me, then the scar is seared into my heart, and it continues to repeat itself in my brain. Once I have internalized the insult, I now start saying to myself, years after the oppressor did his thing.

I once attended a bar mitzvah, and I was dancing with the father of the boy, who was a classmate of mine in elementary and high school. It was just the two of us dancing. I noticed the dad crying. He asked me: “Has anything come of me?!”

I was astounded. “What do you mean? Why are you asking such a question?”
The father, who had a difficult time absorbing the information in school, told me: When we were in school together, one of the people working there came over to me, and said, “you are wasting your time, nothing will ever come of you.” The next year, the man repeated these words again. That is why I am asking you, was he right? Did anything come of me?

I said to him: “Look at this event. You have an amazing wife, and five beautiful children, you have created a successful business, you are loved by your community, and now you are celebrating the bar mitzvah of your oldest! Why are you even thinking about what that man said to you 35 years ago?!”

He said to me: “Not a day goes by that I do not recall his hurtful words to me.”
Do you see now the brilliant sensitivity of the Torah’s phrase?

When you utter a scathing comment to someone who has a good internal support system, it is a momentary pain, and life moves on. But when you mistreat or insult a widow, orphan, child, teenager, or adult who is vulnerable, it is not a one-time event. The hurt becomes embedded in their brain, tattooed in their neural pathways, and entrenched in their thought processes. The oppression continues even after it ostensibly ended, and their outcry continues way after their initial outcry. Their entire life they are still crying in pain, sometimes not even knowing why.

So, G-d says, “hear will I hear his cry.” I will not only listen to the first cry; I will be attentive to the cry that continues, consciously or unconsciously, to the pain never resolved in their own self-image.  
That is why in Judaism right when we awake, we speak of the splendid, infinite purity and light of the soul, the sacredness of the body, and the Divine nature of our consciousness and life force. This allows us to become aware of who we really are, and to notice the negative self-talk and quarantine it, not allowing it to dictate our lives.

A young family had a private audience with the Rebbe on Chanukah. The Rebbe offered a gift of coins to their young child, as is customary on Chanukah. For whatever reason, the child rejected the Rebbe’s gift. After a couple more failed attempts, the Rebbe remarked kindly, “This is a good sign! He is not someone who craves money!”
Rather than seeing in the child’s refusal the signs of a difficult personality, the Rebbe recasts his behavior as an indication of good character. He wanted the child should not to see himself as a “problem case.”
In 2008, Benjamin Zander, the conductor of The Boston Philharmonic Orchestra,  gave a TED Talk called “The Transformative Power of Classical Music.” This is how he ended his talk:
What we say really makes a difference. The words that come out of our mouth matter. I learned this from a woman who survived Auschwitz, one of the rare survivors. She went to Auschwitz when she was 15 years old. And her brother was eight, and the parents were lost.

And she told me this. She said, "We were on the train going to Auschwitz, and I looked down and saw my brother's shoes were missing. I said, 'Why are you so stupid, can't you keep your things together for goodness' sake?'" The way an elder sister might speak to a younger brother. Unfortunately, it was the last thing she ever said to him because she never saw him again. He did not survive.

And so, when she came out of Auschwitz, she made a vow. And the vow was, "I will never say anything that couldn't stand as the last thing I ever say."
Now, can we do that? No. But it is a possibility to live into.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky