Evil In Your Own Eyes

Rabbi Melanie Aron

April 28, 2001

Looking at this week's Torah portion, Tazria-Metzora, Rabbi Cathy Felix, a contemporary American Reform Rabbi, asked an interesting question. Why is it only skin diseases that get mentioned in the Torah? Why so much about tzaraat and nothing significant about the other kinds of illnesses that surely were present in ancient times as well?

It's an interesting question. What was it about these skin diseases, most likely eczema and psoriasis and not actually leprosy, that made them of such interest to the Torah? There are many guesses and no real answer. Some say it is the issue of a large community living closely together and the potential for contagion. Others say it was the symbolic meaning given to these diseases that made them religiously significant.

Another explanation relates to the fact that skin diseases are very visible. They can be disfiguring, can cause a person to look repulsive. They effect how we are seen by others, something which is very important to most of us.

Rabbi Felix argues that the meaning of this chapter is to remind us about the dangers of looking only on the outside, about the superficiality of being concerned only with how others view us.

In the chapter of Pirke Avot which we study this week, the third week between Passover and Shavuot, we find a curious teaching, which relates not to how others see us, but to how we see ourselves.

After Rabbi Shimon speaks about the importance of the Shema and its blessings, and the Tefillah, the core prayer of Jewish worship, and after he urges us not to make our prayer routine, but to add also our own personal supplications, he says something which is a little more difficult to understand: ve-al tehi rasha bifnei aztmecha. A most literal translation would be: Do not be a wicked person in the presence of yourself.

What could this mean? Is it that we should never be wicked -as we are always in our own presence. Sort of like the problem with travel, when you get to the distant place, you are still there.

Does Rabbi Shimon mean to contrast "in your own presence", with" in the presence of other people"? So is the sense is here, don't be wicked, even when no one else will know?

Rambam, Rabbi Moses Maimonides, a philosopher and physician has another interpretation. He translates Rabbi Shimon's teaching: Don't be wicked in your own mind, that is don't see yourself as wicked, because if you see yourself as wicked you will take your shortcomings for granted and will do nothing to improve yourself. Here we have the language of self-esteem, almost one thousand years before it became current in America. Don't view yourself as wicked, as that negative self-image will damage your chances of doing good in life.

Finally there is an interesting polemical reading of this text. I found it in the writings of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch , one of the first self-consciously Orthodox Rabbis in Europe in the 19th century. He believes that Rabbi Shimon's remarks were meant to answer the challenge of the Hebrew Christians of the first centuries of this millennium. According to his interpretation it is not circumstantial that Rabbi Shimon's comment of not being evil in your own mind, comes after his words about prayer.

He writes: This means: Do not allow yourself to be taken in by the erroneous idea advanced by alien philosophers that man on his own must of necessity be crushed by the weight of his guilt, and that it is only through the gracious intercession of another that he can gain control over evil and be delivered from sin...The one person able to free you from sin and raise you to the level of pure, free devotion to duty in the service of God, is none other than yourself. Prayer uttered in the right spirit will be the source from which you will derive the strength and divine aid that you need in all your efforts at self-liberation from evil."

Judaism is ultimately an optimistic religion. It teaches us that we have the potential to sanctify and purify ourselves- from the outside as in the Torah portion, and from the inside in the words of Rabbi Shimon.