WE FINISHED OFF last week’s parsha with halachos of self-worth. In this week’s parsha we find out that self-worth comes from having none. I know, I know, it sounds like an oxymoron, or just a moron. But it isn’t. Making yourself like an ownerless desert that people trample all over is the secret to feeling great about yourself.
The Gemora (Kesuvos 110b) says that Dovid HaMelech complained to God that “they have driven me out this day that I should not adhere to the inheritance of God, saying: ‘Go, serve other gods’” (I Shmuel 26:19). The Gemora asks, “Who told Dovid: ‘Go, serve other gods’?” The Gemora answers its own question, saying, “This tells you that anyone who resides outside of Eretz Yisroel is considered as though they are performing idol worship.”
THIS IS NOT a perfect world. Nothing new so far. It is a perfectly imperfect world. Okay, that may be new to some, but it is not original. Perhaps not original, but certainly confusing. The only way that something can be perfectly imperfect is if the original intention was to make it that way, imperfect. But who does that?
NO ONE OTHER than the Ramban seems to have the question, which is, why command the Jewish People to be holy in the middle of Sefer Vayikra when it should have been the introduction to the sefer itself? The entire book is about being holy, so the mitzvah should have either introduced the sefer or concluded it. Putting it in the middle of the sefer seems “nisht ahin nisht aher” (neither here nor there).
But, before we go there, the Torah reminds us about the need to perform the Bris on an eight-day old male which, quite frankly, seems out of place. True, the parsha starts off talking about birth, but there are other more relevant places for the mitzvah of Bris, which is why commentators try to learn something from it.
