Musar untuk Kejadian 49:22

And King Solomon, peace be upon him, said (Proverbs 14:9-10), “Fools will advocate guilt; among the upright, good will. The heart knows its own bitterness, and no outsider can share in its joy.” Its explanation is - the fool advocates guilt, since he searches for the blemishes of people and their guilt. So he will attribute defects to them and never speak about their praise or about something good that is found with them. And the analogy for this is that flies always all land on dirty places. And his saying, “fools will advocate (literally, fools advocates),” in the singular is [to address] each and every one of the fools, like (in Genesis 49:22), “(literally) daughters treads on the wall.” And our Rabbis said (Kiddushin 70a), “Anyone who is of flawed lineage never speaks in praise of [others]. And [his way is to] disqualify them with his own flaw.” “Among the upright, good will” - for it is the way of the just to cover over transgressions, and to praise a man when a good thing is found with him. And they spoke in ethics about a [simple] man and a sage who were walking past a carcass. The [former] said, “That carcass is so rotten!” The sage said, “How white are its teeth!” And [Solomon] said after this, “The heart knows its own bitterness.” And every sage knows that Solomon did not bring words that are not useful among his chosen teachings (Proverbs). Rather the matter is coming with regard to the first verse - to say that the evil of the fool that advocates guilt is because it is probable that the sinner has repented from his way. And no one knows the bitterness of the soul of a person, and its joy, besides him. And that lifts up the sin, for the essentials of repentance are according to the bitterness of his soul. Therefore the fool that mentions his iniquity sins and is guilty.

Immediately afterwards the Torah mentions the prohibition of shaving off corners of one's beard seeing that imitating pagan practices has been forbidden. One must not destroy the very symbols representing the emanation חד. This is a profoundly mystical aspect to which I have already alluded when discussing Genesis 49,22: בן פורת יוסף, where we discussed the mystical dimension of man's features, that the hair alludes to divine forces found in אדם העליון, the Celestial equivalent of terrestrial Man. Some of these are spiritual outgrowths of the attribute of חסד, whereas others are outgrowths of the attribute of דין. The former are the ones that one must not destroy by shaving them off. This is the mystical dimension of the injunction in 21,5 that: לא יקרחה קרחה בראשם, "The priests must not make bald spots on their heads (in mourning for someone who died). The priests, who more than anyone, originate in the emanation חסד, are forbidden to do this, whereas the Levites who originate in the emanation גבורה, are on occasion even instructed to shave off all the hair on their bodies (Numbers 8,7) in order to weaken the forces of דין. We observe that Gentiles, especially their clergymen, who are the recipients of abundant influences from the emanation גבורה, i.e. the attribute of Justice, and upon whom the spirit of impurity rests, make a point of destroying the hair around the corners of their beards, even though they act like a blind man looking for a window [they do not realize the mystical dimension of what they are doing. Ed.]. Similar considerations are at the root of the prohibition to inflict tattoos on one's flesh (19,28). Once you understand this you realize the reason that women are not subject to the injunctions not to shave off the hair on their heads. They are comparable to the Levites.