Two Minute Torah Podcast

Tazria 5771 by Rabbi Jay M. Stein

"Pronounce him unclean" (Leviticus 13:3)

The indispensable duty of the priest was to speak the words, "you are clean" or "you are unclean.. If the priest was ignorant, he might be guided in his diagnosis by an informed layman, but it was he who had to speak the official formula. Sifra

One of the most aggravating things about being a two year old is that you have many ideas running through your head but you have yet to acquire the vocabulary in order to say what is on your mind. For many cognitive reasons a person's sense of language is not developed at two years old and these children have tremendous difficulty expressing how they feel or more importantly what they want. How many times have we thought and maybe even said to our young children, "what do you want, just tell me." Communication is so difficult and must be learned.

But not only is communication with others important, how we communicate with ourselves and how we understand ourselves is also important. Many times we will see the situation that we are in differently once we have verbalized our feelings. Sometimes we become aggravated by a certain chain of events that once we simply say how we feel, we begin to feel better. Even though nothing in our situation may have changed, we feel better for being able to express those aggravations.

However, sometimes that is not enough. Sometimes in life not only do we need to express how we feel but we also need to know that we have been heard. We need to know that what we have said has been taken seriously. We need to have our feelings validated. Unfortunately, today when we use the terms of "affirmed” or "validated" people often poke fun at us. People often deride those who use those terms as foolish. But our tradition suggests that should not be the case. When a person has been determined to have an ailment and then has taken steps to deal with that ailment, that person needs to be "affirmed" by someone who is in a position to evaluate. It is that validation that often allows a person to feel whole once again. We should never minimize the power we have to make people feel whole by the words that we say.