A Thought on Parshas Kedoshim

"...lo tikom..." "...do not take revenge..." (19:18) When the Torah commands us not to hold a grudge or take revenge, the Talmudic quantification of these prohibitions is that if I ask someone if I can borrow a tool or something and they refuse me, if at a later time they then ask me for a favor, I am not allowed to say to them that since they would not help me I refuse to help them. To do so would be to act spiteful and vengeful and I would be guilty of doing exactly what our verse forbids. Many people have raised the question as to why the Torah is so adamant that we not "take revenge" in this way, yet the Torah does not forbid the first party, the one who was stingy from the beginning by refusing to accommodate the other, from being unkind. Why punish the second person, who does have some psychological justification for feeling uninclined to be nice to someone who has been unkind to him? Why no commandment of "thou shalt not be stingy when asked to lend your possessions"? The Panae'ach Raza grapples with this and suggests that we can indeed understand the psychology of both parties here, and we can see the Torah's understanding of people. Why would some people refuse to comply with another's request for help? It is likely that those types of people are internally territorial, protective of their possessions, and mistrusting of other persons. This predisposes them to refuse others' requests for aid and they have a preconscious reflex to "just say no." They do not even process cognitively the request or weigh their decision. They are just not conditioned to be considerate of others. For that reason, the Panae'ach Raza writes, "the Holy One, blessed is He, would not "force" him to lend his things to others" by commanding him not to be stingy. This would go against his general retentive nature and the Torah does not usually forbid people to do what they cannot immediately control in themselves. In contrast, he writes, a person who is prone to be giving and considerate of others yet finds himself tensing up in spiteful reaction to one who has turned him down, is dealing with hatred and vengefulness. Those are psychological reactions, not reflexes, over which a person needs to marshal self-control. I might feel hate, resentmentment and spitefulness but it is my avoda to take charge of those feelings and not act on them in my interpersonal behavior. This is why the Torah tells me to accept that sometimes some people are just not nice. Their character style, however, is no excuse for me to behave in a way which goes against the ideals which I am capable of. If I say "no" to the other person, I am transgressing the value of chesed which the Torah wants me to aspire to. Good Shabbos. D Fox