The Torah, “Leviticus,” 21:16 – 21:18: And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to Aaron, saying: Any man among your offspring throughout their generations who has a defect, shall not come near to offer up his God’s food. For any man who has a defect should not approach: A blind man or a lame one, or one with a sunken nose or with mismatching limbs;

From a spiritual point of view, a blemish is a flaw, an internal corruption of a person, a flaw in his spiritual yearning for connection and unity.

Question: How is a person’s inner flaw determined?

Answer: It is impossible to determine it externally since it is concealed even from the person himself until he discovers it inside him by himself. This is called the concealed wisdom or the concealed knowledge. It is only to the extent that a person can reveal the defect inside him and bear it that he can fulfill it properly.

The blemish is totally unfelt and cannot be seen on the outside since no one knows what a person’s intentions are. He can perform actions that may seem absolutely stupid and even harmful, totally tasteless and egoistic, on the outside, but in fact everything is totally different because the character and the quality of the action determines the intention.

Comment: But in our world everything is opposite from the Torah, which only refers to the intentions when it speaks about a person.

Answer: These limitations do not refer to a person’s external appearance, of course. Moses, for example is described as very handsome, tall, and strongly built. Can a 120 year old person really look that way? It is only about his internal beauty and purity.

I first understood that when I studied with Rabash. He asked me to help find a match for a certain girl and I decided to introduce her to a guy who studied with us. The girl was very intelligent, really smart, and a talented painter who later gave one of her paintings as a present to Rabash. I invited the guy and the girl to lunch at my place and they spoke and then went for a walk and two hours later he came to the lesson and told me that he doesn’t like the way she looks. I passed this information to Rabash since the future of that girl was very important to him. At first he didn’t understand what happened, but when I explained it to him he wondered: “so he only looked at her externality?!” The guy couldn’t ascend above his reason, and eventually life didn’t work out for him or for the girl. He got married and had five children, but then got divorced after a while. She got married and had one child and then divorced her husband.

Rabash always said simply: “Love is a kind of animal that is built by mutual concessions.”
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 4/28/14

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