By Guest Rambler Ethan Weiss
Recently I made a very bad mistake, and what followed was a very bad result.
My mistake started when I leveraged social media (Facebook in this case) to give an update on something that had happened to a person in our family. This made sense for all the people in my life who had previously known about the incident in question. It made no sense to anyone else who saw my post online, and it was the first they’d heard that anything had happened.
In the process, I broke a very important agreement that my wife and I have regarding social media. We have a policy in my family that my family stays out of Facebook, and I had sadly broken it with my update.
I felt ashamed for my disrespect. I then heard from a chavrusah (Torah study partner) of mine that he was surprised to find out the way he did (through the update). And the reasons that he gave and shared with me made me regret my actions even more sincerely.
And then, even more regret. The incident in question actually got worse.
How could I have been a little blase about what was now becoming intensely serious and personal?
The Torah teaches us that we are to examine ourselves and our actions to better understand what is happening and being reflected back to us. I couldn’t help but think that mine was actually a galactic mistake based on all that was happening around me.
This week’s parsha, Mattos, begins with Moses relaying God's commandment: “If a man will take a vow…he shall not desecrate his word…whatever comes from his mouth shall he do.” It goes on to expound on the vows within a marriage and the levels of severity of breaking those vows between husband and wife.
It was wrong that I made the status update.
But what the Torah is really teaching is that it was wrong that I broke my vow to my spouse. And I can only surmise from all that had to happen to get my attention that the level of severity on this wronging was steep.
Hashem (God), you and your Torah have my attention, as always. And it’s time to focus on our vows and on the people in my life that need my attention.
And then we’re also going to tighten up that social media policy too…
