Eye Vey!

Eye Vey! A few weeks ago, my young son, Chaim, received an injury in the form of a blow to the eye. How he suffered that injury will be left off the record, but suffice it to say it involved the foot of one of his siblings that somehow met his eye with some significant force (accidentally, of course). The incident happened shortly before I was to take my children to school, and Chaim complained to me that he couldn’t go to school because his eye was in pain. I saw there was a bruise on his eyelid, and we had given him ice to apply to it, so I figured he would just go to school and let his body heal itself. My children don’t usually need much of an excuse to ask to stay home from school, so while I was comforting and sympathetic to a degree, I certainly wasn’t overly pampering nor did I intend to leave him home. Getting done what I need to during the day is challenging enough WITH my kids in school, but when they're home it's nearly impossible! So, I walked him to the car and, au revior, off to school he went. My productive workday was truncated when we received a call from the school at 2 o’clock to pick up Chaim because he was in considerable pain the entire day, so Miriam got him from school and brought him to the ER. He was eventually seen by a doctor who diagnosed a scratched cornea and told us that such an injury is extremely painful, to the extent that it feels like having glass in your eye! Now I felt like a real idiot for not showing him enough sympathy and for forcing him to go to school! The doctor prescribed eye drops for Chaim to take for the next 5 days and to follow up with an ophthalmologist in a week. Today (Friday) is a day known on the Jewish calendar as “Lag Ba’omer,” literally translated as “the 33rd day of the Omer.” This day is a day of celebration for a couple of reasons. One reason is because the great Rabbi Akiva had 24,000 students who tragically passed away in a short period of time between Pesach and Shavuot and it was on this day that they stopped dying. The Talmud tells us the reason they died was a punishment for “not having proper respect for one another.” Obviously, people of great stature such as they were, this did not mean they were mean spirited or even worse, physically harmed each other (like, oh, kicking someone else in the eye). It means that on the level of piety which they were on, they lacked a certain sense of compassion, empathy and respect for their colleagues. The greater the spiritual level a person is on, the greater expectation and standard G-d holds him to. As a consequence of their failing, they unfortunately paid a heavy price. Coming as it did specifically during this time of the year, I felt remorseful after hearing what the doctor said for not giving Chaim the proper level of sympathy and TLC that I should have as a parent. I felt a sense of failing to live up to the standards that are taught by the lesson of the episode of Rabbi Akiva’s students. I made a silent resolution to try and be more understanding and empathetic towards people, and certainly my own family, even when to me the situation seems to be less significant than they are portraying it to be. OK, now I just need to break up a new elbow-to-the-nose-off-the record-accidental-situation between two of my children before I start putting my newfound compassion and sympathy into practice! Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Yosef Koval