The Cohain shall quarantine him for seven days (Vayikra 13:21)

Imagine seeing a strange mark on your body, so you go to the doctor. He takes a look at it and decides he needs to immediately run some tests. The results will be back in a few days. During those few days, you pray like you’ve never prayed before. Suddenly the results come back and it turns out that everything is fine. The mark is just a bruise and is nothing to worry about. You are relieved, but a little bothered that a few days of our life were just wasted worrying about this mark.

It used to be a person would find a mark on his body and instead of going to the doctor, he would go to the Cohain to find out if he had a spiritual disease called tzaras. If the Cohain could not immediately determine if it was tzaras, he would command the person to be quarantined for seven days outside of the city. After the seven days, the Cohain would look at the mark again. Sometimes, he would look the second time and determined that the mark was not tzaras. Imagine how the person felt — I just wasted seven days of my life sitting alone. What a waste of time!

That is the wrong way to think, though. A person needs to remember that everything that happens is from Hashem and Hashem has a reason why he wants you to go through everything that occurs in your life. Nothing is a waste of time.

A baby begins crying in the middle of the night. The wife just fed the baby and asks her husband for some help as she is very tired. The husbands spends the next two and a half hours awake with the baby. The next morning, the husband is still very tired and asks his wife if she got a good amount of sleep while he watched the baby. The wife admits that she didn’t get any sleep. She tried but she couldn’t fall asleep. The husband gets angry and says, “if you weren’t going to be able to sleep anyway, why did I need to stay up?” This is the wrong response. The husband should realize that even if his wife stayed awake with the baby, he would not have gotten any extra sleep. Hashem runs everything in the world and is in control of every event that happens to us. Hashem wanted the husband to stay awake with the baby that night. (He also wanted the wife to be unable to sleep!)

One thing that always annoys me is when I am driving on the highway and there is traffic. Suddenly, after driving slowly for 30 minutes, all of the cars start driving at the normal highway speed, but there was no accident nor police cars. It seems like there was no reason at all for the traffic. Why did I need to sit in the traffic for nothing? The answer is because that is the way Hashem wanted it. We don’t always know the reason but Hashem wants to put us through this event for a reason.

Good Shabbos!
-yes
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