By Marco Del Monte
“The Eternal said to Moses: “Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron, and you shall say… None shall defile himself”
Vayomer, Emor, Veamarta: in the very first sentence, the act of speaking is repeated multiple times.
The Torah teaches us many things in this verse, but two stand out in particular: the power of the word and the power of repetition.
Reality is lived and interpreted according to how it is described. Therefore, the power of the word also helps thought in processing reality. Unfortunately, we very often witness phenomena of the distortion of reality where a lie repeated many times becomes a reality. And it is here that Hashem commands us to speak and speak again, and the command is: "None of you shall defile yourselves"; no one has the right to abuse the word, no one must distort reality, *Emet*, because the risk is that of removing the *alef* from the word and leaving *Met*, death written.
It was precisely the power of repetition, the tenacity to achieve a goal, that led Rabbi Akiva to begin his course of studies at the age of 40: seeing the drop of water carving out the rock, he understood that by committing himself and constantly repeating, he could become a great scholar; what Rabbi Akiva later became, we all know. But even before Rabbi Akiva we find the same concept in Moshe Rabbenu: he is punished because he strikes the rock to make water gush from it when Kadosh Baruch Hu ordered him to speak to the rock. Even if it seems impossible, with the word alone he brings water out of a rock, and yet Kadosh Baruch Hu tells us that this is the task of each and every one of us: not only to speak to our fellow man, but above all to speak to ourselves and convince ourselves that we can make it in any case.
It is no coincidence that the word *Mishnah* means repetition, study, and change: by repeating, we study, learn, and change ourselves; perhaps precisely for this reason the *chachamim* advise repeating and studying out loud.
Speaking without listening leads to nothing. Listening to and welcoming that drop of water—that is, even a simple word of Torah—will be able to carve out the hardest rock and in turn cause a spring of living water to gush forth! It is therefore important to know how to speak, but equally fundamental to know how to Listen. Therefore, Shema Israel!
Shabbat Shalom
Translated from the Italian with Google Gemini. The Italian text is the original.