MIND OVER MATTER

When I first read Rabbeinu's story about the exchanged children, it really bothered me that the Servant's Son didn't get any credit for the teshuvah he had done. In fact, we are not even told what became of him in the end. The story ends with the King's Son turning to the Servant's Son and telling him, "Now I know that I'm indeed the son of the king and you're the son of the servant." Somehow it looks as though the Servant's Son ceases to exist, and it seems totally unfair.

I was also a bit bothered by the statement from the "Zohar" that Rabbeinu quotes in Torah 82 Tinyana, "Wherever the masculine is present, the feminine is not mentioned there." The latent feminist in me just couldn't understand why this should be so.

And then it occurred to me that in both cases the underlying idea might be the same. It can best be understood not in terms of two separate people, but rather two parts of the same person. The more crude physical part has to accept the authority of the more refined spiritual part. Then it's not as though the physical part ceases to exist; it just takes its proper place and becomes perfectly aligned with the whole.