In the spring of 1453, the great city of Constantinople stood at the edge of collapse. For more than a thousand years it had been one of the most important cities in the world, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, a center of wealth, culture, and learning. It was a city of massive stone walls, glittering churches, and, perhaps most quietly significant of all, an enormous collection of ancient knowledge preserved in its libraries and monasteries.
On April 6, 1453, the Muslim Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II, began his final siege. For nearly two months, the city held out, battered by cannon fire, dwindling supplies, and growing desperation. Then, on May 29, the walls were breached. Ottoman forces poured into the city. What followed was chaos—looting, destruction, and the collapse of a civilization that had endured for over a millennium.
In those final days and weeks—both during the siege and in the years leading up to it—something remarkable was already unfolding.
There were men who understood what was coming. Among them were scholars like Bessarion, a Byzantine intellectual who would later become a prominent teacher in Venice, and George Gemistos Plethon, a philosopher who had spent years studying and teaching the works of Plato. There was also Manuel Chrysoloras, who had already, decades earlier, begun teaching Greek language and literature in Florence, planting the seeds for what would come next.
These were not men who saw books as decoration. They saw them as lifelines.
Long before the final siege, many Byzantine scholars had begun quietly leaving Constantinople, traveling westward into Italy. They carried with them manuscripts—hand-copied texts of Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Euclid, Ptolemy, Galen—works that, in many cases, had not been widely available in Western Europe for centuries. Some brought entire collections. Others brought fragments. But they all carried something that most people around them did not yet recognize as urgent.
Knowledge. This knowledge mostly originated from Greece and Rome, and it covered a wide range of diverse topics, such as mathematics, medicine, philosophy, astronomy, and politics. When Rome fell in the fifth century, it had already lost much of its learning, studying, debate, and teaching. It had become a bloated empire, its citizens pacified by gladiator games and government subsidies, and it was led by corrupt politicians who debased the currency and siphoned off whatever they could to enrich themselves.
The learning had been streaming to Constantinople for centuries already, because Constantinople was the capital of the Byzantine Empire, which was much more orderly and well governed. The knowledge of the West was preserved, studied and carefully copied for almost one thousand years, but as Constantinople was about to fall, a small group of people took it upon themselves to spirit this knowledge out of the city, so that it not be lost forever.
When the fall finally came, the urgency intensified. Monks and scribes in monasteries rushed to preserve what they could. Libraries were at risk of being looted or destroyed. In the chaos, some manuscripts were lost forever. But many were saved—smuggled out, hidden, transported across the sea into cities like Venice, Florence, and Rome.
Imagine the scene. A city is collapsing. People are grabbing whatever they can—gold, silver, clothing, food—anything that might help them survive the next uncertain chapter. And in the middle of that, a scholar is carefully wrapping a manuscript in cloth, protecting it as though it were a living thing.
To the average person, it would seem absurd. “What are you doing? Leave that! Take something valuable!” But to him, this was the valuable thing. Because he understood something that most people only realize much later: civilizations are not sustained by wealth alone. They are sustained by ideas, by knowledge, by wisdom passed from one generation to the next.
When those manuscripts reached Italy, they did not sit on shelves. They were studied, translated, debated, and taught. The influx of Greek texts into Western Europe helped ignite what we now call the Renaissance. Scholars who had never had access to the original works of Galen, Euclid and Aristotle suddenly found themselves drinking from the source. Art, science, philosophy, medicine, mathematics, and literature began to flourish in new and powerful ways.
It is not an exaggeration to say that these manuscripts helped pull Europe out of intellectual stagnation and into a period of extraordinary growth and creativity. For centuries, Europe had been in the Dark Ages. The average citizen was illiterate, superstitious, and fully educated. Princes couldn’t even sign their own names, and the only literate people on the continent were Jews, who were always “the People of the Book,” and monks, who spent their lives cloistered in monastaries.
But at the beginning of the Renaissance, knowledge and education began to flow back into Europe, people began to learn again, and it dramatically changed Europe, and indeed all of world history. And it all traced back to those individuals who, in a moment of chaos, chose manuscripts over money.
King Solomon tells us in Proverns (10:8), “Chacham lev yikach mitzvos”—“The wise-hearted one takes mitzvos.”
The language is precise. It does not just say the wise person performs mitzvos. It says he takes them.
Because life is not a quiet, orderly system where the important things are clearly labeled and placed neatly in front of us. Life is a whirlwind. Opportunities are constantly flying around—some loud, some quiet, some obvious, some hidden. Most people grab what shines. The wise-hearted person knows how to identify what actually matters and reach for that instead.
The Talmud (Sotah 13A) gives us a powerful example of this idea. When the Jewish people were leaving Egypt, they were commanded to ask the Egyptians for gold, silver, and clothing. After generations of slavery, this was their moment to take wealth, to reclaim something for themselves. The nation was busy collecting these spoils, gathering material resources as they prepared for their journey.
But Moses was doing something entirely different. While everyone else was gathering riches, Moshe went searching for the bones of Yosef. Yosef had made the Jewish people swear that when they left Egypt, they would take his remains with them and bring him to burial in the Land of Israel. It was not a glamorous task. There was no immediate reward. No one was watching.
But Moshe understood.
While everyone else was taking spoils, he was taking a mitzvah. The Midrash highlights this contrast explicitly. The people were busy with gold and silver. Moshe was busy with responsibility, with loyalty, with something eternal, a Mitzvah.
And history remembers Moshe’s choice. Gold fades. Clothing wears out. Wealth shifts hands. But the act of honoring Yosef, of fulfilling a promise, of choosing the right thing over the obvious thing—that becomes part of the eternal story of our people.
Those scholars fleeing Constantinople made the same kind of choice.
Now let’s bring this closer to our own lives.
We often describe ourselves as incredibly busy. And in many ways, we are. Life today is filled with responsibilities, commitments, and constant demands on our attention. But if we take a step back and compare our lives to those of previous generations, something becomes very clear.
We have been given an extraordinary gift: time. Tasks that once required hours of physical effort—washing clothes, preparing food, traveling long distances, accessing information—have been compressed into minutes or even seconds. Technology has removed enormous burdens from daily life. And yet, despite all of this, we feel more overwhelmed than ever.
Why?
Because we have filled that extra time. Endless scrolling. Constant notifications. Streams of content. News cycles that never stop. Entertainment that is always available, always updating, always demanding attention. We have created a world in which the “spoils of Egypt” are constantly being thrown at us. Shiny. Immediate. Addictive.
And at the same time, mitzvos are also there. A few minutes to learn Torah. An opportunity to help someone. A moment to reach out, to connect, to give.
But mitzvos are quiet. They don’t flash. They don’t buzz. They don’t demand.
So the question becomes: what do we take?
The wise-hearted person takes mitzvos.
This is not about abandoning the world or rejecting everything around us. It is about awareness. It is about recognizing that not everything that demands our attention deserves it, and not everything that is truly valuable announces itself loudly.
The scholars of Constantinople understood this. In the middle of chaos, they identified what would matter not just tomorrow, but decades and centuries into the future.
On a much greater scale, Moses understood this. In the middle of redemption, he identified what would matter not just for that moment, but for eternity.
And each of us is given the same opportunity, in much smaller, quieter ways, every single day. A few minutes here. A small choice there. To take something meaningful instead of something distracting. To invest in something lasting instead of something fleeting.
Because over time, those choices accumulate. They shape who we are. They determine what we carry forward.
We live in a world overflowing with opportunity. The question is not whether there is enough to do. The question is whether we are choosing wisely among the things available to us.
Chacham lev yikach mitzvos. The wise hearted man takes mitzvos.
Be the one who knows what to take.
Parsha Dvar Torah
The portion of Tazria includes a detailed discussion of an affliction known as Tzara’at, one of the most misunderstood concepts in the Torah. Because Tzara’at afflicts the skin, it is commonly mistranslated as leprosy. Nachmonides explains, however, that Tzara’at was not a physical malady, but a spiritual ailment that manifested itself physically on the person’s body. This affliction was the result of committing one of several transgressions, the most common of which was lashon hara, or gossip, and slander.
The Torah goes into great detail when discussing the various forms of Tzara’at that may exhibit themselves on a person’s body. Should a person discover a suspicious-looking patch of skin, a Kohen must be brought in to examine the affected area. There are several stipulations that must be fulfilled in order for the Kohen to declare the person spiritually impure and afflicted with Tzara’at, and there are times when the individual must be quarantined and then reexamined. However, one situation is absolutely clear-cut: If the Kohen looks and sees that the person’s entire body is covered with what appears to be Tzara’at, the law is that the Kohen must declare the person pure.
At first glance, this seems completely counter-intuitive. If a small patch of Tzara’at renders a person impure, certainly this should apply when the person’s entire body is covered. On closer consideration, it becomes clear that the Torah is teaching a fundamental lesson about the Kohen’s relationship to those in need of spiritual guidance. If the Kohen sees someone as totally blemished, without even a single redeeming speck, he must not be seeing the person properly, and therefore is not in a position to declare him “afflicted,” or, even more significantly, to help him. Only when the Kohen sees some healthy skin, i.e., some good in the person, may he then declare him “impure.” In such a case, the declaration is the beginning of the individual’s journey back to spiritual health, rather than a permanent judgment about his status.
A great Chassidic Rabbi used to lead his congregation each Yom Kippur for the Kol Nidre prayers. One year, everyone stood quietly waiting, but the Rabbi wasn’t moving from his place. He seemed entirely lost in thought, and no one dared to disturb him. Finally after a protracted wait, he finally began in his usual manner. His followers were intrigued. After Yom Kippur, a few of them approached the Rabbi to ask him what caused the long delay. The Rabbi explained:
“I try to never lead the Kol Nidre prayer until I can find one area in which each person is better than I am. Only with the recognition that we are all flawed, and that some of us are greater in some areas, and some in others, can I approach G-d with my prayers. This year, just before I was about to begin, someone walked in who behaved so rudely that I simply could not find any redeeming qualities in him. After thinking about it for a while, however, I realized that he was in fact greater than I in one respect: If I was as rude as he is, I would never come for Yom Kippur services! Once I came to this realization, I was able to begin the prayers!”
In one way or another, each of us serves as a mentor or guide to someone else at some point in our lives. It may be to our children, a younger co-worker, a study partner, or friend. Sometimes we come up against a situation in which the other person appears beyond hope. However, this week’s portion demonstrates that the status of being beyond hope is more of a problem with the mentor than the person in need of guidance. If our view of someone else is so tainted that we cannot find any redeeming qualities, it is a sign that we are not viewing his situation – or our relationship with that person – properly. Finding the good in a person is the seed from which all of our efforts on their behalf can bear fruit.
Parsha Summary
This weeks parsha, Tazria, begins with laws of impurity associated with childbirth. The idea is that life alone in not an end, rather life’s purpose is that we elevate ourselves, To this end, when a child is brought into this world the mother goes through a process of impurity which then leads to purity. This mimics the type of life she wants her child to lead – one of growing, and elevating themselves from their basic state to a higher state.
After that, the Torah launches into the laws of tzara’at (see above) for the rest of the Parsha. It talks about the different forms of tzara’at, the way the Kohen makes his diagnoses, and what the metzora does after being diagnosed. One major part of his “medicine” is the law requiring him to sit in isolation for a week. This is supposed to help him realize how he made others feel when he spoke negatively about them, and caused rifts, dissension, and isolation.
The last section of the parsha deals with tzara’at that appears on clothing. (No, that reddish or greenish blotch on that suit is not the latest styling from Versace, it is actually a spiritual disease manifesting itself on clothing!) Our Sages explains that because of G-d’s great compassion, one does not immediately get tzara’at upon his body. Rather, he first gets it on his house, as is described in our second Parsha, Metzora. Hopefully, he learns his lesson and stops gossiping and slandering, however, if he doesn’t, it starts to afflict his clothing (a little bit too close for comfort). If the person continues to ignore these blatant cues telling him to shape up, he then gets the full force affliction on his body, for which the atonement process is the longest.
Quote of the Week: Man is free in his imagination, but bound by his reason. – Rabbi Yisrael Salanter
Random Fact of the Week: Our sense of smell is 10,000 times stronger than our sense of taste!
Funny Line of the Week: I saw this wino, he was eating grapes. I was like, “Dude, you have to wait.”
Have a Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Shabbos,
R’ Leiby Burnham
