When a person would become ritually impure because he had talked lashon hara (evil talk) about someone else, he would be afflicted with tzaraat (a skin malady), he would be called a metzora and he would have to go out into the street and call out “unclean, unclean.”
The Shaloh wrote that this verse can be read as, “unclean,” an unclean person says about others. That is, a person who finds fault with others is really projecting his own faults and imperfections into others.
The Baal Shem Tov taught that there are only two reasons why we would see a fault in someone else. Either H”S is showing us something we ourselves need to correct within us, or H”S is showing us that the person we see a fault in needs to be helped. We are all mirrors of each other, if it wouldn’t be this way how else would we be able to fix what needs to be fixed?
In 1939 Rabbi Wasserman came to the USA to raise funds for his Yeshiva. Rabbi Wasserman was asked for his impressions of America. Expecting to hear a negative answer of such a secular society, to their surprise he answered: “American youth has the greatest potential of any I have met. They are sincere in their search for truth, and once they are taught the Torah view, they will develop into the finest bnai Torah.”
(Rabbi Chaim Shapiro; The Jewish Observer, Oct 1973)
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