Thursday, January 24, 2013
Wake-up Calls
11:43 AM | 
Posted by
Rabbi Chaim Coffman |
By Rav
Moshe Sternbuch
WAKE-UP CALLS
“And so
that you may relate in the ears of your son and grandson how I made a mockery
of the Egyptians” (10:2)
Paroh
made himself into a laughingstock amongst the members of his own nation by
shouting "Hashem is the righteous one and I and the nation are wicked” one
moment, and then, as soon as the plague stopped declaring: "Who is Hashem
that I should listen to him?"
Similarly,
in times of distress, or on occasions such as Yom Kippur, we are quick to pray with
great sincerity to Hashem, making all sorts of vows if we are saved from our woes,
and then, once they disappear, forgetting about the vows, or diluting them with
various rationalizations. Even if we stick to our promises, we tend to go back
to our daily routine as if nothing has happened, until the next misfortune strikes
rachmono litzlon, and so on and so forth in a never-ending cycle.
The
Torah tells us that we have a duty to tell our children about this fickleness
on the part of Paroh and to stress to them the importance of making fundamental
and lasting changes in our lives following divine wake-up calls, lest we become
guilty of the same pattern of behavior as Paroh.
redemption
“There
was total darkness in the entire land of Egypt” (10:22)
Rashi at the beginning of parashas
Beshalach (13:18) says that 4/5 of the Jews died during the three days of
darkness. Since 600,000 men left Egypt, this means that 2 million Jews died
during the plague of darkness, and this figure does not include women and
children, so that an estimated 10 million people died altogether.
How could so many yidden
have failed to reach the required spiritual levels after having witnessed eight
unprecedented supernatural plagues during which the Egyptians received so much
retribution? One would have thought that these must have made a profound
impression on them.
In a period of open miracles
Hashem demands much more from us. The people who died were not outright
heretical resho’im, but they failed to sufficiently internalize Hashem’s
Providence, so that in light of the miracles they had experienced they were
judged strictly and found worthy of being punished.
By contrast, in periods when Hashem’s
Providence is less apparent and the wicked appear to flourish, the reward for
those who remain strong in their faith is multiplied manifold. The Arizal states
that during such periods of hester ponim levels of avodas Hashem,
which in previous generations could only be attained with great effort, can be
attained much more easily.
Chazal tell us that in the future and final
redemption, we will experience miracles surpassing even those we experienced in
Egypt. Hence, people assume that even completely wicked people will repent
during that time. However, the Brisker Rov zt”l
told Rav Sternbuch this is not the case, and only those who constantly
contemplate the wonders of Hashem now will be able to recognize then that He is
the Creator, because the evil inclination acts in tandem with the miracles, and
it requires effort on our part to overcome it.
Spiritual treasure
“Speak,
please in the ears of the people, and let each man borrow from his friend” (11:2).
Rashi: I ask you to warn them about
this, so that the righteous man, Avrohom, will not say He fulfilled His promise
“and they will enslave them and oppress them”, but He did not fulfill with regard
to them “afterwards they will go forth with great possessions”.
This chazal quoted by Rashi
is difficult to understand. If Hashem promised Avrohom that they will go forth
with great possessions then surely He would keep this promise irrespective of
what Avrohom will say.
"Great possessions" in
the plain sense refers to material wealth, but, in truth, material possessions
are not a blessing, but the reverse, as Moshe told Hashem: "because of the
gold and silver which you heaped upon them, they made the Golden Calf” (see Masseches
Berochos 5b). Hashem, to Whom
everything is revealed, was going to give them a great spiritual treasure instead,
namely the Torah and mitzvos, which are of eternal value, but so
that Avrohom and his followers would not say that Hashem did not literally
fulfill His promise that they will go forth with great possessions, Hashem said
that each man should borrow gold and silver from his Egyptian neighbor, so that
His promise would also be fulfilled in the literal sense.
discrediting the righteous
“About
the time of midnight” (11:4). Rashi: “About midnight, either
[slightly] before or after, and he did not say ‘at midnight’ lest Paroh's astrologers
make a mistake and say, ‘Moshe is a liar’!"
By this
stage Moshe Rabbeinu had already overturned nature no less than nine
times by means of the plagues throughout Egypt, and yet Moshe was still
concerned that if the plague of the firstborn would appear to commence one
moment before or after the designated time, Paroh would say triumphantly that
Moshe was a liar and all the previous miracles were one big hoax. In the middle
of all their anguish and the death of the firstborns, Moshe was worried that
they would still not lose the opportunity of "discrediting" him and
Hashem.
Deep
inside, the wicked recognize the truth and the vacuousness of their idol
worship and materialism. However, in order to grant legitimacy to their way of
life, when faced with a holy righteous personality whose entire life is devoted
to Hashem, they endeavor to find even a miniscule alleged defect in order to
magnify it and declare that person and everything he stands for to be a lie.
It was
the same with Homon. The possuk says “Yet all this is worth nothing to
me, so long as I see Mordechai the Jew sitting at the king’s gate". Given
that all the other king's servants were bowing down to him, one would think
that Homon would be totally unconcerned about the actions of an insignificant
Jew, so what is the meaning of this possuk? Homon knew that all the
obsequiousness demonstrated by the others was completely false, and that the
only man of truth was Mordechai. Hence he was afraid of him, and felt that all the
"honor" accorded to him was completely valueless as long as there was
someone representing the truth. That was the cause of his fury, which led him
to attempt to destroy the whole nation to whom Mordechai belonged. Following
nine plagues, the Egyptians too had no doubts that Hashem controlled the world,
and that all their idol worship was false. They were therefore likely to go out
of their way to attempt to prove that Moshe was a liar.
Toras Eretz Yisroel
“This
month shall be reckoned to you as the beginning of months” (12:2)
The
Ramban says that the names of our months (Nisan, Iyar etc.) originated in the
Babylonian exile, and we continued using them upon our return to Eretz
Yisroel. Why did we, in fact, continue
using these non-Jewish names?
Some
heretics in golus argued that all or some of the mitzvos only
needed to be observed in Eretz Yisroel. Zionists, on the other hand,
argued that the observance of the Torah was restricted to chutz looretz serving
as a bulwark against assimilation, whereas here in our homeland we should
forget our “galuti” past, and simply adopt nationalism. By contrast, the
holy chachomim at the end of the Babylonian exile knew that the period
of the second Bais Hamikdosh would not yet constitute the final
redemption, and we would still have to undergo a further period of exile.
They
therefore wanted to create a link between the period of exile and the period of
our return to Eretz Yisroel, so that the masses should not think that
now that we had returned to our homeland, anything had changed in terms of our
connection to Torah, and all the takonos enacted in Bovel, and, of
course, subsequently, the Babylonian Talmud, are of central importance for all
generations both in chutz lo’oretz and in Eretz Yisroel.
private acts of Kiddush
Hashem
“The
blood will be for you as a sign on the houses” (12:13).
Rashi: “’As a sign to you’ but not as a sign to others [Mechilta].
Blood
signifies mesirus nefesh (dedication and self-sacrifice). This Mechilta
does not mean to exclude acts of mesirus nefesh performed in front of
others, but should rather be taken as an injunction to also perform private
acts of Kiddush Hashem on a
day-to-day basis within the confines of our own homes to which no one is
witness, which the Rambam talks about (Yesodei Hatorah 5:10).
This takes place every time we overcome our evil
inclination by refraining from sin, performing a mitzvah, or performing it with fervor, and when we set
aside regular times for learning Torah and educating our children properly. In
other words, the sign, which is situated outside as it were, should always be
before us inside too, serving as a constant reminder of our duty to serve
Hashem with dedication and to refrain from sinning.
Eternal nation
“And it
will come to pass if your children say to you, ‘What is this service to you’?
You shall say, ‘It is the Pesach-offering to Hashem… And the people kneeled and
prostrated themselves’” (12:26-27). Mechilta: “the Jews
received evil tidings at this time, namely that the Torah would be forgotten
amongst the Jews in the future. Others state that they received good tidings,
namely that they would merit to see children and grandchildren.
According
to the Mechilta cited by Rashi below (13:5) the descendants in question refer
to wicked descendants, so how can these be termed good tidings?
The bad
tidings of which the Jews were informed were that there would be heretics in
every generation, and the good tidings were that that there would nevertheless be
continuity to the Jewish nation, with children and grandchildren continuing in
the path of Torah who would say this is the Pesach-offering to Hashem.
Throughout
the generations some of our erring brethren have attempted to disconnect the
link connecting the generations. They sought to "modernize" fellow
Jews by doing their utmost to estrange them from their parents and from the
values of previous generations for the sake of more "progressive"
values, such as the belief that we are better than our ancestors and that divine
values are subject to current philosophical, social or other theories.
It is only
logical that such attitudes will stem, in part, from the theory that our
ancestors were apes, instead of the holy beings, which they actually were. We
know that the further removed we are from ma’amad Har Sinai, the less
close we are to our original elevated spiritual status, but if one believes
merely in science and technology, then each succeeding generation will look
with disdain at their predecessors.
The
Torah is telling us that even if such aberrant views would be held by the
majority of the nation, they would still not succeed in uprooting its eternal
sanctity, which remains incapable of being contaminated. When the nation heard
these tidings, the people kneeled and prostrated themselves.
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