Shemot
January 17, 1998
The ethical masters of Judaism have always stressed
that we are known, primarily, through our "small" actions. The large donation
which earns one a special seat on the dais is not nearly so accurate a measure of a man's
goodness of character as are the kind words he says to his wife at breakfast! (Uh-oh!) And
so, too, the converse: cruelty to the poor man who comes to the door may well be a clearer sign of moral degeneracy than many "bigger" and
more public transgressions.
In any case, it is the way of the Chumash to reveal to us the nature of individuals,
righteous or wicked, through just such small details of speech and behavior. In this
parsha, a few words from the mouth of one Jew in Egypt shed light on a critical flaw in
the character of the Jewish people as a whole, one which goes to the spiritual root
of the exile in Egypt...and of our present exile as well.
The parsha recounts the great oppression the Jews suffer at the hands of the Egyptians. It
proceeds in stages, starting with forced labor and moving to outright slavery, bitter
affliction and the murder of our male babies. (This state-sponsored anti-Semitism, the
first in history, has a frighteningly familiar ring to us in the 20th century.) We all
remember the story of Moshe's birth, how his mother hides him in the reeds by the Nile
river, and how he is later discovered and pulled out by Pharaoh's daughter. Nursed by his
own mother--the Midrash explains that he refused to take the milk of an Egyptian--and
instructed by her in the tenets of his ancestral faith, Moshe is then raised in the royal
palace as the son of Pharaoh's daughter.
"It happened in those days that Moshe grew up and went out to his brethren and
observed their burdens..." (2, 11; Artscroll translation) The wording of the verse is
actually, "he saw into their burdens (vayar b'sivlosam)," and Rashi quotes the
Midrash Rabbah: "he set his eyes and his heart to grieve for them." He sees an Egyptian
taskmaster cruelly assaulting a Jew, and after making sure there are no witnesses and,
according to the Midrash, after seeing through prophecy that no worthy person would ever
descend from the Egyptian, Moshe intervenes and kills him. Note that the Torah reveals
Moshe's greatness (his "leadership potential," in modern lingo) through a few
small, vivid details: his compassion for his fellow Jews and his self-sacrifice in
defending them, as well as his careful deliberation before taking action.
On the day after this incident, Moshe goes out from the
palace again, and this time, he sees two Jews quarreling with one another. Moshe asks one
of them why he is about to strike the other. The Torah continues: "He replied, 'Who
appointed you as a dignitary, a ruler, and a judge over us? Do you propose to murder me,
as you murdered the Egyptian?' Moshe was frightened, and he thought, 'Surely the thing is
known.'" (2, 14-15;
Artscroll Translation.)
The simple meaning is that Moshe is scared because, seeing that people know about his
killing of the Egyptian, he realizes that the news might reach Pharoah (as it does). But
Rashi quotes the piercing comments of our Rabbis in the Midrash, who explain that Moshe,
on a deeper level, is scared by the poor character that this man's words reveal:
"And Moshe was frightened"-- He was worried because he saw in Israel wicked
people, informers. He said, "Judging from this, perhaps they are not fit to be
redeemed." "Surely the thing is known"-- The thing is [now] known to
me that I used to wonder about: how did Israel sin more than all the 70 nations, to be
oppressed with crushing labor? But I see that they are deserving of this."
In other words, Moshe sees that it is the habit of loshon hara, hateful and damaging
speech about a fellow Jew, that is responsible for the severity of the Egyptian exile;
that an underlying pettiness of character in the Jewish people requires the painful,
but--ultimately--purifying effects of golus, of exile. An astounding insight: the evil in
our hearts, and our tongues, kept us slaves in the evil empire of Egypt. (Not to mention
that it helped get us there in the first place: the hatred of the brothers for Yosef in
the first place--culminating in his sale --was partly caused by the negative things he
told his father about them.)
Can shooting off our mouth really have such grave national consequences? Indeed it can,
and does. We've all heard of the book, Chofetz
Chayim, the masterful work on the laws of
loshon hara, by the great sage and tzaddik, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, zt'l. In the
introduction, Rabbi Kagan asks a question that has probably troubled many of us: why has
our present golus lasted so long? Put another way, since the Almighty has the ability to
redeem us at any time, what has prevented us--and continues to prevent us--from being
redeemed?
The chief reason we are still in golus, he concludes, is because we Jewish people are
still guilty of the sin of speaking loshon hara. (Rabbi Kagan, who refused to have the
luxury of curtains on the windows of his home and only reluctantly consented to having a
wooden floor installed, certainly did not write this provocative statement just to sell
copies of his book!) The Talmud actually states that the destruction of the Second Temple
was caused by causeless hatred, and the loshon hara that went along with it. If that was
the original reason for this exile in the first place, Rabbi Kagan reasons, how can we
hope for the exile to end as long as we still haven't corrected this flaw? We ourselves,
with our sharp tongues (and unloving hearts), are preventing G-d every day from showering
his blessings on us, and bringing the final redemption.
The reason why loshon hara is considered so serious a
sin by the Torah--and is even equated with the three cardinal transgressions of murder,
adultery and idol worship--is dealt with at length in Sh'miras Halashon, the companion
volume to Chofetz Chayim which examines the aggadic material on the subject. Very briefly,
besides the enormous damage gossip and slander can cause in the life of the person spoken
about, they represent the debasement of perhaps our most precious--and uniquely
human--gift, the power of speech. Hashem gave speech to mankind to use for constructive
(or, better, holy ) purposes: Torah study, prayer and kindliness. To employ it
maliciously to destroy an individual's honor and undermine the unity of the Jewish people
is, literally, a desecration. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch writes of the end result of
loshon hara:
"...G-d's blessings are all wasted, for man turns
them into curses, and shalom has fled. Instead of entwining themselves into a garland of
peace, in which each rejoices to adorn the other, to add beauty to the other's life with
his own life, people confront each other like hostile thorns, hatching plans for mutual
destruction...G-d's world is destroyed, hatred and discord hold sway at man's own
invitation, and generate robbery and murder and evil without end." (Horeb, p. 262)
A little backbiting at the dinner table is really no "small thing" after all. If
loshon hara destroyed the Temple, how can exile help us to rebuild it? Exile is supposed
to educate us: we see the effect of our sins, we meditate on the blessings we lost--true
sovereignty in the Land of Israel, our Holy Temple, the closeness of the Divine
Presence--, and we commit ourselves anew to live faithfully by the Torah, the blueprint
for national (and universal) harmony. When Moshe hears the Jew snap back at him hurtfully,
"Who appointed you as a dignitary...," he realizes that exile has not yet fully
worked its intended effect on the Jews in Egypt; they are not yet ready for redemption.
They need to be softened a bit more by the "hard blows of fate;" they are still not
"flexible" enough when it comes to walking in G-d's ways, or submitting to moral
correction. (Hirsch, Commentary on the Torah: Volume 2, p. 20)
Paradoxically, the Jew's snappy response to Moshe also contains seeds of our greatness,
however. Hirsch writes that we see one of our supreme national virtues in this little
incident: our blessed stubbornness! The unwillingness to yield to human authority has kept
us alive throughout golus; it has helped us to say, "NO," to Pharaoh, Haman,
Ferdinand and countless others. One of the morning blessings we recite alludes to this
very trait, according to Rabbi Avigdor Miller: "Blessed are you, Hashem, our G-d,
King of the Universe, Who girds Israel with strength (gevurah)." We thank Hashem for
the gift of being stiff-necked!
Unfortunately, this trait can backfire--as we see in
this parsha. It can be used against Moshe, against our own Sages. But, as Hirsch
concludes, "...without it we should never have become the undying, immortal People of
the Law." (ibid.) There's a bright side to everything.
May Hashem help us use our Jewish stubbornness in the right way! For instance, to
stubbornly refuse to say loshon hara...
Good
Shabbos!
Insights
Into Genesis
Insights Into Exodus
Insights Into Leviticus
Insights into Numbers
Insights
Into Deuteronomy
Rabbi Yosef Edelstein, Savannah
Kollel. Phone: 355-0157; fax: 354-9923; e-mail address: Yosef18@aol.com
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