MEASURE YOUR FRIEND TO MEASURE YOURSELF
As we read the Parshios of the Torah we discover so many times that our people failed to live up to HaShem’s expectations. It is noteworthy how true the Torah is to the real facts and does not sugarcoat our past. It is nevertheless disappointing to see so many failures. Furthermore, it is difficult to understand how could our people who experienced the Ten Plagues and the Splitting of the Red Sea and received the Torah at Sinai demonstrate such a lack of faith in HaShem?
The opening verse of our Parsha, B’shalach, reads “It happened when Pharaoh sent out the people …” The Ohr Hachaim Hakadosh asks why does the verse imply that it was Pharaoh who sent out the people, when we know it was HaShem Who sent them out. In his answer, the Ohr Hachaim introduces the Zohar which states that whenever the Torah refers to the Jewish people it uses the phrase “the Children of Israel ” or some other specific name indicating the Jewish people. And when the Torah uses the phrase “the nation” it is a reference to the eruv rav, a large number of non-Jews, who were perhaps Egyptian or from some other nationality that tagged along with our people.
The Ohr Hachaim then explains the verse by telling us that it was Pharaoh who sent the eruv rav out with our people, it was not HaShem. Pharaoh wanted to sabotage the exodus and bring our people back to Egypt. HaShem took us out of Egypt and Pharaoh sent the eruv rav with us.
After gaining this new insight, I opened my Chumash to review the many instances where our people failed in living up to HaShem’s expectations and I was pleased to discover that most of them were in fact, instigated by the eruv rav! This includes the terrible sin of the Golden Calf which was instigated by the eruv rav not our people. In some of them there is no mention at all of the Jewish people. Unfortunately, the sin of the spies in which we rejected entering the Land of Israel, there is no mention at all of the eruv rav, we must carry that load ourselves.
It certainly lessens the question how we lacked faith in HaShem, because most of the time it was not us who demonstrated the lack of faith but the eruv rav.
The question is why does HaShem display such displeasure at our behavior in the desert? So many of those sins were started by the eruv rav! Especially the sin of the ‘misonanim’ in B’haloscha, in which there is no mention at all of our people’s participation, what did we do wrong?
It would seem that HaShem expected that we would influence the eruv rav rather than the eruv rav influencing us. Perhaps all those sins demonstrated how short we came up in carrying the lessons of emunah. While it may be correct that we did not fall that greatly, but if our emunah would have been in the right place the eruv rav themselves would have been elevated. In other words, the stronger one’s emunah in HaShem is, the stronger his friend’s emunah will be as well.
If we are correct in our understanding, the Torah is teaching us such a wonderful lesson; if you wish to measure your level of emunah see how the people around you relate to emunah issues.
Have a very safe and very wonderful Shabbos.
Paysach Diskind