|
Kabbala and the World Archives
Printer-Friendly Version
|
The Parsha, the Process and the Promised Land – Vayelech
Michael Freund
Where is Man?
After Moshe has reassured the
Jewish people regarding the future and formally appointed Joshua as his
successor, G-d tells Moshe to summon Joshua and appear together with him in the
Tent of Meeting. G-d addresses Moshe in the Tent, telling him that after his
death the Jewish people will sin and stray after false gods. The Torah says,
“My anger will flare against it [the nation] on that day and I will forsake
them, and I will conceal my face from them… and it [the nation] will say on
that day, ‘Is it not because my G-d is not in my midst that these evils have
come upon me?’ But I will surely conceal my face on that day because of all the
evil that it [the nation] did… (Chap. 31, verses 17-18).”
The Question:
If the nation recognizes that they
had become distanced from G-d – by acknowledging that “my G-d is not in my
midst,” then why should G-d punish them in the following verse by declaring
that “I will surely conceal my face on that day”?
The Answer:
Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Pshischa
(1767-1827, a disciple of the Chozeh of Lublin), says that the nation’s
declaration that “my G-d is not in my midst” is, in fact, a sin and not an act
of penitence. The Jewish people, says Rabbi Simcha Bunim, are obligated to
believe that G-d is with them even at the most difficult of times. By declaring
that “my G-d is not in my midst,” they are saying exactly the opposite. Hence,
says Rabbi Simcha Bunim, because the nation sins in such a manner, it is
appropriate that they be punished accordingly. They say that G-d is not among
them, so He decides to conceal His face, as if He were not among them.
The Lesson:
In these difficult year, when
Israel faced a wave of unprecedented Palestinian terror and the world is still
reeling from the shock of the World Trade Center collapse, many people are
grappling to try and understand why the world seems filled with so much evil
and destruction. Major media outlets, such as the Washington Post, reported a
noticeable increase in the number of Americans seeking spiritual comfort at
their local houses of worship after Sept. 11, and President George W. Bush even
declared a national day of prayer and remembrance. It is tempting during such
calamitous periods in history to throw up our hands and question whether G-d is
really concerned with what occurs here on earth. However, as we saw above, such
a question is inherently unacceptable, for G-d never abandons us, even if we
might feel that He has. Indeed, the question we should be asking in light of
all that has occurred of late is not “Where is G-d?” but “Where is Man?”
Human beings are granted free choice, and those who crashed the airplanes into
the World Trade Center or bombed innocent students to death at Hebrew
University were evil men perpetrating evil deeds. Though the world has finally
seemed to awaken to the dangers of terror, we must ask ourselves: why did it
take the presumed deaths of some 2,000 innocent Americans to rouse the world
from its slumber? For years, Israel has been the target of terrorists, men who
have ruthlessly murdered for the sake of advancing their twisted agenda. Rather
than condemning such terror, much of the world coddled it. Rather than
declaring Yasser Arafat and his tactics to be unacceptable and out of bounds,
the nations of the world granted him legitimacy. It was Arafat who introduced
airplane hijackings to the world in the 1970s, and it was Arafat’s allies in
Hamas and Islamic Jihad who popularized suicide attacks in the 1990s – the
lethal combination of which were used in the fateful attacks in New York and
Washington last week. Had the world heeded the warning signs earlier, had it
taken forceful measures to stamp out Palestinian terrorism decades ago, who
knows how many innocent lives might have been saved and how many needless
deaths might have been avoided. Pinning the blame on G-d is easy, but it is
also a cop-out. G-d is here, He is with us and He is watching over us at all
times, as Rabbi Simcha Bunim said above. The true blame for recent events lies
with those people who commit such heinous acts and those who assist them, but
also with those who have the power to stop them and fail to do so.
May we all merit to be written and sealed in the Book of Life for a year of
health, peace, and prosperity, and may the new year herald the end of the exile
and the return of the entire Jewish people to the entire Land of Israel.
Michael Freund served as Deputy Director of
Communications and Policy Planning in the Prime Minister’s Office from 1996 to
1999. He is currently an editorial writer and syndicated columnist for the
Jerusalem Post. Comments/Feedback/Subscribe: parsha_sheet@hotmail.com
|
|
