By the Grace of G-d
Dear Friend,
Assumptions are so important.
How could any of us make plans or decisions without feeling comfortable assuming certain things.
Have you ever bought an airline ticket?
Taken on a monthly mortgage repayment?
Committed to a spouse in marriage?
All these things require assumptions.
You assume that you will still be able to make the trip once the date of the flight arrives.
Mortgage payments can only be made if you have the resources to pay. The bank and you assume that you will be earning enough funds to pay your obligations for the next twenty – thirty years.
Marriage requires the great leap of faith that your spouse will turn out to be what you assume them to be.
To make it simple.
Have you made plans for today? Did you make those plans before today, perhaps yesterday?
That required (an implicit belief in G-d and) an assumption that G-d will grant you life this morning.
Assumptions can also be misleading and even dangerous.
This week’s Parsha of Pinchas talks about Hashem's final decision that Moshe will not be the one to lead the Jewish People into Israel. The leadership will be handed over to Joshua.
The Torah spells out Moshe’s mistake for all to see. Hashem clearly states the reason that he is not allowing Moshe (or Aharon) to enter the Promised Land is because they hit the rock instead of speaking to the rock.
By providing water to the Jewish people in a different mode than instructed by G-d, was a ‘sin’ that denied Moshe the ultimate gift of leading his people into the land.
Why so? What was so grave about hitting the rock instead of speaking to the rock?
The core of the answer is as follows. Speaking to the rock in the presence of the Jewish people and having them all see how the rock miraculously gives forth water, would have caused the name of G-d to be glorified and sanctified.
The message would have been ‘if even a rock is able to give forth water by merely being spoken to by G-d, we, the Jewish people how much more so we must listen to the word of G-d’.
Because of Moshe’s great and lofty level of saintliness, the small misstep of the missing of that opportunity is significant enough to have Hashem take away his entry into the land of Israel.
Why does the Torah state the cause of this prohibition of entry at every juncture that it arises? Is it not disrespectful to Moshe to repeat several times in the Torah his mistake of hitting the rock?
Rashi brings the following answer.
It would be more disrespectful not to spell out the issue clearly. Assumptions would be made about Moshe that would be worse than what actually happened.
It would be said that Moshe was part of the various rebellions against G-d that various sectors of the Jewish people had engaged in during their forty years of sojourn in the desert.
The parable is given:
Two women are brought to the Jewish court (in Biblical times when Jewish law governed the nation of Israel).
One has been convicted of promiscuity G-d forbid. If the proper advance warning procedure is followed, the punishment of lashes is administered.
Another woman was also being punished by the court. Her violation is a much lower-level infraction. She has eaten the fruits of the Sabbatical year when they are still not ripe. The Rabbi’s decreed that this is a prohibition as the fruits of the Shmita are holy and intended only for proper consumption as an edible. Eating an unripe fruit is considered ‘destroying’ the fruit, not ‘consuming’ the fruit.
There is a vast difference between the moral violation of promiscuity to the subtle violation of misuse of the Sabbatical years fruit.
The woman who has committed the minor infraction requests that her violation be publicized.
So that it is not thought that she too has been morally sinful.
I am sure that you can find parallels to this today, which I will leave to your imagination.
True, Moshe and Aharon erred. But it wasn’t a rebellious act of sin. It was a subtle and almost negligible change in fulfilling Hashem's instruction. After all, forty years earlier Hashem had told Moshe to hit the rock and bring forth water. The fact that after speaking to the rock and not getting results, he assumed that maybe he should try hitting the rock is hardly a reason for Hashem to punish him.
Yet, Moshe’s greatness is what causes him to be judged so exactingly.
With Tzadikim the bar is higher than with regular lay people, and they are held to much higher level of perfection.
Moshe understood that some people may not understand this. They may assume that his non-entry into Israel is just the same as the People of Israel’s non-entry. That it was a result of not believing in G-d.
Moshe wanted the narrative to be very clear that he believed in G-d fully and the only reason he was not being allowed to go to Israel was the omission of speaking to the rock and further sanctifying G-d’s name.
I recall a story told about the Rebbe when he was running from the Nazis. One of his sojourns was in the city of Vichy, France. The authorities required all residents to be registered. When the registrar came to the Rebbe’s hotel, the Rebbe’s wife stated their religion as ‘Orthodox’. When the Rebbe came home, his wife shared this incident with him. The Rebbe promptly went to the registration office to amend the religion to read ‘Jewish Orthodox’. For ‘Orthodox’ could have been assumed to mean Greek Orthodox or something like that.
The Rebbe stated, ‘I don’t want to be separated from Hashem even if only on paper’.
Moshe insists that his minor sin be recorded in the Torah, so that there can be no misunderstanding from what is written in the Torah that he had been participant in a sinful group that rebelled against G-d, Heaven forfend.
If I wasn’t sure what topic to write about today, Hashem sent me a sign.
Yesterday I wrote a note to a vendor in the USA that did some work for the new Synagogue being built in Bangkok’s Sukhumvit Soi 22. I asked him for more favorable payments terms. Sometime after midnight, my telephone woke me up (I keep it with me in case someone needs to reach me in an emergency) and I saw this vendors name on the call screen. I assumed that he was calling me to discuss my request which could certainly wait till the next day.
I assumed that he simply didn’t realize the time difference. When I looked at the text messages, I saw that it was indeed an emergency and called him right back. He has a family member traveling in Asia and they had a medical emergency. The emergency was not in Thailand but since he is contact with me, and I live in Asia he reached out to me. May Hashem send complete and swift healing!
This was a personal reminder to me not to assume and jump to conclusions without investigating what the situation is.
What was remarkably Providential to me was the fact that I was thinking to write this article about assumptions, but I wasn’t sure. Having a personal story like this happen to me on Thursday night as I was formulating my weekly article, was like a sign from Heaven to write about this topic.
(As I thought about it more I realized that the very opening of the Parsha is also about dispelling assumptions. See below*).
We are humans, and we all make assumptions.
Thankfully we have Hashem's guidance that tells us what direction our assumptions should be leaning toward.
The Pirkei Avot teaches ‘judge every person in a favorable way’.
Here is a story that R’ Yanky Tauber shared that brings the point home:
R’ YT relates: The incident I'm going to tell you about occurred more than ten years ago, but hardly a week goes by in which I don't think about it.
I had popped into a Jerusalem synagogue for minchah (afternoon prayers). A few rows in front of me there was this man, sitting with his four kids. The fellow in front of him had his arm over the back of the bench, and the fellow behind him was also disturbing him in some way. He kept snapping at his kids. What a jerk, I thought to myself. Ok, you're nervous, you're rude, that's fine, there are lots of nervous and rude people in these stress-ridden times, but does the whole world have to know it?
I'm really a live-and-let-live kind of guy, but this fellow was impossible to ignore. His ill-will and discontent filled the room. Yes, I thought, your kids are a rowdy bunch, but do you have to yell at them all the time? Why don't you leave them home if they get on your nerves so much?
At the conclusion of the service, his four kids—the twelve-year old, the nine-year old, the eight-year old and the six-year old—stood in a row and recited the mourner's kaddish. What a jerk, I muttered—meaning myself of course—my face hot with shame.
(Click here for an in-depth article about this topic. Or click here for a short lecture by Chana Weisberg on this topic).
How fortunate we are that the Torah clearly guides us on being positive people. On projection a positive outlook on those around us. On seeing the inherent good at every juncture possible.
The way we judge others is the way Hashem ultimately judges us.
Let us judge others the way we want to be judged.
With a good and positive eye.
Especially during these ‘Three weeks’ of national mourning, when we remember the destruction of the Bet Hamikdash, we need to mindful of how we can rectify the cause of the destruction.
This exile started almost two thousand years ago because of ‘Sinat Chinam’ – baseless hatred – the way to fix it is by love without strings attached.
One of the important mindsets to have, is the ability to assume that your fellow is good at his or her core.
May we all have much success in creating an atmosphere of unity and love within Am Yisrael.
We pray for the hostages, the soldiers, the wounded and for Am Yisrael at large, to merit to bring this world to its perfected state with the coming of Mashiach NOW.
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Yosef Kantor
*here is a brief explanation of how the Torah dispels the assumption one may have made about Pinchas’ character. Or click here for more in-depth on this topic.
Pinchas the son of Elazar the son of Aaron ( Numbers 25:10)
Why does Gd refer to Pinchas as “the son of Elazar the son of Aaron”? Because the tribes of Israel were mocking him, saying, “Have you seen this son of the fattener, whose mother’s father (Jethro) fattened calves for idolatrous sacrifices, and now he goes and kills a prince in Israel?” Therefore, Gd traces his lineage to Aaron.
(Talmud, Sanhedrin 82b)
Few professions are as cruel and inhumane as the fattening of calves for slaughter. So when Pinchas slew Zimri, many said: “Look at this holy zealot! He acts as if motivated by the desire to avenge the honor of Gd and save the people, but in truth he has merely found a holy outlet for his cruel and violent nature. After all, it’s in his blood—just look at his maternal grandfather . . .” So Gd described him as “Pinchas the son of Elazar the son of Aaron” in order to attest that in character and temperament he actually took after his paternal grandfather—the compassionate and peace-loving Aaron.
The true greatness of Pinchas lay in that he acted in complete opposition to his nature, transcending his inborn instincts to bring peace between Gd and Israel.
(The Lubavitcher Rebbe)