Dvar Torah for Post-Shavuot

Based on Likutey Halakhot, Hilkhot Yayin Nesekh, 4:21

OK. We've left Egypt. We worked on ourselves through the 49 days of the Omer-Count and cleansed ourselves well enough to receive the Torah. And we actually received the Torah. So, now, there's nothing to worry about. All we have to do is apply ourselves to learning and living the Torah in "real life."

Well, not exactly.

As high a spiritual level as we may have merited„and at Sinai we merited receiving all 70 "Faces" of the Torah„our arch-enemy Satan has not despaired of bringing us down. He lies in ambush, seeking to strike at our most vulnerable spot, our Achilles heel, sexual immorality. Satan tries to get to this target not by getting us to sin, but by getting us to do a "mitzvah." Not one of the 613 mitzvot, but one of his "mitzvot." He attempts this by trying to confuse us, so that we mistakenly think that that which is not a mitzvah is a mitzvah. For example, in Parshat Shlach (Numbers 13:1-15:41), after the Jews have been told that they have been sentenced to wander the desert for 40 years for the crime of having despised the Promised Land (as a result of the spies' report), some of them came back the following morning and said, "Let us go and enter the Land. Our rejection of the Land was a sin" (ibid. 14:40). In verse 41 Moshe Rabbeinu (Moses our Teacher) responds to them with a question. "Why are you doing what God said not to do?" Yes, yesterday it was a mitzvah to strike out for the Promised Land. Today, however, it is not. They ignored his advice and attempted to enter the Land. They were met by Amalekites and Canaanites and annihilated (v. 45).

Reb Noson writes, and we have just noted, that such confusion can be deadly. Such confusion struck the Jewish people just 40 days after the Revelation at Sinai. Although we had been cleansed of the poison with which the Serpent had infected Eve (Genesis 3:2-6), the Eirev Rav (Mixed Multitude), a horde of Egyptians and others who accompanied the Jews at the Exodus, were not cleansed. Because they were still infected by the poison, their understanding of the Torah was distorted. When they thought that Moshe Rabbeinu had died, their fallacious view of things led them to clamor for a new leader. They impressed their faulty view on the Jews. "Moshe Rabbeinu led us out of Egypt. Now he is dead and we must have a new leader" (Exodus 32:1; see Rashi)! The Jews thus fell to serving an idol, the golden calf! They still believed in God. They didn't really think that yesterday's golden earrings was today's deity (see Ramban ibid. vv.1-4). Yet their validation of the Eirev Rav's thinking spoiled their own thinking enough that they thought it was a mitzvah to make the calf.

However, Chazal (our Sages) tell us what they really wanted. "The Jews worshipped idolatry only to permit themselves public promiscuity" (Sanhedrin 63b). On the threshold of summer, we, who have just received the Torah, who are surrounded by the Eiruv Rav, who perhaps even (unknowingly) let them into our homes and computers, must take extra care to preserve the little purity of mind that we have. We must beg (!)of God that when we study Torah we understand it properly. We must scream at the top of our lungs that He have mercy on us, that the light of the Torah should not become distorted as it passes through the prism of our minds. We want to derive from our study God's will because we want to do God's mitzvot, not mitzvot that are of Satan's, or our own, making.

agutn Shabbos!
Shabbat Shalom!