Parshas Vaera
How Shabbos Brings Redemption1
The first scenes in the drama of our redemption from Egypt all took place
on Shabbos. Moshe, a medrash2 tells
us, negotiated a day of rest for his people. “Work a slave incessantly,
without any respite, and you kill him,” he told Paroh. Paroh relented,
and allowed them Shabbos to regain their strength. Another medrash speaks
of old scrolls the Jews had preserved, which told of a promised redemption
by G-d. Reading them refreshed them, gave them joy. It was on Shabbos,
of course, during their time away from their toil, that they were able to
turn to these scrolls. In this very concrete example of the role Shabbos
played in a nascent redemption, we have just a hint of the fuller meaning
of what Chazal tell us:3 “Yisrael is
redeemed only in the merit of Shabbos.”
Geulah rises from the deepest descent into galus.
Understanding the nature of galus will therefore help us understand
how geulah addresses it, and how Shabbos helps bring it about.
Kabbalistically, galus is the unavailability of Daas4. Practically, this means that deficiencies
in emunah and/or kedushah bring about galus, since
they perforce must diminish the effects of Daas. Toldos Yaakov
Yosef cites the Besht as pinpointing the cause of the Egyptian
galus: they lacked the realization that HKBH creates the world anew
each day. In other words, a deficiency not in basic emunah, but in
clarity and precision of emunah, created the space for
galus. Geulah, in turn, addressed that deficiency and
vividly displayed to the Jews the nature of His Providence, and His role
as not only Creator but engineer and orchestrator of all phenomena. The
ten sefiros, through which hashgachah wends a path from His
Will to concrete activity, each have a countervailing kelipah,
which obscures the presence Hashem. The ten makos challenged and
opposed the ten “anti-sefiros,” breaking their power, weakening
their obscuring stranglehold over our conception of Divinity. (This, of
course, is what detza”ch ada”sh and b’achav are about. They
point to a progressive campaign to evince the role of Providence in all
things. The first set dealt with things below ground, the next with
things that dwell on earth, and the last with things above ground. Each
set is linked in the Torah to some declaration by the Egyptians, or some
goal described by Hashem, that prominently uses some form of the word
“daas.”
By the time all the makos had run their course, there was very
little room left for doubt or opposition. Paroh, it is true, remained a
hold-out. This only evidences the loftiness of emunah. Just as
emunah comes from a higher place, so does the ability to hide from
it, to oppose it. Paroh was able to persist only because of Divine
assistance, which offered him a capacity to deny. This capacity was not
native to him nor within his ordinary grasp; like some levels of
emunah, his counter-emunah, his radical unbelief in the face
of the obvious went beyond teva. (Even Paroh had his moment of
clear belief, but not till the crossing of the Sea.) Within all this we
recognize how far-reaching and insidious are the effects of the sitra
achra, reaching to every nook and cranny of emunah!
Our escape from Egypt began with the ten makos, or began with an
infusion of emunah. The refrain is repeated several times in the
narrative: “the nation believed,”5 “they
believed in Hashem and Moshe His servant.”6 The makos created and reinforced belief, belief
that took hold of them on three levels – belief in the mind, belief in the
heart, and belief that saturates a person’s very limbs. Similarly, the
other great component of Daas – kedushah7 – operates on three levels – kedushah
experienced intellectually, emotionally, and taking hold of a person’s
entire body.
It is easy to see how extraordinarily important Shabbos is to
geulah. Shabbos, of course, is an experiential affirmation of
emunah, particularly Hashem’s creation of everything in six days.
It is also a living font of kedushah. Reishis Chochmah
posits that we draw upon ourselves all aspects of kedushah from
Shabbos. This is alluded to in the verse, “And Hashem blessed the seventh
day and sanctified it,” i.e. the blessing is the sanctity that we find in
it and draw from it.
It does not end there. If we are correct that the short definition of
galus is the removal from us of Daas, Shabbos is clearly the
necessary corrective. “It is a sign between Me and you so that you will
know that I am Hashem Who sanctifies you.”8 This knowledge is synonymous with deveikus;
Shabbos offers us the highest levels of deveikus we can
experience. When we take advantage of them, when we taste of the level
of “And you shall cling to Him,”9 -
which is the goal of all Torah and mitzvos - we bring geulah to the
world, whose ultimate definition is full deveikus with Him.
We can come at it from a different direction as well. Curiously, Chazal
find an allusion to the four exiles in the second verse of Chumash. We
are accustomed to seeing galus as a consequence of sin; they see it
woven into the fabric of Creation.
The Ari opined that galus came about because of a deficiency in
zarecha – the lives of Avraham’s descendents. Chazal, however,
seem to distance themselves from this. They argue10 that not a single Jew in Egypt was lost to licentious
behavior.
The resolution is simple and straightforward. The Jews were not involved
in what we would term aveirah. They were still deficient. Their
deficiency lodged in the vast area between mitzvah and aveirah – in
dealing with the permissible. We are told “Sanctify yourself in what is
permissible to you.”11 A constant theme
of our lives must be to take of the permissible things of this world in a
different manner than others do. It is true that the Torah does not
specify consequences and retribution for failure in this area. This is
because rank aveirah damages body and soul, and must be dealt with
explicitly. Deficiency in kedushah in this area does not inflict
damage upon the person, but it does mar the soul. Galus comes
about not necessarily because of out-and-out sin, but because Jewish souls
require a purging of the harm inflicted by improper indulgence in the
realm of the permissible.
Shabbos offers an escape from the quagmire of spiritual mediocrity. It
offers an opportunity for a person to renew himself as a different being
through his “Shabbos neshamah.” When his ordinary soul loses its
spiritual luster through becoming comfortable and mired in the material,
the Shabbos neshamah gives him an opportunity to link more
significantly with G-d.
Shabbos provides for the individual the identical promise it holds for the
nation in need of redemption. No galus is worse than that of the
individual held captive to his own yetzer hora. Such a person
needs nothing less than redemption; that redemption begins with Shabbos,
just as the national one. In Kiddush, we refer to Shabbos as techilah
l’mikra-ei kodesh.12 The Rebbe of
Kobrin rendered this “the beginning for those called to kedushah.”
One who responds to an inner urge to seek kedushah must begin with
Shabbos, and use its special neshamah as a vehicle to repair his
damaged relationships with all things, even with permissible things.
Shabbos brings geulah. It brings a person to a place where he can
once again feel a closeness to Hashem. The chief avodah of Shabbos
is to return13 to a position of
deveikus. The affairs of the rest of the week plunge a person into
so many activities that are experienced as unrelated to G-d. These
activities therefore sever some of the bond between him and Hashem.
Shabbos restores the love between him and His Creator.
1 Based on Nesivos Shalom pgs.65-69
2 Shemos Rabbah 1:28
3 Vayikra Rabbah 1:3
4 The Rebbe refers (explicitly!) to the sefirah of daas; the
word should not be simply translated as “understanding.” He specifically
points to daas as one of the mochin – the “mentalities” – the “upper”
sefiros that describe processes “internal” to G-d, rather than externally
manifested.
5 Shemos 4:31
6 Shemos 14:31
7 This likely means that Daas cannot flow to a person whose
conduct is far removed from the intrinsic holiness of its Source
8 Shemos 31:13
9 Devarim 10:20
10 Vayikra Rabbah 32:5
11 Yevamos 20A
12 Lit. the first of the holy convocations, or “called-upon
days.”
13 The words “return” and “Shabbos” are related
Text Copyright © 2008 by Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein and Torah.org
