Date: May 12th 2022

At the end of this week’s parsha, Parshas Emor, the torah relates a remarkable incident that occurred in the court of Moshe Rebbeinu. A Jew who was the son of an Egyptian father and a Jewish mother fought with a man from his mother’s tribe, the tribe of Dan. The son of the Egyptian wanted to pitch his tent with his mother’s tribe. The man from Dan objected on the grounds that camp placements were arranged according to patrilineal descent and therefore, presumably, the son of the Egyptian should pitch his tent amongst the Eirev Rav, the group of other Egyptian converts. The case came before Moshe Rabbeinu who ruled in favor of the Dannite. In an act of rage the son of the Egyptian cursed the sacred name of Hashem that he had heard during the revelation at Mount Sinai, a capital offense.

Moshe was unsure what the law in such a case would be. Unlike most judges in history, when Moshe did not know the law he had the luxury of consulting the Almighty. Hashem ruled that the sin of ‘blessing the Name*’ incurred the most severe of all capital punishments and that the son of the Jewess should be stoned to death.

The Torah relates that Moshe told the Jews what Hashem had decreed. The Jews carried out His word and stoned the man. The pasuk then states in the closing words of parshas Emor that the Jews did as Hashem commanded Moshe.

The Ramban and Sforno both grapple with what these final words are telling us. Since we already know that Hashem commanded Moshe to stone the transgressor, and we are told that the Jews carried out the execution, don’t we already know that they did as Hashem commanded Moshe?

Both commentaries answer in a similar fashion- the repetition is to relate a unique praise of the reaction of Jewish people in this incident. The Torah is teaching us that when the Jews stoned the one who cursed, they acted purely for the sake of doing Hashem’s will and not out of hatred. Though the Jews had only just come from the enslavement of Egypt, which our sages tell us was akin to a two hundred and forty year holocaust, they did not execute the son of the Egyptian who fought with a hereditary Jew with any hatred in their hearts.

A deeper examination of this commentary yields the following question:

The setting of this episode was in the Jewish camp in the desert of Sinai. The Jews of that generation witnessed the greatest expression of Hashem’s total control of the universe since the creation of the world itself. They experienced the daily open manifestation of Hashem’s presence in the Manna and the Clouds of Glory, they heard the voice of God at Mount Sinai when they received the Torah. This man went and uttered the very name that they all merited to hear at Sinai and cursed it. And he did so publicly. He achieved the notoriety that only one other man in history has, which was to be sentenced directly from Hashem to death by stoning. If after all of that, when the Jews approached to stone him in order to fulfill Hashem’s command, would their service have been diminished in any way if feelings of hatred for this man had crept into their hearts?** If anything, such feelings would fit well with the proper way to relate to this sinner and be in alignment with executing him
.

It is apparent from the commentaries that although the Jews had been commanded to destroy the sinner and remove his evil from their midst, perhaps even to hate his deeds, there was no part of this mitzvah that included hating him. If any such emotion would have been invoked, it would have detracted from the purity of their actions.

We can learn a great lesson from the words of the Ramban and Sforno. To do a mitzvah properly precludes doing it for other reasons even if those reasons add to our performance and commitment. Acting for the sake of heaven means that we must try to purge all secondary motives completely, even those that support the aim of the mitzvah itself. We are supposed to strive to serve Hashem with the singular purpose of obeying His will. Nothing else.

POSSIBLE APPLICATION

We don’t need a d’var torah to tell us that if we daven in shul with demonstrable kavanah so people can see our devoutness, or if we learn torah so we will be considered “chashuv” (important), we are missing the boat. The chiddush the Ramban and the Sforno is telling us is that even when our ulterior motives are not petty or self-serving and we feel it is proper to embrace these feelings because they help motivate us to do a particular mitzvah, we are missing the mark as well.

For example, there is a mitzvah of Ve’ahvta Le’reacha Kamocha - loving a fellow Jew like ourselves. There are many ins and outs of this mitzvah and related halachos, but the simple application is, as Rabbi Akiva said, to treat others the way you would wish to be treated. When we give of ourselves to friends and family and community members, our generosity is often enhanced by the selfish pleasure we get out of the relationship. And we don’t think this is a problem. Our less-than perfectly altruistic intentions are moving in consonance with our motivation of following Hashem’s commandment of loving our neighbor like ourselves. I think this chazal is teaching us that when Hashem tells us to do something we need to try to do the mitzvah on His terms for the reasons He gives us and not for other motivations, even though it seems like our other feelings are not at cross purposes with Hashem’s will. It’s worth noting, in our example, that relationships tend to fracture along these
lines.

The Ramban and the Sforno both tell us that the Jews of the midbar were praised for not allowing any semblance of hatred of the mekalel to enter their thoughts at the time of the stoning. However, it is reasonable to assume that if they would have allowed themselves to feel hatred, it would have inspired them to carry out the execution with greater zeal. Hashem praised them for doing the mitzvah only because it was the commandment of Hashem and not for any other reason. This is the ultimate way that we are supposed to perform mitzvos- with a simple focus on serving Hashem undiluted by other motivations.

For us, in our time, many thousands of years after the revelation at Sinai and our people’s spiritual zenith, purifying our intentions to the point where there is not even a drop of ulterior motive in our mitzvah performance seems beyond our grasp. However, we can try to self apply this concept that purity of motive is always the ideal, and we can incorporate this aspiration into our repertoire of things to strive for. We can meditate for a moment on that thought before we do a mitzvah, trying to enhance the bandwidth of this stream of focus amongst the other impulses that overlay our actions.


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