"You have given Me life" (Shelach Lecha)
After the spies returned, the people raised their voice and said, “if only we had died in the land of Egypt, or if only we had died in this Wilderness! Why is Hashem bringing us to this land to die?” (Bemidbar 14:2-3). Rather than looking forward to a life of blessing, the people assumed that entry into the land of Israel was a decree of death. Then, having heard their complaints, God threatens to bring their worse fear to a reality: “I will smite them with the plague and annihilate them!” (14:12). But then Moshe intervenes and reminds God how He is “slow to anger, abundant in kindness and forgiving” (14:18), to which God responds, Salachti Kid’varecha - “I have forgiven because of your words” (14:20).
So far we have just read the story as it appears in the parsha. However, according to Rabbi Yitzchak (Brachot 32a), God’s words to Moshe conveyed a deeper message which not only addressed His forgiveness of the people, but God’s very essence: As Rabbi Yitzchak explains, it is as if God: “Moshe, you have given me life through your words”. This suggests that, somehow, by stopping God from killing the people who’d already imagined that they were going to die, Moshe’s intervention somehow ‘gave life’ to God. But what does it mean that Moshe gave life to God?
The Rashba, in his commentary to the Aggadot, offers a profound explanation that whenever we talk about God being alive, we really mean that God will be alive in the eyes and hearts of others. In this case, had God destroyed the Jewish people, the other nations would have claimed that ‘God is dead’. Therefore, by keeping the Jewish people alive, God Himself remained alive in the consciousness of the other nations.
Still, this explanation seems to be more oriented to what the nations will say than necessarily to the nature of God.
Having tried to find a further approach to this cryptic Gemara, I then encountered an amazing explanation from the Maharsham in his ‘Techelet Mordechai’ commentary to Parshat Acharei Mot on the verse ‘V’Chai BaHem’ (Vayikra 18:5), meaning ‘and you shall live with them’, who explains that someone who is alive is able to feel things, whereas if the Jewish nation sin, God then turns His eyes away from them in a manner that may be compared to God acting as if He is dead and unable to feel anything. However, when God forgives the people, God restores His relationship with the Jewish people and therenby chooses to feel their anguish. On this basis, God was saying to Moshe that: “I will remain alive in terms of Me choosing to feel the anguish of the Jewish people.”
However, there is one further approach which I would like to suggest to explain the words “Moshe, you have given me life through your words”, but to do so we must first refer to Gemara Nedarim 40a which relates how one of Rabbi Akiva’s students was sick but none of his colleagues came to visit him. Having then heard about this, Rabbi Akiva immediately visited the young man, to which the young man exclaimed: “My teacher! You have given me life!”. The question I’d like to ask is – what is the connection between these two Gemarot?
On face value, they are very different. One involves a teacher visiting a student who is sick, while the other involves a prophet reassuring the Holy one, Blessed Be He, who is seemingly angry and ready to destroy the Jewish people. Yet the unifying theme of these two sources is that they focus on gentle words which remove pain and bring healing and life.
We are taught in Mishlei 18:21 that: ‘death and life are in the power of the tongue’, and ‘a soothing tongue can generate a tree of life’ (15:4). True, the Jewish people used their words to speak about death. However, Moshe, and then Rabbi Akiva, used their words to bring comfort and life. What we learn from here is that our words matter. Words can focus on hurting and harming, or they can focus on helping and healing.
As we know, we are at a significant point in Jewish history, and when such moments occur, our task is to consider ways to improve ourselves and thereby increase our individual merit and the merit of the Jewish people. And undoubtedly a good place to start is with how we speak.
Given this, I would like to ask that we each challenge ourselves to think a little longer before we speak and to remember that ‘death and life are in the power of the tongue’ and ‘a soothing tongue can generate a tree of life’. And why? Because we are a people who pursues life.
Shabbat Shalom.
Rav Johnny Solomon
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