הצור תמים פעלו כי כל דרכיו משפט א-ל אמונה ואין עול צדיק וישר הוא: שיחת לו לא בניו מומם דור עקש ופתלתל: ה לד' תגמלו זאת עם נבל ולא חכם הלא אביך קנך הוא עשך ויכננך: (“The Rock, perfect is His work, for all His ways are judgment; a G-d of good faith without injustice, just and upright is He. The crooked and twisted generation, His sons, have harmed Him not, [it is] their defect. Is it to Ha-Shem that you repay this, ungrateful and unwise people; is He not your Father, your Owner, He made you and established you”; vv. 4-6).
What grammatically ought to be the first word of the last verse in the above passage is written very unusually in the séfer Torah, so that the initial ha of hala-Shem is written both very large and also as though it is a separate word in its own right, rather than the interrogative prefix, as we find in ha-lo later in the same verse.
What are we to learn from this unusual orthography? Why is the hé written this way?
B.
The Talmud offers the following comment; רבי יושעי' ברי' דרב חננאל אמר כו' "ה לד' תגמלו זאת" – הא לד' תגמלו זות (“Rabbi Yosha‘ya son of Rav Chanan’el said... Is it to Ha-Shem that you repay this – It is to Ha-Shem that you repay this”; ירושלמי מגילה פ"א ה"ט). Rabbi Yosha’ya understand the free-standing hé to be equivalent to the word ha, “this” (ordinarily spelt hé alef) and thus converts the phrase from what we would understand to be a rhetorical question to a declarative sentence: It is Ha-Shem, no less, that you are repaying thus!
The Ba‘al ha-Turim sees in the free-standing hé (whose gimatriya or numerical value is “five”) an allusion to the five books of the Torah. The thrust of Moshe’s warning, then, is that despite the perfect justice with which G-d runs the world, despite His faithfulness in paying the reward due for each and every mitzva enumerated in the Torah, nonetheless His ungrateful people will likely act in a fashion all too worthy of the epithet “crooked and twisted generation.”
The Maharal mi-Prag looks at the entire verse, and notes that Ha-Shem is here referred to as a father, an owner, and a maker. A father, because just as the father’s initiative sets in motion the process by which children come out into the world, so did Ha-Shem’s initiative bring Israel out into the world, when the bënei Yisra’él came forth from Egypt. G-d refers to Israel as His son: שלח את בני ויעבדני (“Send out my son that he may serve me”; Exodus IV, 23); or Hoshea XI, 1: כי נער ישראל ואהבהו וממצרים קראתי לבני (“For Israel is a youth and I love him completely, and from Egypt I called to My son”). G-d likens the Exodus to the birth of a child; He is our Father.
Simultaneously, He brought us forth מבית עבדים, “from the house of slaves.” The Talmud comments, concerning an ‘eved ‘Ivri who refuses his freedom and has his ear bored at his master’s doorpost to accentuate his unacceptably servile attitude: דלת ומזוזה היו עדים שפסחתי על בתי בני ישראל ואמרתי להם "כי לי בני ישראל עבדים" וגו' (“door and doorpost were witnesses that I passed over the houses of the bënei Yisra’él and said to them, ‘For to Me are the bënei Yisra’él servants....’ [Leviticus XXV, 55]”; קידושין כ"ב.). Despite a child’s dependence on his father, the father does not own the child’s person. With Israel, it is different; G-d is both our Father and our Owner.
G-d is also our Maker. Unlike a flesh-and-blood father, G-d did not merely contribute to the process of bringing forth a child. He supplied all Israel’s components, and is thus both our Father and our Mother.
Finally, human parents entrust their child to teachers who work assiduously to “polish” the facets cut by the parent in their little “gem”, to mould the child’s character and bring out the completed adult. Here again, it is G-d Who established Israel: He provided us with the Torah, our guidepost and vocation in life, making it possible for Israel to be the self-sufficient עם לבדד ישכן, “people which dwells alone” (Numbers XXIII, 9) or, as Chazal put it: ישראל הם כרכא דכולא בי' ממנו מלכים ממנו כהנים וגו' (“Israel are a ‘city’ in which everything is found, kings, kohanim....”; חולין ע"ו:).
והם החליפו הטוב ברע הגמור ובודאי דבר זה תמי', concludes the Maharal; despite all of the advantages afforded Israel, Moshe laments that they will have thrown them away, traded in the good for the decidedly bad, an apparently inexplicable thing; hence, the exclamation to which our attention is called in the Yërushalmi supra (נצח ישראל פ"ב וע"ע גבורות ד' פי"ג ונתיבות עולם ח"א נתיב העבודה פי"ד).
C.
The séfer Ém la-Miqra’ vëla-Massoreth offers the following suggestion for our passage’s unusual orthography: ובהיות שישראל חוטאים ח"ו השכינה מצטערת כי היא קבלה עלי' עונותיהם של ישראל לצאת בעבורם בגלות כדכתיב "ובפשעיכם שולחה אמכם" ובהיות ה' רמז לשכינה היא רבתי וגו' (“And since Israel are sinning. G-d forbid, the Divine Presence is suffering, for She has accepted upon Herself Israel’s sins and because of them gone into exile, as it is written, ‘and because of your transgressions your mother has been sent forth’ [Isaiah L, 1]; and since [the letter] hé is an allusion to the Divine Presence, it is written large....”), and is written separately, apart, because in such a case of willful ingratitude as the Maharal has described above the Divine Presence has been driven into exile.
Consider the implications of this statement.
G-d ordered Israel to construct a dwelling place for Him in their midst, ועשו לי מקדש ושכנתי בתוכם (“And they will make for Me a Sanctuary and I shall dwell [vë-shachanti] in their midst”; Exodus XVIII, 8). Ibid. XXIX, 46 makes clear that this was a specific aim of the Exodus: והוצאתי אתם מארץ מצרים לשכני בתוכם וגו' (“And I brought them out of the land of Egypt to establish My dwelling [lë-shochni] amongst them....”). From the root of this verb the term for the Divine Presence in the universe, Shëchina, is derived.
At first this dwelling was the Mishkan (also from the same root), in the desert, at Gilgal and Shilo. After David conquered the Holy City, his son Shëlomo built the Béyth ha-Miqdash there, the “home’s” ultimate intended location, where it remained until first the Babylonians and then the Romans destroyed it, driving the Shëchina into exile, where She has been ever since.
Chazal tell us: כד ברא קב"ה בר נש בעלמא אתקין לי' כגונא עלאה ויהב לי' חילא ותוקפא באמצעיתא דגופא דתמן שריא לבא וכו' ומתמן אתזן כל גופא כו' ובגונא דהא אתקין קב"ה עלמא ועבד חד גופא כו' ולבא שרי באמצעיתא דכל גופא כו' וירושלם באמצעיתא דכל ישובא שריא והיא אסחרא להר הבית כו' דתמן שכינה שריא והכא הוא לבא דכל ארעא ועלמא ומהכא אתזנו כל אינון אתרי דישובא וגו' (“When the Holy One, Blessed is He created a human being in the universe, He established him according to a supernal design and gave him power and effectivity in the middle of the body where the heart is infused... and thence is nourished the whole body... and according to this design the Holy One, Blessed is He established the universe and made [it] one body... and the heart was infused in the middle of the whole body... and Jerusalem is infused into the middle of the inhabited world [yishuva] and surrounds the Temple Mount... where the Shëchina was infused, and there is the heart of the whole Earth and the universe, and thence are norished all the locations of the yishuva....”; זוה"ק ח"ג קס"א).
A human being is a microcosm of the universe, which has the Shëchina in the Béyth ha-Miqdash at its “heart.” The heart nourishes the body by pumping blood and delivering nutrients throughout it. We eat, the saying goes, “to keep body and soul together.”
In the Mishkan and Miqdash, Israel offered sacrifices, which G-d Himself calls קרבני לחמי לאשי ריח ניחחי (“My sacrifice, My food, for My fire, My savory aroma....’: Numbers XXVIII, 3). The “body” of the universe, which was to be nourished from its “heart” went on a starvation diet, “giving up the ghost” as the Shëchina went into exile. That is what our sins have accomplished.
D.
Two months ago we were in mourning for the Holy Temple. Was that mourning sincere? Do we really want to end this long and bitter exile of the Shëchina from our midst, in which we have undergone expulsions and genocide, the Crusades, the Thirty Years’ War, the Chmielnicky Rebellion, the Holocaust (if only to hit some of the lowlights)?
The means is in our hands. On Rosh ha-Shana we all declared ותפלה ותשובה וצדקה מעבירין את רוע הגזירה (“Prayer, repentance [tëshuva], and charity moderate the destructiveness of the decree”). Within that tëshuva we need to work on the root cause of our exile, which Chazal have told us is sin’ath chinnam, empty, baseless hatred of our fellow Jews (יומא ד.).
Look at the headlines. Secularists look down on religious people (charédim), disparaging them as primitive religious fanatics à la the Muslims, chas vë-shalom. Some charédim do their cause no good by rioting and throwing stones in response to secularist provocations. The so-called “settlers,” imbued with the deepest love of the Holy Land, are demonized in the press and, again, some do their cause a disservice by rising to the bait of the provocations.
Tëshuva literally means “return.” On the threshold of Yom ha-Kippurim, it is time for all of us to redouble our efforts, return to our heritage, learn and practice the Torah -- all 613 mitzvoth -- respect those whose standards within those mitzvoth differ from ours, and so end the Shëchina’s exile and our own with its recurrent atrocities.
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