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Chomer Lidrush
Ideas to turn your gears heading into the parsha
1) Why the Torah Promies Rewards in This World
Our double-parashah begins: “If you follow My statutes and observe My commandments and perform them… I will give your rains in their season… you shall pursue your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword… I will establish peace in the land… I will walk among you, and you shall be upright before Me” (26:3–8).
What’s strange about the beginning of our parashah is that there is not a single mention about reward or the World to Come. All the promises in these pasukim are for a good and dignified life — here, in this world.
Rav Moshe Gorelick explains that this is actually precisely the point: Moshe Rabbeinu makes no mention of the World to Come because these guidelines are a metric by which one merits life in this world. Forget about amassing reward in Olam Haba – if you want to maximize your time in Olam HaZeh, here is how to do it: by keeping the Torah.
Rav Gorelick notes that even secular historians like Arnold Toynbee and Freud have acknowledged what the Torah proclaimed long ago: that moral resilience, not military might or economic prosperity, determines the fate of civilizations.
2) "In Praise of Impracticality"
It’s always a little exciting when a famous and oft-quoted Chazal lines up with the current parashah –– and this week is one of those times! Chazal (Toras Kohanim) ask: "Mah inyan Shemitah etzel Har Sinai?" — what does the mitzvah of Shemitah have to do with Har Sinai, that it’s mentioned here, in Behar? Why is this particular mitzvah, of all the 613, singled out in connection with the setting of Matan Torah? The answer, quoted by Rashi, is that just as the laws of Shemitah – with all its details, boundaries, and conditions — were given at Sinai, so too all the mitzvot were given there, in their general form and in all their particulars. Shemitah becomes the model through which Torah reminds us: every detail matters, and every law is from Hashem.
And yet, shemitah only applies in Eretz Yisrael. So why teach it now, in the wilderness, decades before anyone enters the Land? Mah inyan Shemitah etzel Har Sinai? What’s this mitzvah doing here?
Rav Norman Lamm zt”l saw this as a powerful message: We tend to value what feels urgent, what speaks to our current reality. But shemitah is about a future that isn’t yet ours. That’s the point: Torah isn’t only about now, or what’s only immediately practical — it’s about shaping who we’re becoming and believing that there is a future, there is a destination that will one day be reached – and we must be prepared for it. The Torah doesn’t speak only to practicality because it believes in the potential of reaching what, at the current moment, seems so very impractical.
(A particularly striking passage from the original derashah:
It was the Jerusalem Talmud (Hag. 2:1) that attributed to the most notorious heretic in Jewish history the opposition to "other-worldly study of Torah." Elisha ben Abuya, known as Acher ("the other one"), is said to have stormed into a classroom, rudely interrupted the teacher, and shouted at the students: "What are you doing here? Why are you wasting your time in such irrelevant material as Torah? You, you must be a builder; you must be a carpenter; you ought to become a fisherman, and you should be a tailor. Do something useful in your lives!" The great heretic was an eminently practical man...
Of course, I do not mean to be cute by espousing impracticality and advocating irrelevance. Total irrelevance is deadening to the spirit and results in what philosophers call solipsism, divorce from the outside world and experience and the introversion into oneself; and impracticality can become nothing but a semantic excuse for inefficiency and incompetence. What I do mean is that relevance is a good, but not the only one or even the most important one. And while practicality is necessary for the execution of ideals, dreams and visions need not be pre-restrained in the Procrustean bed of a mercantile mentality.)
3) Shiur - Deepening our Connection to Torah
In the beginning of the Parshah we are told of the importance of Talmud Torah, that we have a requirement of being Amel BaTorah (see Rashi to 26:3). But how does “Im Bechukosai Telechu” teach us to be an amel baTorah? Please see our specially made source-sheet for a shiur on the topic, comprised of two approaches and a final mehalech between them. Great for an afternoon shiur or even prep for Shavuos.
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