From: JoshHoff@aol.com <joshhoff@aol.com>
<br>To: "joshhoff@aol.com" <joshhoff@aol.com>
<br>Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2010, 06:17:06 PM EDT
<br>Subject: Netvort: parshas Chukas, 5770
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                                               Under the Tent<p>
          By Rabbi Joshua (derivatively known as The Red Hoffer) Hoffman

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In the beginning of parshas Chukas, the Torah  speaks at length about the laws of  ritual defilement caused by coming into contact with a human corpse, and the means of purifying oneself from this defilement through us\e of the ashes of the parah adumah, or red heifer. In the middle of these laws, we are told, “This is the law (lit., the ‘Torah’): When a person dies in a tent...” (Bamidbar 19:14), and then given the laws regarding defilement that occurs through being in the same tent as a corpse. The Talmud, however (Berachos 63b), derives a certain principle from this verse, which is that    the  lasting achievement in Torah study can be attained only by one who kills himself over it. In this exposition of the verse, the words 'this is the Torah' are taken to refer to the study of Torah, and the tent mentioned in the verse is taken to refer to the study hall of Torah. One may ask why this principle  is derived specifically from a verse  found in the laws of the red heifer. What is the  connection between these laws and the study of Torah?
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Rav Mordechai Ilan, in his work Mikdash Mordechai, cites a midrash which says that the parah adumah is actually an allusion to the Jewish nation. He offers two explanations to this midrash. first, he says that a unique characteristic of the Jewish nation is its readiness to accept all of God's laws even before knowing what they entailed, as reflected in their statement at Mt. Sinai, ' we will do and we will listen,' meaning that they agreed to observe the Torah's commandments before learning what they entailed. In this way, they were accepting al of the Torah as, ultimately, being a chok, a decree from God which they accepted upon themselves without first understanding it. The  parah adumah is the classical example of a chok, whose purpose is extremely hard to fathom. The Jewish nation, thus, accepted all of the Torah upon themselves as if it consisted completely of laws such as the parah adumah, and that is why the midrash says that the pariah adumah alludes to the Jewish people. Rabbi Ilan's  second explanation of the midrash is that the parah adumah is able to bring about purity impurity, and this is also something that the Jewish people has been able to do historically. Achaz, for example who worshipped idols and closed down the study halls, gave birth to Chizkiyahu, who, in his years of king of Yehudah, made sure that everyone in the nation was learned in even the most esoteric laws of the Torah, such as the laws of purity and impurity. According to both of these explanations, in any case, the midrash is telling us that the red heifer, or parah adumah, alludes to some special characteristic of the Jewish nation as a whole.

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Based on this midrash, we can understand why the principle of the need to 'kill oneself' in the tents of Torah' in order for one's Torah study to have permanence is derived from a verse that is found in the middle of the laws of the red heifer. The verse states, ' when a man dies in a tent, '  the word used for 'man' here is 'adam.' As we have mentioned many times in the past, Rabbi Ephraim of Lunshitz, in his Olelos Ephraim, points out that of all the words for 'man' in the Hebrew language- ish, gever, enosh and adam' only the word adam retains its singular form when used to indicate the plural. This is because the individual Jew is always associated with the nation as a whole, which is a characteristic nit shared by any other nation. That is why, according to one opinion in the Talmud, the corpse of a non-Jew does not cause defilement to someone who is in the same tent, because the verse from which this kind of defilement derived, the word adam is used to refer to the corpse. Only a Jew is referred to by the term 'adam.'
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We can, then, extrapolate that when the  Talmud in Berachos derives a principle regarding Torah study from the verse introducing the laws of defilement through being in the same tent as a human corpse,, this principle has something to do with the corporate nature of Torah study by the Jewish people. The Torah has been described by many great rabbis, including Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor, as the soul of the Jewish people. when one studies Torah, he must do so with a recognition of this fact, and gear his study toward the actualization of the Jewish soul. Someone who studies for his own personal benefit, out of intellectual curiosity, or to be known as a scholar, is certainly meritorious in that he is, after all, studding God's word, but he is missing the wider picture. Rav Tzvi Yehudah Kook explained the statement of the Talmud that the land lay waste because people did not make the blessing over the Torah before they engaged in its study to mean that they did not take into consideration, in their Torah study, the  message of that blessing, which says that God chose us from among  all the nations and gave us His Torah. In other words, people studied Torah for their own purposes, and not in order to develop the soul of the nation and help it actualize its national destiny. Perhaps, then, the idea of killing oneself in the tents of Torah is to minimize one's personal interests when he studies Torah, and emphasize the importance of the Torah for the proper development of the Jewish nation. Only when Torah is studied with this goal  in mind will it have permanence.