Once- A - Year Day
By Rabbi Joshua (annually known as The Hoffer) Hoffman
After
Moshe pleads with God not to wipe out the natio God tells Moshe, "
I have forgven them in accordance mean?' Rashi says that
this refers to Moshe's argument that if God wipes out the people,
there will be a Chillul Hashem, a desecration of His name, in that
the nations will say that God killed wiped them out because He
was not able to bring them into the land. Rav Moshe Sterbach, in his
Ta'am VaDa'as, adds that it is for this reason, to avoid a
Chillul HaShem, that we invoke this verse on the evening of Yom
Kippur, after Kol Nidrei. The continued state of the Jewish people as
a nation denigrated and suffering among the nations is a desecration
of God's name, and so we ask Him to remove our suffering for His
name's sake.
so that God's punishment of the people for
heeding the words of the spies was to make them stay in the
wilderness for forty years, one year for each day that the spies
scouted the land. As God told Moshe- '" one day for a year."
( Bamidbar, 14:34) actually, the verse should have said ' a year for
a day.' Why was it written in this way? Rabbi Besser suggested
that it serves as an allusion to Yom Kippur, which is a day that
comes one time a year. The punishment of a year for a day
demonstrated God's kindness to the people, and, in addition, as Rashi
points out the mission of the spies, to traverse the entire land,
should have taken them much longer,,but since God knew that the
spies would sin, and cause the poeple to reject the land and be
punished, in accordane with the number of days he trip would take,
he enabled them to make the trip in a very short time. We thus ask of
God, at the beginning of Yom Kippur, to show us, in our annual
judgment, the kind of mercy that he should us after the sin of the
spies.
I would like to sugeest a further reason for
alluding, on Yom Kippur eveningto the sin generated by the spie .
Rabbi hershel Reichman, a Rosh Yeshiva in Yeshiva University's RIETS,
spoke in the Yeshiva, this past Shavuos, about the reason for
reading Megillas Rus on Shavuos. Although many other reasons
have been given, Rabbi Reichman felt that one of them is to
emphasize the connection between the Torah and Eretz Yisroel. Rus,
after becoming a convert to Judaism, went to Eretz Yisroel with her
mother-in-law Naomi. This demonstrates, said Rabbi Reichman,
that to lead a true Jewish life, and observe the Torah properly, one
must live in eretz Yisroel. This idea is actually stated by the
Ramban in his commentary to parshas Vaeschanan , where he cites and
elaborates on the Sifrei brought thereby rashi, Rrashi, which
says that the main place to do themitzvos in in Eretz Yisroel, and we
do mitzvos, suchas tefillin and tzitzis, outside the land so that
they will not be new to ua when we come back to the land. Rabbi
Eliyahu Meir Bloch, among others, explained that as far as God's
decree to observe these mitzvos, there is no difference between
Eretz Yiroel andother lands.. The difference, rather, is in the
effect that themitzvos have on us, whichis far greater in Eretz
Yirsroel than it is outside of it, since Eretz Yisroel is the place
where the divine presence ( shechinah)dwells. In order for us to be a
kingdom of priests and a holy nation, fulfilling the charge which we
received as a prelude to the giving of the Torah, then, e must live
in Eretz Yisroel, wherethe shchinah dwells.
Yom
Kippur is the day that we received the second pair of tablets
containing the Decalogue, after receiving atonment for the sin of
thegolden calf, which led Moshe to break the first set. Thus, Yom
Kippur is a second giving of the Torah, and we need, again,on that
day, to be aware of the intrinsic connection between
Torah and Eretz Yisroel. Perhaps, then, it is for that
reason that we allude to the aftermath of the sin of the spies
on Yom Kippur, in order to remind us of the importance of eretz
Yisroel in our mission as God's peeople on this earth.