The Torah tells us that when God decided to inform Noach about the coming flood, He told him, "The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the world is filled with robbery through them, and behold, I am about to destroy them from the earth" (Bereishis, 6 : 13). Rashi, citing the midrash, says that their sentence was sealed due to robbery. Even though, as Rashi previously cited from the midrash, the people of that generation had violated the three cardinal sins of murder, idolatry and sexual immorality, it was the sin of robbery that brought about their destruction. Why should the sin of robbery have outweighed these three major violations? Rabbi Yaakov Kaminetsky, in his commentary Emes L'Yakov, cites another midrash as saying that robbery - chamas - in itself constitutes murder, idolatry and theft. Rabbi Kaminetsky explains that when the Torah says that the earth was filled with robbery, it is telling us that robbery had become legalized. Mankind had thus set up a standard of morality that contradicted the code of laws referred to by the rabbis as the Noachide code, which includes a prohibition of idolatry. Setting up such a system, says Rabbi Kaminetsky, constitutes idolatry, because it indicates that man is no longer serving God, but some other entity. While this idea is certainly true, it does not explain the equation of robbery with murder and sexual immorality made by the midrash. I believe that the remarks of the Abarbanel that we cited above can provide us with such an explanation.
The Abarbanel, as we have seen, cites a verse in Yirmiyahu to the effect that God's moral covenant generates the physical boundaries of the earth. Thus, God's laws constitute a set of moral boundaries. If man does not observe these moral boundaries, then God will not maintain the physical boundaries. The most fundamental boundary in human society is one's property rights. In a society where robbery is widespread and these boundaries are not observed, other boundaries are apt to fall as well. The three cardinal sins that were violated by the generation of the flood were also a question of boundaries. Idolatry ignores the boundary between man and God. Rav Kook writes that the notion of a man or a woman being a deity actually stems from man's desire to come close to God. However, no matter how close a person gets to God, there is a boundary beyond which he cannot go. Identifying man as God goes beyond that boundary. Murder and sexual immorality, too, can be viewed as breaking the boundaries that exist between people, as defined by God's laws. Robbery, thus, constituted an invasion of boundaries, and it was that failure to maintain the proper moral boundaries in life that led to the cataclysmic destruction of the flood, in which the physical boundaries of the world were obliterated.
The need for boundaries in life was brought out during the revelation of the Torah at Mt. Sinai, as well. Moshe was to ascend to the top of the mountain and receive the tablets from God. Aharon and his sons and the seventy elders also went onto the mountain, as recorded in parshas Mishpatim (Shemos, 24 : 9, but did not enter the holy cloud as Moshe did. The people, for their part, were not allowed onto the mountain at all. Thus, boundaries were set at Mt. Sinai, and they were carried over into the mishkan and the mikdash (temple) as well. These boundaries, it would seem, serve to remind us of the boundaries we must have in our lives, within the miniature mikdash that each of us is bidden to be, as presented in the Torah we received while standing at the foot of Mt. Sinai.