Breakfast in Bed for Six- Hundred Thousand
By Rabbi Joshua (repastingly known as The Hoffer)Hoffman


Prominent among the nations with whom the Israelites are enjoined from intermarrying are those of Ammon and Moav. The Torah, in this week's parsha tells us that an Ammonite or Moabite cannot enter the congregation, because they did not greet the Israelites with bread and water on the road when they were leaving Egypt, and because they hired Bilaam to curse the Israelites (Devarim, 23:4-5). We have discussed, in the past ( see Nervort to parshas Ki Seitzei, 5758) why the crime of not greeting the nation with bread and water is mentioned before that of hiring Bilaam to curse them. If Ammon and Moav were barred from marrying into the Jewish nation for failing to greet them with bread and water, they should certainly be barred for hiring Bilaam to curse them! Actually, according to the Ramban, the two crimes were not both committed by both Ammon and Moav. Rather, Ammon did not greet the nation with bread and water, while Moav hired Bilaam to curse them. Still, as Rav Yaakov Kaminetsky points out in his discussion of this Ramban in his work Emes L' Ya'kov, we can still ask why the seemingly lesser crime is mentioned first.


Rav Kaminetsky offers two answers to his question ( which was originally asked by the Magid of Dubna, as we discussed in Netvort in 5758). First, Rav Kaminetsky says that the Torah here is using a literary style that we find in the Talmud very often, known as ' lo zo , af zo,'or,' not only this, but also this,' in which the bigger 'chidush,' or new idea, is mentioned first, and the lesser chidush is mentioned second. This device, says Rav Kaminetsky, is sometimes used in the Torah itself, as well. His second answer is that, according to the Targum Yonasan ben Uziel to this verse, the major message being conveyed is that only the males of Ammon and Moav are barred from marrying into the Jewsih nation, but not the females, because, as the Talmud tells us, it is not the usual way for women to greet strangers on the road and give them bread and water. Taken this way, we can understand that the verse first tells us that the females of ammon and Moav are not barred from marrying Jews because it is not the usual practice of women to bring bread and water to wandering nations in the wilderness, and, secondly, that they are also not barred due to crime of hiring Bilaam to curse the Jews, presumably because women usually don't do such hiring.


Why, however, are the males punished so severely for not greeting the nation with food and water? The Ramban explains that Ammon and Moav both came from Lot, who was saved from the destruction of Sodom by Avraham. As such, they should have shown gratitude to his descendants, rather than neglecting their needs, and even trying to destroy them. Rav Baruch Epstein, in his work Tosefes Beracha, offers a different, very intriguing answer. He says that the Hebrew word for 'greet' used in our verse is 'kidmu,' which means to do something early in the morning. Accordingly, says Rav Epstein, what the two nations failed to do ( assuming, unlike the Ramban, that both nations failed to bring the people bread and water), was to provide the wandering nation with breakfast! The Talmud Bava Metziah, 107) tells us that breakfast, referred to there as 'pas shacharis,' or morning bread, has thirteen wonderful qualities, many in regard to maintaining one's physical health by preventing certain diseases, and others in regard to maintaining one's mental and even moral equilibrium. Ammon and Moav, by neglecting to provide the nation with this all important moral, was depriving them of these restorative qualities, and leaving them open to many kinds of afflictions, and, for this reason, were punished so severely for this crime.

One may, of course, ask why these two nations should be expected to know all of the special qualities of a good breakfast that the Talmud enumerates. Perhaps, in defense of Rabbi Epstein's explaantion, we can say that it is common knowledge that a good breakfast is an essential element in starting the day, providing a person with the enegy he needs to begin his schedule. I would like to suggest a somewhat different defense, based on a remarkable story recorded in the book O! Jerusalem, about the battle for Jerusalemduring the War of Independence fought in Israel in 1948. Supplies at that time were very scarce, and many people did not have enough food to eat three meals a day. The workers at Angel Bakery, however, werte directed to go through the motions of eating their regular meals, even though they didn't have food and drink, so that they would maintain the framework of a regular schedule, and be able to carry on with their work. In a similar way, we can suggest that when the Jewish nation was wandering in the desert, they were at risk of total dissolution. Beginning each day with breakfast would put them into the framework of maintaining a semblance of routine so that they could carry on with their mission. Ammon and Moav, by failing to provide them with this crucial factor in national survival, demonstrated that they did not really care if the nation would continue to exist. In this sense, we can perhaps say that this crime was similar to the crime of hiring Bilaam to curse the people, because the net effect would be the same. As mentioned in Netvort, 5768, one of the answers to the question as to the order in which the two cremes are mentioned, as given by Rabbi Yisroel Grumer of Cleveland, Ohio, is that bystanders to an atrocity, who watch and do nothing, can sometimes be considered as evil as the perpetrators themselves.

Partial archives are qavailable at http://www.yucs.org/heights/torah/bysubject/

In additon, archives from 5764-5768 are now availabe at yeshivasbrisk.freeservers.com/netvort.html My thanks to Ben Zion Lazovsky, son of Rabbi Louis Lazovsky, both of Chicago, for arranging this archive.



Please address all correspondence to the author (Rabbi Hoffman) with the following address - JoshHoff @ AOL.com.

To subscribe to Netvort, send a message with subject line subscribe, to Netvort@aol.com. To unsubscribe, send message