From:                              Netvort@aol.com

Sent:                               Friday, February 22, 2008 2:50 AM

To:                                   JoshHoff@aol.com

Subject:                          Netvort : parshas Ki Sisa, 5768

 



                                                     


                                           The Roar of the Crowd

                    By Rabbi Joshua (discerningly known as The Hoffer) Hoffman


  After Moshe is told by God about the nation's failing through the sin of the eigel, he  begins to descend the mountain with the tablets of testimony. He encounters Yehoshua, who as the Torah tells us, heard the "voice of the people in its shouting," and tells Moshe , "The sound of battle is in the camp" (Shemos 32:17). Moshe, however, tells him that it is not the sound of strength or weakness that he hears, but the sound of shouting (32:18). We need to understand why Yehoshua chose to report on this sound to Moshe. After all, Moshe, too, should have been able to hear it, so why mention it to him? We also need to understand Moshe's negation of Yehoshua's description of what he heard, and his own explanation of the noise that was emitted by the people. I would like to answer these questions by expanding upon some explanations and ideas presented by Rav Moshe Shternbuch in his work Ta'am VaDa'as.

  The Midrash Tanchumah tells us that when Yehoshua told Moshe that he heard the voice of battle, Moshe responded disappointedly, remarking that a person who will, in the future, exercise authority over six hundred thousand people did not know how to discern between different kinds of noises made by the people. This midrash would seem to indicate that Moshe already knew that he would not be the one to lead the people in battle for the Holy Land. In fact, Rashi to parshas Shemos tells us that already at that time God told him that he would not lead the nation in those battles. Moshe therefore must have assumed that Yehoshua, as his student, would become the leader of the people, and would need to lead them to war, just as he had when Amalek attacked , and it was therefore important for him to know if a battle was approaching. What, then, was the mistake that Yehoshua made when he identified  the sound as one of battle?

  Rav Shternbuch writes that Moshe, because of his elevated level of holiness, was not able to hear the impure noise of the eigel worshipers. He cites the Zohar here, which points out that, as Chazal tell us, Moshe's face was like the sun and Yehoshua's face was like the moon, and that is why Moshe did not hear the sound and Yehoshua did. Rav Dovid Feinstein has explained this contrast between Moshe and Yehoshua as being a function of the generations they had to lead. Yehoshua had to lead the next generation into the Holy Land and then lead them into battle, and thus needed to understand the different voices of the people. Moshe, however, was the Torah teacher for the nation, and, in that capacity, did not need to understand the different kinds of collective sounds the nation might emit. As Rav Moshe Tzvi Neriah writes in his Ner LaMaor, this was a function of what Moshe meant when, in asking God to appoint a leader to succeed him, he referred to Him as "God of the spirits of all flesh" (Bamidbar 27:16). Moshe was asking, according to the midrash, that God, who understands the nature of all people, should appoint a leader who can deal with the personalities of each person. On a collective level, as well, the new leader would need to understand the collective moods of the people at each junction of their journey.

  When Moshe first encountered Yehoshua, then, he did not hear the sound that Yehoshua did. Only once Yehoshua called his attention to the sound did he hear it. He then proceeded to tell Yehoshua that in his capacity as future leader he would need to discern the sounds emitted by the nation, and therefore he taught him the nature of the sound he was now hearing from them. Because God had already told Moshe that the people were worshiping the eigel, he knew that the sound he heard was not one of war. Therefore, he told Yehoshua that it was not the sound of strength, denoting victory in war, or of weakness, denoting  defeat in war. Rather, said Moshe, it was just sound, as the Torah initially describes the noise emitted by the people. What did the Torah, and Moshe, mean by this description?


  Rav Sternbuch cites the Targum Yonasan ben Uziel, which translates the phrase 'kol ha-am be-reioh,' which we translated above as 'the voice of the people in its shouting,' as 'the voice of the people wailing in joy.' This translation seems to be self-contradictory. If the people were in joy, how could they be wailing? Rav Shternbuch explains that although the people initially thought that they were experiencing joy, still, since they were acting against the laws of the Torah, it was not real joy, and they ultimately ended up with a sense of loss and of wasted effort. Moshe, who knew what the people were doing, knew that the sound he was hearing was not one of ultimate joy, and, so described it, as the Torah itself did, as nothing but noise, or an empty, meaningless sound. As we have mentioned in the past (see this year's Netvort to parshas Yisro), true joy comes when a person is able to actuate his inner nature. For a Jew, this means that joy comes when he follows the laws of the Torah, which are the essence of the Jewish soul. Acting against the laws of the Torah leads to a sense of nothingness, which was reflected in the sound the people emitted when they worshipped the eigel.



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

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