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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