100 Years Later, This Torah Lesson Feels Written for Today - Rabbi Shlomo Horwitz

[music] >> You would not believe what I learned about Parshas Ki Seitzei. This week marks a very special milestone. It's the 100th Yahrzeit of one of the great Torah giants of the last century, Rabbi Meir Simcha HaKohen of Dvinsk, the Meshech Chochmah, who passed away on the fourth day of Elul 1926. So, I thought, what would be more appropriate than to share with you a beautiful and relevant Meshech Chochmah on this week's parsha? And I think when you hear it, you will get why 100 years later his voice speaks to us so powerfully. The Torah tells us about the mitzvah of Hashavas Aveidah, returning a lost object. Lo sisa es shor achicha o es seyonim achim. If you see the ox or sheep of your brother wandering away, you cannot just ignore it. You have to return it. But listen to this. It says your brother's ox, but in Mishpatim it says ki sisa chamor sonecha, you see the donkey of your enemy. So, which is it? Is it your enemy or is it your brother? The Gemara in Pesachim asks even a more basic question. We're talking about Jews with Jews. How are you allowed to hate another Jew in the first place? Doesn't the Torah say you cannot hate your brother, lo sisa achicha bilvavecha? So, the Gemara in Pesachim answers that it's talking about a case where you personally witnessed this other Jew doing an aveirah, a sin. So, the first case in Mishpatim is talking about that, and the second case in Ki Seitzei is talking about where you didn't. That's what it sounds like. But the Meshech Chochmah says something unbelievable. Mishpatim is before the chet ha'egel, which is described in parshas Ki Sisa. At that point, Klal Yisrael was on such an unbelievable spiritual level. Hashem had just called them a mamleches kohanim vegoy kadosh, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. On that level, if you saw somebody doing an aveira, you could say this person has really fallen. He's doing something that the rest of us are not capable of doing. That's so sinas chinam, but then comes the chet ha'egel. And then all the other failures in the midbar. Says the Meshech Chochmah, everything changes at that point because now when I look at somebody else and see what he's doing wrong, before I criticize him, I have to look at myself. Yefash peish b'ma'asav, take a good look at your own actions because we have all fallen from that high spiritual plane of before the chet ha'egel. And I'm going to discover if I look closely at myself, I got my own problems. Maybe he's got one problem, I have a different one. His weakness may be obvious to me because it's not my weakness, but if I look at my own life, how can I look down at somebody else? How can I hate him? How can I define him by his faults? The Meshech Chochmah says, it's impossible to do that. So, therefore, there's no concept of sinas chinam any longer after the chet ha'egel. And this is why in parshas Ki Seitzei, it says achicha because that's all that we have. We only have brothers, we don't have another Jew that we are capable of hating. The lesson is, it's so easy to see somebody else's faults and to criticize and to judge. The Meshech Chochmah is telling us, take a good look at yourself first. If he has faults, don't I? They might be be different, but we're not perfect. And our job is not to look for reasons to push people away, it's to look for ways to bring people closer. And this is really how Rabbi Meir Shapiro lived his life. He stayed in Dvinsk during war and peace. He could have run for the hills, but no, he stayed in his town tending to the needs of his flock, because he loved every Jew. Achicha, we are brothers. Have a great Shabbos.