Vaad Before Pesach – the Art of Listening in Emuna

Vaad Before Pesach – the Art of Listening in Emuna

We will examine the idea of Emunah that became revealed in yetziyas mitzrayim.

There is an element in Emunah which we have inherited from the Avos hakedoshim. This is called maaminim bnei maaminim. We have this because we are part of the Jewish nation, independent of our personal level and our middos. If Emunah were dependent on our personal madreigah, then Klal Yisroel would have ceased many years ago, since after all, with yeridas hadoros, our involvement with the world has increased, and our madreigah has lessened.

We have all inherited this emunah which was revealed in yetziyas mitzrayim. The emunah in mitzrayim was specifically when Klal Yisroel were in their most dire straits. In this newfound emunah, Klal Yisroel believed that they would be saved from mitzrayim. This is the inherited part of Emunah which is an inherent part of klal yisroel. We will not be discussing this.

Emunah which depends on middos

We are going to focus on the other part of emunah which depends on middos. This aspect of emunah is not just a factual emunah to believe in Hashem. Rather, it is dependent on middos. We see this very clearly from Paroah. One day, he believed that Hashem was controlling the world, and then the next day, his middos and kochos hanefesh returned, and they caused him to change his mind not to send the Jews out. 

In Mitzrayim Hashem wanted klal yisroel to be in a state of Emunah constantly. This Emunah was a learning process and depended entirely on middos. 

What is the basic middah upon which Emunah depends?

Medrash

The Medrash Shemos Rabbah 8,2 says that four people deified themselves-Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Yehoyosh, and Chirom. What was their logic in making themselves into gods?

Paroah said ‘li ani asisini’, meaning that things work out according to my assumptions. These four people, who were all very powerful in their own right, all worked on this basis. However they wanted things to work out, they lived with as fact. They thought that they could guide the world. Hashem wanted to break such an approach.

The medrash continues to say that these are the baalei gaavah who make themselves into gods.  Such people do not have the capacity to listen to Hashem, since they think that everything must go according to their assumptions and that Hashem has no right to intervene.

Now we can start to discuss Emunah that depends on middos. A person needs to work on themselves to be prepared to hear things that the ear doesn’t want to hear. Paroah didn’t want to listen to Hashem’s demands to send klal Yisroel out of Mitzrayim. Paroah was happy with his own world and didn’t want to hear from Hashem telling him not to go according to his own assumptions.

Other middos are not constant. For example, sometimes we need to employ our middah of chessed, and at other times, our middah of middas hadin. We need to be with the middah of emes, but sometimes halachah requires us not to tell the truth. The middah of Emunah is different from all other middos. It needs to be constant.

Emunah needs to be constant. The problem is that Emunah is a middah and middos cannot function constantly. If so, how can Emunah be built upon a middah?

Iggeres haramban-humility is a constant middah

The Ramban in his iggeres says that anavah is thinking that you are in front of Hashem, His Shechina is upon you, and that you should fear Him like a servant in front of his master the whole time. Being a servant in front of his master means that the eved is subservient to his master and that the servant is not in charge.

We need to accept that we are Hashem’s servants. We do not naturally like to give the stage over to Hashem. The way to develop this is to start with being an anav in bein odom lechaveiro. When we speak with a simple person, we need to listen to them very seriously.

On the other hand, to listen to a person with the feeling that everything he says needs to be in line with my high level of truth, my yesodos, and my ‘assumptions’ is the way of a full-blown baal gaavah who does not allow anyone else to say anything that does not fit with him. He is a person who makes himself into a god.

Being humble and feeling secure

I am not telling anyone to become a hefker mensch. A person should be strong with his mehalech in life and not keep changing it. However, a person can be an anav and feel very secure with himself. A person should feel secure whilst at the same time learn to step back and let others take the stage. Once we learn this, then we can give the stage to Hashem.

People enter into shidduchim thinking that they know exactly what will be and what they will need. People look at life in their own way, and everything needs to fit into this.

I myself had a kesher with Rav Wolbe because I had no money. People think that they need to find a shver who is a millionaire. They think that they need to take care of their financial situation. They want to eliminate the option of Hashem communicating with them through money. 

We want to learn Emunah from the Ramchal and the Nefesh Hachaim, but in our lives, we don’t listen to Hashem speaking to us. People try to explain current events using the Ramchal and others. Do they consider, though, that Hashem might be doing things for an entirely different reason? Emunah is not to fit everything into what we know. The listening aspect of Emunah is to listen to Hashem without fitting everything into our preconceived ideas and assumptions.

Such an approach might be more uncomfortable. It means that certain things will bring with them sfeikos.

A good listener has a mehalech

To be a good listener, I am not saying you should know nothing. On the contrary, a good listener knows the sugyah, and because he knows the sugyah, he is sensitive to what he is listening to. So, he has a mehalech, but having the mehalech doesn’t mean that everything needs to fit with the mehalech. A person with a good mehalech, who listens, will often realise that his mehalech is not fully complete.

The Alter from Kelm brings the gemorah that when Moshe Rabbeinu came and made the first mofes with the mateh, Paroah said to him that he is bringing keshofim into Mitzrayim, a place already full of keshafim. Moshe replied that in a place where they know how to distinguish good merchandise from bad merchandise, you need to bring your good merchandise. However, Moshe told Paroah that because he already had an ear for keshofim, he would not be able to hear anything new. Moshe’s mateh was different from their keshofim. For Paroah to accept the mateh of Moshe would have required him to reject his whole mehalech, and Moshe knew that he would not be prepared to do so.

For us, we do not need to change our whole mehalech, but we still need to overcome our negiah which stops us from listening to things that we are not used to hearing. If you do not overcome this, you are ‘osim atzmom elohah‘, like Paroah.

Avodah-being open to hear something new

In the hakdamah to the mesillas yesharim, the Ramchal says that the whole point of avodah is to make the brain think about things that one considers unnecessary. This is why the Ramchal says that he is not coming to say chiddushim. Chiddushim won’t have an impact. The main thing that makes the impact is to think about these seemingly mundane matters. 

General Avodah and Emunah are connected. For both, we need to be open to hearing something new. Emunah doesn’t mean feeling small; it means having a certain self-doubt. Self-doubt doesn’t mean that we don’t know anything. Sometimes I tell very confident people that they have no self-doubt. They reply that no, there are some things that they don’t know anything about. This is an incorrect response. Of course, nobody knows everything. However, to have self-doubt means to have a strong self-to have a deah, but to have a doubt. Without first having an opinion on the matter, it’s impossible to have self-doubt.

On some matters, it would be incorrect to have self-doubt, such as about the creation of the world, because the Torah says so. Having no self-doubt is a common problem nowadays. Many people know a lot and can bring quotes for everything, and everything fits their mehalech. However, they lack self-doubt. A person needs to know that Hashem reserves the right to say something that does not fit with a person’s deah. 

A Rabbi was speaking at an event. I had heard a lot of very good feedback about him. I listened very carefully to every word he said.  He gave a very long speech for about 20 minutes, instead of the 5 minutes that are the norm for such an event. He then spoke to a few people. Afterwards, I was asked to speak. I went up to speak, and he saw me going up and said, ‘I beg your pardon, but people are waiting for me, so I really need to go, which means that this Rabbi was tremendously ordered with his time. He spoke for 20 minutes, then another 2 minutes and 15 seconds with people, and then, exactly then, he needed to go. I don’t believe this!

When he had the stage, everything was going well. When somebody else took the stage, it wasn’t possible for him that somebody else should take the stage and make him listen. This person was a mevuzah in my eyes for not being able to give the stage over to someone else.

Paroah and the three others all needed to be penetrated to bring into them that which they didn’t want to hear. Paroah was the most powerful person in the world, and everything went according to his will, except for Moshe Rabbeinu with the stick. We do not have the whole world going our way. Nevertheless, we have to deal with our personal world, which we naturally feel should go entirely according to our own will. What we see in the faults of Paraoh applies to ourselves. The medrash concludes by saying that all baalei gaavah need to be broken into with Emunah.

We can learn bein odom lechaveiro how to give the stage to others. Afterwards, we will find that we will be able to listen to Hashem even when He speaks about matters we do not want to hear. This is the Emunah which is built on middos.

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Written by Rabbi Rapport