Why Your Anger? The Power of Teshuvah

1“Why, Hashem, should Your anger flare against Your people, whom You brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?”¹ But what room is there here for the question “Why should Your anger flare”? Bnei Yisrael had sinned and made a molten calf, and it was only right that Hashem's burning anger, Heaven forbid, should be upon them. What, then, astonished Moshe, and what was he praying for? We must also ask why Moshe mentions “with great power and with a mighty hand” here in particular. [After all, his argument was that Hashem's great Name would, Heaven forbid, be desecrated in the eyes of the nations, and that would be true however He had brought them out of Egypt. Besides, everyone already knew that He had brought them out with a mighty hand, so why mention it? The Alshich and the Kli Yakar touch on this question to some extent.]

2Further on Moshe says, “Why should Egypt speak, saying, ‘With evil intent He brought them out, to kill them …’? Turn back from Your burning anger, and relent from the evil against Your people.”² Notice the word “saying,” lemor. Chazal teach that lemor means “to say to the generations.”³ What does a message to all the generations have to do with this verse?

3aWe may explain it this way. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Moshe, “Now leave Me alone, so that My anger may flare against them and I will consume them, and I will make you into a great nation.”⁴ From this Moshe understood that teshuvah could not help for this sin and that they had become liable to be destroyed at once. Right after this the verse tells that Moshe stood before Hashem and pleaded, “Why should Your anger flare against Your people?” That is: why should Your anger grow so great that You would not accept them even if they repent? They have within them “a portion of God from Above.”⁵ They are the children of Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov, and they come from a good root. They truly want to walk the straight path; it is only “the leaven in the dough,” the yetzer hara, that holds them back, as Chazal said.⁶

3bMoshe, the faithful shepherd, brought a proof for his words: this had always been Hashem's way, from long ago. Even when Israel served idols, He did not unleash His burning anger against them, for He had brought them out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Why, really, did taking them out need great power and a mighty hand? Is anything too hard for Hashem? The answer is that when He brought them out of Egypt, there were accusers on High who said, “These are idol worshippers, and those are idol worshippers,” claiming that Israel was no different from the Egyptians.⁷ But the Holy One, blessed be He, revealed His great power to be gracious and merciful. He redeemed them from the midst of Egypt on account of what they would do later: afterward, when they came to Mount Sinai, they would set right their sins. There they repented and prepared themselves to receive the Torah, as Chazal teach in the Mechilta: “Why does the Torah say, ‘They journeyed from Refidim and came to the Wilderness of Sinai’? It compares their journey from Refidim to their arrival at the Wilderness of Sinai. Just as their arrival at the Wilderness of Sinai was in teshuvah, so too their journey from Refidim was in teshuvah.”⁸

3cAnd at once, on the very next day, the Holy One, blessed be He, said to them, “And you shall be to Me a kingdom of kohanim and a holy nation.”⁹ So within a short time Bnei Yisrael rose out of the lowest state, out of the forty-nine gates of impurity, the depth they had sunk to in Egypt. At first they were called idol worshippers, and they were transformed into a holy people. This is because sin is no more than an evil garment over the soul of a Jew, and it can easily be removed. So Moshe argued that now too, Hashem could accept their teshuvah for the sin of idolatry they had committed. This resolves our question. When Moshe asked “Why should Your anger flare?” he was not asking about the anger over the sin itself. He was asking why Hashem's anger should flare so fiercely that He would not accept Israel's teshuvah.

4The true reason teshuvah can help Israel even for so great and terrible a sin rests on what the holy sefarim explain: why teshuvah helps only Israel and not the nations of the world. A non-Jew who transgresses one of the seven Noahide mitzvos is put to death for it when Israel's hand is strong, that is, when Jewish courts hold power, and teshuvah does not help him for his sin at all.¹⁰ The reason is that Israel, at its root, is wholly good. Its people have a soul from Hashem's own portion, and they come from the root of the holy Avos. It is only that when they sin, a screen forms that separates them from their Father in Heaven. When they come back in teshuvah, they remove that screen. Their soul, the “portion of God from Above” within them, is revealed and shines for them again, and they draw close to their Father in Heaven. It is not so with the nations of the world. Their foundation, essence and core are evil, and sin is part of their very nature. For them there is no returning to good through teshuvah, since there was never any good in them; they come from an evil root.

5In the same way we can interpret the verse “Why should Egypt speak, saying …” Moshe meant: if You do not accept Bnei Yisrael's teshuvah, the generations to come will say that teshuvah does not help at all. This is “lemor: to say to the generations,” the teaching of Chazal we cited: later generations would say that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not accept Israel's teshuvah. That is what Chazal meant when they said, “Israel made the Calf only in order to give ba'alei teshuvah, those who repent, an argument.”¹¹ Rashi explains: “That is, they were mighty and in control of their yetzer hara, and it was not fitting that it should overpower them. Rather, it was the King's decree that it should rule over them, in order to give ba'alei teshuvah an argument. If a sinner says, ‘I will not repent, for He will not accept me,’ they tell him, ‘Go and learn from the episode of the Calf: they denied Hashem, and they were accepted in teshuvah.’”¹² In other words, the sinner should learn from this that even in so low a state, and with so grave a sin, teshuvah still helps.

6May Hashem, blessed be He, grant that we return to Him as we should, serve Him wholeheartedly, and bring the redemption near. Amen, may it be His will.