Plagues That Revealed a Gift: Hashem's Name Made Great

1“When you come into the land of Canaan, which I give you as a possession, and I will put the plague of tzara'as in a house of the land of your possession.”¹ The commentators, the Ibn Ezra and the Kli Yakar, ask why the verse needs the extra words “which I give you.”² Everyone knows that Eretz Yisrael was given by the Holy One, blessed be He; the verse could simply have said, “When you come into the land of Canaan.” We must also ask why the verse adds here that He gives the land “as a possession.” This passage is not about holding the land or dividing it; those subjects come later, in Parshas Behar and Parshas Pinchas. And why does the verse repeat the point, saying a second time that the plague of tzara'as, the affliction that can strike even the walls of a house, comes “in a house of the land of your possession”?

2aWe can explain this through the teaching of Chazal that Rashi cites: “‘And I will put the plague of tzara'as’: this is good news for them, that the plagues will come upon them. For the Emorites hid treasures of gold in the walls of their houses all the forty years that Israel was in the wilderness, and through the plague the owner tears down the house and finds them.”³ At first glance this is difficult. If the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted to bless Israel, why did they have to find the blessing through plagues, of all things? “Is the hand of Hashem too short”⁴ to do it some other way? The answer is that, as is known, the whole purpose of the plagues is to show how great Hashem's providence is.

2bThe Ramban explains this at length:⁵ “‘And the garment, when the plague of tzara'as is in it’: this is not natural at all, and nothing like it happens in the world; the same is true of the plagues of houses. But when Bnei Yisrael are whole with Hashem, the spirit of Hashem rests on them always, keeping their bodies, their garments and their houses looking sound. When one of them falls into sin, an ugliness appears in his flesh, his garment or his house, to show that Hashem has turned away from him. That is why the verse says, ‘And I will put the plague of tzara'as in a house of the land of your possession’: it is a blow from Hashem upon that house. The plague of houses applies only in the Land, which is Hashem's inheritance, as it says, ‘When you come into the land of Canaan, which I give you as a possession.’ This is not because it is a mitzvah tied to the land, but because such a thing comes about only in the chosen Land, in whose midst the glorious Name dwells.”

2cThe Ramban continues: “In Toras Kohanim they also expounded that a house does not become impure until after the conquest and division of the Land, and until each person recognizes his own portion.⁶ The reason is that only then were their minds settled enough to know Hashem, and the Shechinah would rest among them. I think the same is true of the plagues of garments: they apply only in the Land. The Torah did not need to exclude the lands outside it, because such plagues never occur there. For this reason, too, they apply only to white garments and not to dyed ones, for perhaps the dye produced that ugliness in that spot by its nature, and it is not ‘the finger of God.’”⁷ Those are his holy words.

2dWhen Bnei Yisrael came into Eretz Yisrael and conquered it in war, they might have made the mistake, Heaven forbid, of thinking that they were privileged to live there only through the strength of their great war. But then they saw the plagues through which they found silver and gold, and it was plain to every eye that “the hand of Hashem has done this,”⁸ and that it had not come about naturally at all. So, as a matter of course, they all acknowledged that the conquest of the Land, too, was His doing. “Not by might and not by strength”⁹ were they privileged to dwell in their land; it was the Holy One, blessed be He, Who gave the Land as an inheritance to His people Israel. This explains why the words “the land of Canaan, which I give you” appear here, of all places, in connection with plagues. The plagues would reveal that this Land is not an inheritance like those of other peoples, who hold their lands by virtue of their wars; it is purely a gift of Hashem. So too the verse adds “as a possession,” to teach that this gift Hashem gives Bnei Yisrael is theirs as an achuzah, an ancestral holding. In other words, He gives it to us as a gift, in the manner of an inheritance, and not as something we gain through toil and conquest.

3When the plagues revealed the silver and gold to Israel, “all the ends of the earth saw the salvation of our God.”¹⁰ The power of His great Name was revealed on earth, and His Name was magnified among all the nations of the world. That is why the verse repeats “in a house of the land of your possession”: through the plagues all the peoples would see and acknowledge that this land is “the land of your possession.” The plagues, then, magnified His great Name in the eyes of the nations.

4We find the same at the Exodus from Egypt, when His great Name was likewise magnified in the world. That is why the Shabbos before Pesach is called Shabbos HaGadol, “the Great Shabbos”: on that day His great Name began to be magnified in the world. As is well known, on the tenth of Nissan Bnei Yisrael tied the lamb to the bedpost. When the Egyptians asked about it, Bnei Yisrael answered that it was for the Pesach offering, because the Holy One, blessed be He, was about to redeem them at once.¹¹ From that moment the redemption had begun, and Hashem's Name was magnified and sanctified in public.

5The Acharonim, the later authorities, raise a well-known question: why is the miracle named after the Shabbos on which it happened, and not after its date, the tenth of Nissan, so that this day would be called “the Great Day”? We may answer as follows. First we must ask why Bnei Yisrael acted so publicly, telling the Egyptians that they were taking the lamb for an offering. Hashem had not commanded them to make it known. Why, then, did they tell the whole truth, with no fear that the Egyptians, who worshipped the lamb, would kill them? It is well established that one does not rely on a miracle.¹² But on that Shabbos the light of the holiness of Shabbos shone on them, and Chazal taught that even an am ha'aretz, an unlearned person, does not lie on Shabbos.¹³ So they felt compelled from within to tell the truth: the lamb was set aside for an offering. It was through Shabbos, then, that His great Name became known and was magnified. That is why the miracle was fixed on Shabbos in particular and named Shabbos HaGadol: it came about only through the power of Shabbos, through which His great Name was magnified.

6Since His great Name began to be revealed on this Shabbos, that revelation kindled the light of the redemption that brought Bnei Yisrael out of Egypt. For the Tiferes Shlomo asks¹⁴ why Moshe Rabbeinu at first refused to go and redeem Bnei Yisrael. Moshe was known to be compassionate, and he had already seen how hard their exile was; surely he should have had mercy on them and gone to save them. The Tiferes Shlomo explains that redeeming Bnei Yisrael before their time would bring about further exiles. These would inevitably cause the Name of Heaven to be desecrated, as the verse says, “Why should the nations say, ‘Where now is their God?’”¹⁵ So Moshe did not want to redeem them before their time, because of the chillul Hashem, the desecration of Hashem's Name, that would come of it. But Hashem told him that this was not so: a leader of Israel must look not only to the honor of Heaven but must also have mercy on Bnei Yisrael. He also told Moshe that he would be the messenger to redeem Bnei Yisrael before their time. That is the gist of his words. We may add to them: on the contrary, the very redemption of Bnei Yisrael would itself cause the great Name of Hashem to be magnified and sanctified in the world.

7May the Holy One, blessed be He, grant that we see wonders through which His Name will be magnified in the world. Amen, may it be His will.