Abundant Mercy: Enough Suffering, Pure Compassion

1“And may Kel Shakkai grant you mercy before the man.”¹ Why did Yaakov have to double his request, naming both Kel and Shakkai, when both Names denote the attribute of mercy? And he added still more: “grant you mercy.” All this shows that this was a special prayer, one for which ordinary mercy was not enough; only great and abundant mercy would do. Rashi brings a teaching of Chazal: “He Who said to the world ‘Enough!’ may He say to my troubles ‘Enough!’ For I have had no rest since my youth: the trouble of Lavan, the trouble of Esav, the trouble of Rachel, the trouble of Dinah, the trouble of Yosef, the trouble of Shimon, the trouble of Binyamin.”² But what does the Holy One, blessed be He, saying “Enough” to His world have to do with Yaakov's troubles?

2Let us first raise a further point, about the prayer Al HaNissim, the thanksgiving added on Chanukah. There we say, “And You, in Your abundant mercy, stood up for them in their time of distress.” Notice the words “in Your mercy.” We must also ask why, for the miracle of Chanukah, the composers of the prayer added that His mercy was “abundant.”

3My holy father and teacher, zt"l, taught on the verse “And it came to pass at the end of two years of days”:³ when we recognize and believe that every bad thing has a root of good, the power of this faith alone can sweeten all the harsh judgments and turn them to the good. This is the meaning of Vayehi mikeitz. Mikeitz means “the end”: at the end of the exile, before the days of Moshiach, there will be, Heaven forbid, a time of vayehi, a word that expresses distress.⁴ The remedy for this is in the words that follow, which say of Pharaoh in his dream, “and behold, he was standing by the river.” The word for river, ye'or, is related to or, “light,” and alludes to faith. The judgments are sweetened when we know and believe that every bad thing has good at its root, and through this faith we have the power to sweeten everything and turn it to the good. Those are his holy words.

4aTo understand all this, we may explain as follows. As is well known, Chazal said that at first Hashem thought to create the world with the attribute of judgment; when He saw that the world could not endure, He joined the attribute of mercy to it.⁵ This means that every bad thing, Heaven forbid, which belongs to the attribute of judgment, has good at its root. That is how He joined mercy to judgment: mercy is joined to judgment and mixed into it.

4bChazal explained the Name Shakkai this way: “I am the One Who said to the world ‘Enough!’ When the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world, it kept on expanding … until He rebuked it and made it stand still.”⁶ The idea is this. The world, with its matter, kept on expanding. Had it gone on expanding without Hashem setting it a limit, there would have come into being an endless physicality, which we would have had to rectify, and who could withstand that? So Hashem rebuked His world and made it stand still. That is, He held back matter and physicality so that good would be mixed into them as well, making it possible to sift the good out of the bad and to rectify the world. We may understand the sweetening of the harsh judgments along the same lines. This is the meaning of Chazal's words that Yaakov Avinu prayed, “He Who said to the world ‘Enough!’ may He say to my troubles ‘Enough!’”: he asked that good and mercy be mixed into his troubles as well.

5Mercy mixed into hardship is one of the ways in which Hashem conducts the world with mercy. But there is another way as well. Suppose, Heaven forbid, that Israel has already suffered so many troubles that its measure of suffering is full, and it can no longer bear the yoke of the exiles and the troubles. Then the Holy One, blessed be He, Who is good, graciously grants and bestows mercy alone, without any admixture of judgment. This is not like the first way, in which the mercy is mixed into the bad and hidden within it. Here there is only an abundance of mercy, with no judgments at all.

6This lets us understand what Yaakov Avinu meant by “And may Kel Shakkai”: “He Who said to the world ‘Enough!’ may He say to my troubles ‘Enough!’ For I have had no rest since my youth …” For each trouble that had come upon him until now, he had prayed “Kel Shakkai,” that He Who said to the world “Enough” should say to his troubles “Enough.” He was asking, as we saw with the world's creation, that mercy be mixed even into the judgments. But now the trouble of Binyamin had come upon him, and his measure was so full that he composed a different prayer. In it he prayed also for the generations to come, until the end of all generations, for the time when the troubles grow stronger, Heaven forbid. He said, “And may Kel Shakkai grant you mercy.” Yaakov was saying: You are indeed Kel Shakkai, and, as we have seen, within the bad there is a root of good. But from now on, since my measure is already full from so many troubles and I have no strength to bear any more, I ask of You more than this: “grant you mercy.” Conduct Yourself with us in the second way, the way of mercy alone, without judgments.

7This also explains the wording of the prayer we examined, “in Your abundant mercy.” In the days of the Greeks, at the time of the Chanukah miracle, many Jews were Hellenists, who strayed after the Greeks and their wisdom. For salvation to come to Bnei Yisrael then, the attribute of judgment had to be kept from ruling over them. The accuser, too, had to be kept from arguing against them as he had argued at the Red Sea: “How are these different from those?”⁷ Hashem's conduct through the attribute of Shakkai, the first way, was not enough for that. To be worthy of salvation they needed the second way: the conduct of mercy alone, without any admixture of judgment. This is the meaning of “in Your abundant mercy You stood up for them”: He stood up for them with this abundant mercy, with no judgment mixed in at all, and through it they were privileged to be saved.

8We can now also understand why only with the mitzvah of the Chanukah lights do we find mehadrin min hamehadrin, doing the mitzvah in the most beautiful way of all.⁸ The other mitzvos have nothing like it. With them we find only hiddur mitzvah, the beautifying of a mitzvah, which is a single level of beauty, one mehadrin. In light of what we have explained, we may say this. Because Israel was privileged to be saved by the source of mercy itself, with mercy alone, we must correspondingly thank the Holy One, blessed be He, for the miracle with the utmost beauty, in the manner of mehadrin min hamehadrin.

9Today we need an abundance of mercy of this second kind, not mercy mixed into the bad, Heaven forbid. We have suffered enough in this last generation, and we have no strength left. So may Hashem have mercy on us. As the Midrash says, “‘Grant you mercy before the man’: this is the Holy One, blessed be He.”⁹ That is, Yaakov Avinu prayed for the coming generations, up to the generations before the coming of Moshiach, that we would receive from Hashem the attribute of mercy that is nothing but mercy. And may we be privileged to be redeemed very soon indeed. Amen, may it be His will.