“Be There”: Torah with Total Self-Sacrifice

1“Hashem said to Moshe, ‘Come up to Me to the mountain and be there.’”¹ Why does the verse add “and be there”? It has already said, “Come up to Me to the mountain,” so it goes without saying that once Moshe has gone up the mountain he will be there.

2A second question concerns the verse “And they said, ‘All that Hashem has spoken we will do and we will hear.’”² Tosafos, the classic commentators on the Gemara, ask: Bnei Yisrael had already said “we will do and we will hear” of their own free will, so why did they need to be forced?³ Chazal relate in that Gemara that the Holy One, blessed be He, held the mountain over them like an upturned barrel and told them, “If you accept the Torah, good; and if not, there will be your burial.” Tosafos answer that it was done in case they went back on their word when they saw the great fire. But this is difficult. On the contrary: once they saw the great fire and recognized how great the power of the Torah is, why would they go back on their word?

3The Gemara there says: “When Israel put ‘we will do’ before ‘we will hear,’ a heavenly voice went forth and said to them, ‘Who revealed to My children this secret, which the ministering angels use?’ As it is written, ‘Bless Hashem, His angels, mighty in strength, who do His word, to hear the voice of His word’: first ‘who do,’ and then ‘to hear.’”⁴ Notice the words “mighty in strength.” What does being “mighty in strength” have to do with accepting the Torah? It would have been more fitting to say “righteous ones” or “holy ones,” or something similar.

4aPerhaps we can explain it this way. A great foundation of acquiring the Torah is to learn it with mesirus nefesh, the readiness to give one's life. This means breaking the bad middos, the character traits of laziness and desire that keep a person from learning, and taking on the yoke of Torah eagerly and with love for it. By breaking these bad middos a person can acquire the Torah. This is what Chazal taught: one of the forty-eight things through which the Torah is acquired is “accepting suffering.”⁵ But this seems hard to understand. Do we not find that the Torah itself is a cure for every illness? As the verse says, “and a healing to all his flesh,” and the Gemara discusses this at length.⁶ Why, then, should acquiring it involve suffering? The answer is that the suffering meant here is the suffering of uprooting bad middos. Breaking them goes against a person's nature, so the toil it takes is suffering for him.

4bThe same idea lies behind a story in the Gemara.⁷ R' Yochanan went down to bathe in the Jordan and saw Reish Lakish leap across the river in a single bound. R' Yochanan said to him, “Your strength for Torah!” Rashi explains: how fine your strength would be for bearing the yoke of Torah. R' Yochanan said this because he saw in Reish Lakish tremendous powers of soul, great determination and an extremely strong will. Reish Lakish was then the chief of a band of robbers, a man who would put himself in danger and risk his life for that work. So R' Yochanan told him that he could give himself over in the same way for words of Torah. That is the meaning of R' Yochanan's words, that Reish Lakish's strength was fine for Torah: the power of mesirus nefesh, which is the power needed to acquire the Torah.

5This lets us explain why the mountain was held over them like a barrel. Acquiring the Torah needs the power of mesirus nefesh. At the giving of the Torah, Bnei Yisrael saw the great fire. It hinted at mesirus nefesh, at being ready to be burned in fire for the sake of the holy Torah, and by seeing it they received the power to give themselves over for the Torah. But this lasted only for that moment. It was not enough to pass the power of mesirus nefesh on to later generations, who had not seen the great fire. The Holy One, blessed be He, wanted the generations to come to inherit this power, to show that the Torah can be received only through mesirus nefesh. So He held the mountain over them like a barrel and told them, “If you accept the Torah, good; and if not, there will be your burial.” In this way, by holding the mountain over them, He planted the power of mesirus nefesh, in actual deed, for all generations.

6This also explains the words “Come up to Me to the mountain and be there.” Hashem was telling Moshe that it is not enough to be on Mount Sinai and occupied with Torah. One must “be there” with one's whole body, mind and soul, with mesirus nefesh. My holy ancestor the Yid HaKadosh, zt"l, is quoted as saying that a person who cannot go and immerse in a mikveh should learn Gemara with Tosafos, and he will be purified by immersing in the sea of the Talmud. It has also been said about this: just as an immersion in a mikveh does not count if even one hair stays outside the water, so a person learning Torah must be completely immersed in the Gemara, without stray thoughts. In this way he is privileged to acquire the Torah and the crown of Torah.

7a[We know that the goal of avodas Hashem, the service of Hashem, is this: while a person is occupied with Torah and mitzvos, all his thoughts should be inside the Torah he is learning and the mitzvah he is doing.⁸ With this the holy Rebbe R' Yechezkel of Kuzmir, zt"l, explained the words “Come up to Me to the mountain and be there.” It is not enough to go up to learn Torah; a person must also reach “and be there,” so that while he learns, all his wishes and thoughts rest in the Torah. This is what the early Midrash Tanna Devei Eliyahu means: as soon as Bnei Yisrael said “we will do and we will hear,” the Holy One, blessed be He, said, “Let them take for Me an offering,” the command to build the Mishkan.⁹ The holy sefarim, the Midrash Yonasan, the Chida's Kisei David and the Ateres Yeshuah, ask what the one has to do with the other.¹⁰]

7b[The answer is that “we will do and we will hear” hints at this. First, before learning Torah, a person must be at the level of “we will do”: he must work on himself until all his intentions and thoughts are bound up with his learning. After that he can reach the level of “we will hear,” listening and analyzing in depth as he learns. When Bnei Yisrael reached such a level, the Holy One, blessed be He, at once said, “Let them take for Me an offering … and I will dwell among them.”¹¹ They were now ready for the Shechinah to rest among them, because no screen separated them from their Father in Heaven: they were giving everything over to avodas Hashem.]

7c[In this light we can explain Chazal's words: “If the teacher resembles an angel of Hashem, let them seek Torah from his mouth.”¹² The holy sefarim, such as the Degel Machaneh Efraim, citing the Baal Shem Tov, ask how we are to know what an angel of Hashem looks like, so that we can compare the teacher to one.¹³ The answer lies in what “angel” means here. Just as an angel on high cannot have any thought at all except doing his Maker's will, so if we see a teacher learning Torah without any other thoughts, at the level of “and be there,” he resembles an angel of Hashem in this. Of him it is said, “Let them seek Torah from his mouth.”]

8May Hashem grant that we serve Him without stray thoughts when we pray and learn Torah. May we sit “beside still waters”¹⁴ and keep all the words of His Torah, and may we be able to go up “on the highway that goes up to Beis El,”¹⁵ until the coming of Yinon,¹⁶ speedily. Amen, may it be His will.