Blessing That Awakens: The King's Revenge

1“Hashem spoke to Moshe, saying: Speak to Aharon and to his sons, saying: So shall you bless …”¹ Notice the wording: why does the verse say “saying” a second time? The Alshich raises this question as well.² We must also ask why the passage begins with dibbur, “speak,” which is a harsh expression, and ends with amirah, “say to them,” which is a soft one.³

2On the verse that comes a little later, “They shall place My Name upon Bnei Yisrael, and I will bless them,”⁴ the holy sefarim ask: the Holy One, blessed be He, has already commanded the Kohanim to bless Israel, so why does He also need to add a blessing of His own?⁵

3The halachic authorities cite the view of the sefer Chareidim, by R' Elazar Azikri:⁶ just as the Kohen has a positive mitzvah to bless, so Israel has a positive mitzvah to be blessed. But this needs explaining. A blessing is for a person's own good, so why should it need to be commanded as a positive mitzvah?

4In the Priestly Blessing it is written, “May Hashem make His face shine upon you.” The holy Ohr HaChaim explains that this means there should be no screen separating Israel from its Father in Heaven, and that the light of His Shechinah should shine upon Israel.⁷ Those are his holy words. But this is a spiritual blessing. How does it fit with the rest of the Priestly Blessing, which in its plain sense speaks of bestowing material good?

5aWe can explain this, however, through a parable that my holy father and teacher, zt"l, always used to tell in the name of the Baal Shem Tov, on the verse “Kel nekamos Hashem, God of vengeance, Hashem.”⁸ He asked: the Name Kel denotes the attribute of mercy, as it says, “The kindness of Kel is all the day”;⁹ how, then, can it be mentioned in connection with vengeance? He explained it with a parable. A king once set out to tour the provinces of his kingdom, and naturally, wherever he came, the people honored him as greatly as they could.

5bBut then he happened upon a remote village whose people were coarse and crude, with no idea at all of what a king is. As the king's carriage passed among them, the village boys did as they always did, playing with stones and throwing them, until one stone hit the king in the face. At once the boy who had thrown it was hunted down and sentenced to death. But the king, who was very wise, said that he wanted to take this boy with him in his carriage. He brought him to the royal palace and gave him every good thing; and what is lacking in a king's house? There the boy saw the king's great splendor, his honor and his goodness. He began to understand how great his crime and his sin had been: he had rebelled against this great and kindly king and thrown a stone at him. He fell at the king's feet and pleaded for his life with all his heart, in deep shame and remorse.

6The meaning of the parable is this. The soul is hewn from beneath the Throne of Glory. But when it comes down into this material world, a person grows coarse and physical and forgets what the King's honor is, until he does not even recognize that he is sinning against the supreme King of kings. But when the Holy One, blessed be He, bestows every good thing on a person, the person takes it to heart and recognizes Hashem's greatness and goodness, and he returns in teshuvah with tremendous remorse. So the blessing Hashem bestows is, in fact, the King's greatest revenge. The more good He does for a person, the more that person takes it to heart and reflects on the greatness of His goodness, His honor and the King's splendor, and the more pain and shame he feels over all his rebellion. This is the meaning of “God of vengeance, Hashem”: Hashem takes His vengeance through the attributes of kindness and mercy. Those are his holy words.

7This explains the Priestly Blessing. We know that the task of the tzaddik of the generation is to bestow every good thing on Israel,¹⁰ in the spirit of “The whole world is sustained for the sake of Chanina My son.”¹¹ The point is this. The tzaddik's real and main task is to bestow spiritual blessings. But by first drawing down material abundance into the world, he makes it possible for people to begin to recognize the Creator of the world, as in the parable of the king. This is the meaning of “They shall place My Name upon Bnei Yisrael”: spiritual abundance, which comes about through “and I will bless them,”¹² that is, through the Priestly Blessing, which draws down abundant material blessing. In this way the Kohanim place the Name of the Holy One, blessed be He, upon Bnei Yisrael, so that they walk in the way of Hashem. The Tiferes Shlomo and the Maor VaShemesh explain it in a similar way.¹³

8This is what the holy Ohr HaChaim meant when he explained “May Hashem make His face shine upon you” to mean that no partition should separate Israel from its Father in Heaven, and that the light of His Shechinah should shine upon Israel. This is indeed a spiritual matter, yet it comes through the material abundance that the Priestly Blessing brings. So the blessing the Kohanim give, that there be no partition between Israel and its Father in Heaven, is one of the material blessings of the Priestly Blessing. For abundant good rouses people to return to Him in teshuvah.

9This is the meaning of “Speak to Aharon and to his sons, saying.” The verse teaches that the heart of the blessing is “saying,” leimor: drawing down mercy and soft speech. This soft speech is what moves a person to make an accounting of his soul and to do teshuvah, and the harsh word dibbur here points to that accounting. So the dibbur and the amirah are “complete together.”¹⁴ This answers both of the questions we began with.

10This is what the Chareidim means by a positive mitzvah to be blessed. The main purpose of the Priestly Blessing is to bring a person to teshuvah and to yiras Shamayim, the fear of Heaven. So each person has a mitzvah to make himself a vessel in which the blessing can rest, so that through it he will be led to teshuvah and yiras Shamayim.

11We may say that this is also the point of Chazal's teaching “All agree that on Atzeres we also require ‘for you.’”¹⁵ When the Holy One, blessed be He, bestows abundant material blessing on us, the “for you,” it reminds and rouses us to keep the Torah that was given on Atzeres. This also lets us explain the verse “And Moshe went up to God,” to Elokim, the attribute of judgment, “and Hashem called to him,” with the attribute of mercy.¹⁶ Moshe Rabbeinu had the power to go up to the attribute of judgment and to ensure that Hashem's vengeance would come only through mercy, as we saw with “God of vengeance, Hashem.” Through him, judgment itself was turned into kindness and mercy. May we be privileged to have it so until the coming of the Redeemer. Amen, may it be His will.