Mishpatim

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‎‎Among the various laws our parsha teaches us about how to deal with other people, is the law of how one should treat a widow & orphans. אלמנה ויתום לא תענון, you shall not persecute any widow or orphan. אם ענה תענה אתו , if you will persecute him כי אם צעק יצעק אלי שמע אשמע צעקתו, for if he will cry out to Me, I shall surely hear his cry.   

The כי seems to be an extra word. What does it add? 

The incidents of Satan  with איוב and Penina with Chana can give us a perspective on this question.

The gemara says that the Satan and Penina acted לשם שמים , for the sake of Heaven. The Satan felt that Hashem was enamored with איוב so he worried that Hashem would lose some of the love he felt for Avraham, replacing him with איוב. So he challenged Hashem to test איוב. 

Penina harassed Chana because she wanted her to feel the pain of not having children in order to daven much more intensely so that she would be granted a child. If that's true, then, when Chana finally did have children, why did two of Penina's died for every child that Chana had?  Why would she be punished like that if she only harassed Chana for her own benefit? 

This, says the קול אליהו, teaches us that, even if one has good intentions, if they do it at someone else's expense, it's unacceptable. As Reb Yisroel Salant once said, a person tends to worry about his friends’ spiritual level but his own worldly needs. The Torah here is teaching us the opposite; one should worry about his own spiritual needs & his friends’ worldly needs. That's what the extra word כי is telling us; even if you have the best intentions, if you hurt the widow or the orphan & they cry out to Hashem, He will hear their cry. 

There's a story told of Reb Hirsch Broide from Kelm who once employed a young orphan girl in his home. After a little while, it seemed like there was always something missing in the home: money, jewelry etc. The rabbi's wife suspected the girl & asked the rabbi if she could summon her to Beis Din. He said she could. When the date arrived & the wife was getting ready to go, she saw her husband also putting his coat on to go. She said to him that I don't need you to come with me. I can handle it alone. He answered, “ I am not going to help you; rather I'm going to help the girl who has no one else to come to her aid. 

We see how far one has to go as not to cause pain ‎& suffering to an orphan. A young widow one came to Reb Shlomo Zalman Auerbach & said that her husband had recently died leaving her with small children. She could find no peace. She asked him what she could do as a merit for her husband's soul. He answered, "go out & buy some toys & play with your children to make them happy. That's the best thing you can do for him"!  He understood her heartache & told her to do something in her husband's memory that would help to really heal her pain.

We have to take this lesson to heart & try to help minimize the pain of those in need & certainly not cause anyone pain which would cause them to cry out to Hashem. Reb Levi Yitzchok of Barditchiv used to cry when he came to our posuk; he would say, “Hashem, there are countless times in the Torah that it says not to antagonize the orphan. However, we are all orphans as the prophet ירמיהו said in Aicha, יתומים היינו ואין אב we are orphans with no father. So why doesn't Hashem pity us & take us out of this galus? 

One answer could be that we don't cry out to Hashem. The posuk says, “if he cries I will answer him. So let us take this opportunity to cry out to Hashem like orphaned children so that He will answer us & bring us home! 
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