Eikev

Our sedra opens with the words והיה עקב תשמעון את המשפטים, if you will listen to the mitzvos וברכך, Hashem will bless you. ‎The sefer רמיזי תורה asks how could the Torah say that if you do these mitzvos you will get material rewards when the gemara tells us that you don't get reward for mitzvos on this world; that's reserved for the world to come when you get eternal reward? 

He answers that the Mishna states that the reward for a mitzva is the opportunity to do another mitzva & the joy a person has when he does a mitzva counts as another mitzvah.  He gets rewarded for the joy he had when he did the mitzvah, separately from the mitzva itself.  

So he explains that the material reward on this world referred to in the Torah applies to the simcha that the person had when he did the mitzvah. The reward for the actual mitzva that you had to do, is reserved for the world to come.

Chazal tell us the word והיה connotes ‎simcha which is what the posuk is saying; when you do the mitzvos with simcha, then you will get all the material blessings of this world.  

Rav Moshe Leib from Sosuv used to say that the same way a person guards his money, he should guard his service to Hashem. The best way to guard your service to Hashem is to do it constantly with joy. 

The classic translation of  והיה עקב תשמעון ‎is if you listen to the light mitzvos, which Rashi interprets as the ones that we trample with our heel, then you will get the blessing. The Midrash tells us that one doesn't know the reward he gets even for polishing his shoes before Shabbos and it quotes the posuk in shir hashirim מה יפו פעמיך בנעלים & the Midrash ends with a posuk in Yeshayhu ויקרא ביום ההוא לבכי, how we will cry when we will see the reward. 

The רה"ק מאפטא  explains this midrash with a parable. There was a poor man who went begging from town to town who  rested along the way between the towns on a big rock or pile of dirt that he found. One day, after he rested on a small hill, he saw that the rocks around there looked pretty so he decided to fill his pockets with them in case they were worth something. However, as he walked from town to town, he got tired from the extra weight of the stones, so he started throwing them out until he had nothing left. When he got to a town where he had a friend, another poor man. They were looking for some money to get food. As he's searching his pockets, he finds one of those stones, so he & his friend say, “let's go to the jeweler maybe they’re worth something.”  

The jeweler sees it & immediately offers them $1000. They’re shocked so he takes their silence for a refusal & doubles his offer. When the friend sees that, he says, “wait a minute. let's go to town & see the big jeweler. we'll for sure get more.” He turns to his friend, sees him crying and says, “what's wrong. You’re gonna be rich!” The poor man tells him, “do you know how many of these I had that I just threw away? Do you know how much more I could have had?

This, רה"ק מאפטא explains, is going to be us at the end of our days. When we see the eternal reward that awaits us even for the smallest mitzvah, we will cry over how many we threw away. How can we avoid this? How do we capitalize on our available mitzvos so that we don't leave them behind?

Perhaps, if we accept upon ourselves one mitzva that we enjoy and do that mitzva with simcha, then our reward will be another mitzva that we enjoy.  Then, we will keep going up in our joy in mitzvos, making sure we don't lose out on any. In addition, we will merit the material rewards of this world, too, for doing our mitzvos with simcha!

Va'aschanan

Moshe, as he's recounting all that has happened over the years, ‎reminds the Jews that he won't be going into the land with them & that they should be very careful not to anger Hashem. 

‎

Then he warns them that their children, ‎who did not personally experience the exodus, will be in danger of slipping into the pagan culture of the Canaanites & being exiled from the land. 

However, he reassures them that all will not be lost; even while the Jews are in exile they will eventually return to Hashem Who will return us to our land, as the posuk states, ובקשתם משם את ה' אלקיך ומצאת כי תדרשנו בכל לבבך ובכל נפשך , from there you will seek Hashem, your G-d and you will find Him, if you search for Him with all your heart & soul.

The posuk starts with ובקשתם, you will seek, in the plural implying ‎that the masses have to seek Hashem for Him to be found; then it says ומצאת, you will find Him in the singular. Why the change?  

The Gra' bases his answer on a gemara which relates the story of two people who had the same problem and went to pray for it to be resolved. One of them was answered & one of them wasn't answered.  ‎The gemara asks why was one answered and the other not? The gemara answers, the one who was  answered prayed with kavana, concentration, while the other one didn't. Our posuk can be explained the same way.  ובקשתם, in plural, many people searching, ומצאת, He's found in singular, meaning only certain individuals will find.  Which ones? As the posuk concludes, כי תדרשנו בכל לבבך ובכל נפשך, when you search for Him with all your heart and soul; meaning that one who davens with all his heart & soul, one who has kavana when he prays, will be answered.

Rabbainu Bachya explains a little differently.  He says, had the Torah also written ומצאתם in the plural, one could have thought that in exile it's only if the masses search & pray to Hashem ‎that we will be answered but the prayer of a lone individual will not be answered. To counter that notion, the Torah says ומצאת, in the singular, to tell us that, as long as even the individual is sincere & prays with his heart, he too will be answered.

Perhaps Rabbainu Bachya is telling us something a little deeper, that ‎one shouldn't be influenced by the masses. One shouldn't think that “what's the point of my prayers if no one else doing it?” One might look around at the masses that don't seem to take davening seriously & be disheartened.  Therefore, the posuk says ומצאת, you, as an individual need to look into yourself & find Hashem. 

A baker in the city of Cracow named R' Yekel was very poor. He had three daughters to marry off & had no money to do it. He davened to Hashem with all his heart & soul to help him out of this situation. One night, he had a dream that he was standing in Prague beside the Vlatava River, before a bridge that crossed to the royal palace. In his dream, he was told that an enormous treasure was buried beneath the bridge. When he woke up & remembered the dream, he just laughed it off but then, when the dream kept repeating itself every night, he decided to travel to Prague. 

It was a long, tiring journey, but, when he arrived before the royal palace, the scene was exactly as it had appeared in his dream! Yekel went under the bridge to figure out how to dig without attracting attention. Suddenly, a guard appeared right in front of him demanding to know what he was doing. Too frightened & tired to come up with anything, he told the guard about his dream. The guard started laughing, stupid Jew! Why do you take dreams seriously? I too have had such dreams. For months I have dreamed of a treasure buried beneath the oven of a baker named Yekel, in Cracow. Do you think I'm going to travel to Cracow to search for Yekel's oven? Forget your foolish dream ‎& leave! Yekel retuned home & lo & behold, beneath his oven lay a treasure. With the money, he married off his daughters & built a shul to express his gratitude to Hashem who had answered his prayer. 

‎Yekel thought he had to go far to search for his treasure, when really it was right there in front of him the whole time.

‎All he had to do was look. Sometimes we, too, do the same thing. We look to what others are doing or think that we have to go somewhere far to find Hashem when in reality He's right here with us. All we have to do is look!‎

‎

‎

Devarim

Sefer Devarim  (the Parsha which always precedes Tisha B’Av), opens with Moshe rebuking ‎the Jewish people for their past sins. Moshe, knowing the spiritual challenges that the Jews would face upon entering the land, feared they would view these challenges complacently, confident in their ability to resist the influences of the Canaanite land. Therefore, he admonished them with their previous failings to warn them that they might fail again. Moshe intended that his admonition would awaken a spirit of vigilance & self-scrutiny that would protect them in the years ahead. 

However, the opening posuk doesn't seem to be saying anything more than the location where this took place. Rashi explains that each word is alluding to various incidents that took place over the years where the Jews had sinned. 

Reb Chaim Shmulevitz explains that the reason the Torah just alludes to these sins rather than saying them explicitly is to teach us that, even when one has a legitimate reason to rebuke, he must exercise the utmost care not to embarrass those that he's rebuking. 

The Ben Ish Chai quotes the Maharam Shiff who explains the posuk הוכיח תוכיח את עמיתך, you shall reproof your friend. He says that it means that you shouldn't rebuke someone in a way that will embarrass him; rather you should rebuke your friend, someone who never did that sin, & discuss it with him within earshot of the sinner so he will hear the reproof without being embarrassed. 

It is said that when Reb Zisha had to rebuke someone he would go within earshot of the individual & talk to himself saying "Zisha how could you do something like this? I feel terrible, I'll never do it again" and the person would hear & get the message without any embarrassment. 

The gemara tells us that it's better to throw yourself into a burning furnace than to publicly embarrass another Jew. There’s a story told about Reb Yisroel Yaakov Lubchansky that exemplifies this. The shul in Baranovitch was heated by a wood burning stove which, if no one fed the stove wood overnight, the shul would be ice cold in the morning. The shamas was supposed to come early in the morning to feed the stove so it would be warm when the people came in the morning. However, he relied on the poor people that would sleep there to keep the stove going. 

One morning, the Rabbi comes in & it's freezing in the shul. No poor people slept there that night & the shamash didn't show up to warm the shul. So the rabbi, not wanting the people to blame the shamash for the cold shul, started the fire in the stove & started loading the wood into the stove. The shamash walks in & sees someone loading the stove & calls out "good morning". Now the rav didn't want the shamash to know that he was the one who was doing the shamash's job loading the stove because then he would be embarrassed, so he didn't respond.

The shamash, just seeing him from the back, thought it was one of the poor people who was disrespecting him by not responding, so he called out again " good morning". By now, the fire had caught on & Reb Yisroel’s face was getting hot.  He prayed that the shamash would just move on so he could get out without the shamash knowing who was loading the stove. The shamash, though, was waiting for his response. Furious, the shamash yells, “you ingrate; you don't respond when someone talks to you”. He pushes him almost right into the oven & then walks away. Only then, with his beard badly singed, did the rabbi pull himself out of the oven & leave the shul before the shamash could see him.   

So great was his resolve not to embarrass the shamash, he let himself get burned!

The Torah is teaching us here how careful we have to be not to cause anyone, no matter who, any embarrassment. The commentaries find many different things alluded to in the words of this posuk. In a similar vein, the  Gra' says אלה הדברים אשר דבר משה , these are the words that Moshe spoke. What are the words? As the posuk continues אל כל ישראל , to all of Israel, that we should be one nation together, peaceful, that we should all just get along & have unity between us. 

The first step toward that unity could be if we are careful about what we say to others & make the utmost attempt not to embarrass one another. Doing so, we could repair the hatred that caused the destruction of the Bias Hamikdash & have it rebuilt speedily in our day!  

Matos/Masei

As the Jewish people approach the land that they were promised, the tribes of Gad & Reuven come to Moshe with a request to settle on the east bank of the Jordan river because there was more grazing pasture for their livestock. Moshe insists that they first join their brothers in battle; only after conquering the land will they be permitted to return to Transjordan.  

‎However the wording of the posuk needs explanation. 'ונכבשה ‏ הארץ לפני ה, and the land should be conquered before Hashem,  ואחר תשבו והייתם נקים מה' ומישראל, and then you shall return. Then you shall be vindicated from Hashem & from Israel. 'ואם לא תעשון כן הנה חטאתם לה, but if you will not do so, behold! - you will have sinned to Hashem.

There are a few questions on this posuk. First why is it necessary to say, “and then you shall return" of course, after they conquer they can go back; that was the whole point of their request.  Also, asks the Ohr HaChaim, why does it say ‎'ואם לא תעשון כן הנה חטאתם לה , but if you will not do so, behold! - you will have sinned to Hashem. ‎It should have said, "if you will not do so, then you will not get the land".  Why does it mention sin?

The ליקוטי כרם שלמה answers with a parable from Chovos Halivovos. There was a righteous man who saw men coming back from battle. He said to them, “now you are coming back from a small battle; prepare yourselves for war.” They asked him what war is approaching? He answered, “the war with the evil inclination.” 

This, he says, is what Moshe was telling the tribes of Gad & Reuven: conquer the land before Hashem and then return and be vindicated from Hashem & the people. What he means to say is that once you conquer the land, come back but don't get rid of your armor. Stay prepared to battle the evil inclination to the point where you will be vindicated from both Hashem & man without any trace of sin. That's why the posuk concludes, “if you don't do that, then you will have sinned to Hashem”, meaning that if you are not constantly prepared for battle against the evil inclination, you will come to sin. 

‎  

‎We see that it's also not enough not to sin in Hashem’s eyes, but also not to sin in man's eyes.  People tend to think that as long as Hashem knows that I'm doing the right thing it's OK. However, the Torah stresses, "then you shall be vindicated from Hashem & from Israel". What you’re doing has to look right in the eyes of people too. 

There's a story told about R' Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld‎, the Rav of Yerushalaim. There was a woman in Hungary who unfortunately was not blessed with children. She came to the Rav of her town with a large sum of money & asked him to send the money to a great sage that he should pray for her. The Rav suggested R' Yosef Chaim as the sage. She agreed & the rav sent R' Yosef Chaim the money with a letter to pray for this woman to have children. 

A few weeks later this woman's husband came to the Rav extremely upset saying, “how could you take all that money from my wife without my consent?” the Rav said he was under the impression that he had consented but the husband insisted that the money be returned to him. The Rav didn't have the money & wasn't going to ask for it back so he offered to pay the man back in installments.  

As they were standing there, the postman knocked on the door with a special delivery from Jerusalem. The Rav looked at the return address and was stunned to see the words Sonnenfeld - Jerusalem. He opened the letter and found the entire sum of money with the following note. 

“I received your letter with the money, you wrote that a woman gave it to you. I am hesitant to accept it because I don't know that her husband agreed to it. I have sent back the money. Please give it back to the woman. I nevertheless fulfilled her request & hope that Hashem answers my prayer.” 

If we live our lives in this manner with the utmost integrity, then we, too, could merit to not only be clear in the eyes of Hashem but even in the eyes of man!