הלכה על שמות 4:19

(Aleph)⁶Starting from here, each paragraph begins with a letter from an acrostic that sequentially includes all of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, followed by the author’s name. The Rabbis said (Bereishit Rabbah 8:5), “At the time that the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted to create man, He created a group of angels, etc. And they said (Ps. 8:5), ‘What is man that you should consider him’ [and so, they opposed his creation].” At first glance, [we would wonder] why the angels would care about man’s creation. [To answer this, we must understand the nature of man:] As the essence of man’s creation is [that he be] upon the earth. Even though the [human] soul benefits from the radiance of the glory from [the One from] which it has been hewn, and there is nothing lacking in the house of the King; [nevertheless] the Divine Wisdom, may His name be blessed, decreed that [the human soul] should be brought down [to the world], in order to test it with the performance of His commandments and the keeping of His Torah. And when ‘it is very righteous,’ ‘so will it multiply and so will it expand’ and ‘grow upwards,’ until ‘it returns to God who gave it’ ‘with great strength’ and ‘with abundance of power.’ And it is written in the Zohar 1:60a [to explain the verse in Prov. 5:15], “Drink water from your own cistern, running water from your own well”; [that] when the soul is above, it only has the aspect of a cistern, which does not [produce its own water], but is rather filled from others. In of itself, however, it is empty. But when it comes down to this lowly world and achieves what it is supposed to achieve – like the wisdom of His decree, may His name be blessed – then it has the aspect of a well, which is an overflowing spring and is emanating from itself. And in this way it will not [acquire] the bread of shame.⁷The roots of this this idea – that unearned reward is a source of shame – are from several places in the Zohar. See, for example Zohar 1:4a. The basis for the metaphor, however is found in Talmud Yerushalmi Orlah 1:3, 61b. And the first well-known use of the actual phrase is only found later in R. Yosef Karo’s Maggid Mesharim 2:8, which was written in the 1500’s. As the essence of the matter is that anyone who has nothing from himself is a poor person that is considered as if dead.⁸Zohar 2:119a, Nedarim 64b. This is as is written in Gur Aryeh,⁹Maharal, Gur Aryeh on Exod. 4:19:2. that the water of a well is called living waters because it [produces water] from itself (meaning, its underground spring) – which is not the case with the water of a cistern. And so this is why a poor person is considered as if dead. [Hence (as in Prov. 15:27)], “and the one who hates gifts, lives.” See there. And if so, the whole time that the soul is in its source, it has the aspect of a cistern that has no life; as it is empty from itself, besides from what is given to it. [This is] until it descends here and emanates from itself with the aspect of a well and has life. And this is why it states (Gen. 2:7), “He blew into his nostrils a living soul.” That is because the main aspect of the creation of man on the earth was so that the soul could have the aspect of “a living soul.” And this is [the meaning of], these are the commandments, “that a man should do and live through them” (Lev. 18:8).

The same author, in his novellae on the Pentateuch, Meshekh Hokhmah, Exodus 4:19, finds an intriguing allusion to this principle in the verse "Go, return to Egypt for the people who sought your life have died." Since God explicitly commanded Moses to return to Egypt, all other considerations would appear to be immaterial. Why, then, does Scripture expressly tell us that Moses was informed that the danger had passed? Meshekh Hokhmah comments that God's command to Moses was inherently no different from any other commandment of the Torah and, despite the fact that Moses' mission was designed to rescue the lives of the children of Israel, Moses was under no obligation to risk his own life in fulfilling a divine command. Hence Moses might legitimately have declined to undertake the mission of rescue.¹⁷Similarly, when God directed Samuel to anoint David as king, Samuel responded, “How can I go? If Saul hears he will kill me” (I Samuel 16:2). In both instances, self-endangerment serves not simply as exemption from performance of a statutory commandment but even as grounds for avoidance of an ad hoc command. See R. Yitzchak of Vilna, Bet Yiẓḥak (Jerusalem, 5733), Parashat Bo. Only divine assurance that the danger no longer existed made it impossible for him to decline on a plea of self-endangerment.¹⁸The comments presented in Or Sameaḥ and Meshekh Ḥokhmah serve to establish that self-endangerment is not required even if the entire community of Israel, rather than a single individual, is endangered. Cf., however, R. Abraham I. Kook, Mishpat Kohen, nos. 142–144; Klei Ḥemdah, Parashat Pinḥas; R. Isaac ha-Levi Herzog, Teshuvot Heikhal Yiẓḥak, Oraḥ Ḥayyim, no. 34; R. Ovadiah Yosef, Dinei Yisra’el, VII, 38–40; and R. Pinchas Baruch Toledano, Barka’i, III, 32.