Cytowanie Komentarza do Sędziów 9:2

והעם לא נסע, ”And the people did not journey.” The reason was that the cloud had not risen. It was a great compliment for Miriam that both the cloud and the people waited for seven days until Miriam was cured. Our sages in Sotah 8 state that a person is “measured,” i.e. treated, in accordance with the way he treats others. Shimshon was in the habit of judging matters based on what his eyes saw, as we know from Judges 9,2 where he told his parents that he insisted that they arrange for his marriage to a Philistine girl seeing “she seems right in my eyes.” As a result of the yardsticks he applied, the Philistines in due course gouged out these very eyes which had misled him (Judges 14,3). Avshalom was very proud of his hair. As a result, when he was punished for rebelling against his father David and sleeping with 10 of his father’s concubines he was hung up by his hair (Samuel II 18,15). The same “measure for measure” principle works also in reverse, i.e. positive character traits displayed by individuals usually are rewarded by G’d in kind. Joseph who had taken a great deal of trouble to bring his father’s bones to burial in the Holy Land, was rewarded in Moses securing his casket and the people taking it with them to the Holy Land during their 40 year trek through the desert (compare Genesis 50,7 and Exodus 13,19). The most illustrious Israelite ever personally looked after keeping the promise made to Joseph by his brothers in this regard. Seeing Moses had taken so much trouble, he was rewarded by G’d Himself burying him (compare Deut. 34,6). We must not be surprised therefore that Miriam experienced the same kind of treatment. When her brother Moses had been lying in a basket in the reeds alongside the river Nile, she had kept watch from a distance in order to see what would develop (Exodus 2,4). Having kept watch for an hour or so at the time, she was now rewarded by the entire Jewish people waiting for seven days with their journey until she could rejoin the main body of the nation. In this connection our sages in Sotah 8 have said that although in practice the four kinds of death penalty in the Torah can no longer be applied seeing we do not have a Temple and our judges do not have that authority while we are in exile, the principle of such kinds of deaths has not been abrogated. When certain people die violent deaths this may reflect the fact that had there been a chance to convict them of the death penalty they would have been executed by a method parallel to that which caused their death. This is an ongoing miracle proving that what we call השגחה פרטית, “G’d’s individual supervision of each of our fates” is still very much in evidence. This is the meaning of Isaiah 30,18: ”for the Lord is a G’d of Justice; happy are all who wait for Him.”