Parshat Bechukotai
Overview
The Torah promises prosperity for the Jewish People if they follow G-d's commandments. However, if they fail to live up to the responsibility of being the Chosen People, then chilling punishments will result. The Torah details the harsh historical process that will fall upon them when Divine protection is removed. These punishments, whose purpose is to bring the Jewish People to repent, will be in seven stages, each more severe than the last. Sefer Vayikra, the book of Leviticus, concludes with the details of erachin – the process by which someone vows to give the Beit Hamikdash the equivalent monetary value of a person, an animal or property.
Insights
Israeli Secret Weapon Unmasked!
"If you will follow My decrees you will dwell securely in your land. I will provide peace in the land, and you will lie down with none to frighten" (26:1-6)
Can you keep a secret?
Every year nations spend billions of dollars on defense. Every country wants to have the latest secret weapon; a "smarter" bomb that can pin-point military headquarters and take it out without touching a hair on the heads of the babies in the maternity hospital that some beneficent dictator has built next door; a anti-missile missile that can discriminate one hundred percent between an enemy rocket and a planeload of tourists; a foolproof WMD detector, a super-snooper surveillance system that forewarns of global terrorist activity; the list goes on.
But there’s one weapon that beats all other secret weapons and (keep this to yourself and lean very close to the computer screen) we have it!
Shh! (I dont want this article to be picked up by a web-crawler and find its way onto the Enemynet site, so you better delete it as soon as you have finished reading it, okay?)
What is it about this weapon that beats all other secret weapons?
This weapon prevents your enemy from ever launching an attack on you in the first place.
And I don’t mean a deterrent. I mean a device that stops your enemies either thinking about attacking you or if they think about attacking you, it ingeniously stops them from being able to carry out the attack. The weather stops them, or their billion dollar research program turns up a dud, or their entire army gets the dysentery.
Not only does such a weapon exist, but also we have that weapon.
It’s called...
Lean a little closer to your monitor so not everyone sees this, okay
It’s called...
Shh!
(The Torah!)
The Talmud teaches that learning Torah is greater than saving lives.
How can that be? How can anything be greater than saving a human life?
The answer is that there’s one thing better than saving a human life, and that’s preventing someone from getting into a life-threatening situation in the first place.
The power of Torah learning is that it is “magen umatzil”. It doesn’t just save us from our enemies, it protects us as from them as well.
That's our secret weapon.
Shh! Keep it a secret!
You promised.
- Source: Shir Ma’on; thanks to Rabbi C. Z. Senter
