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Torah details this for us and repeats the warning again and again: do not have the strength. Why didn’t you turn to the
“Remember, do notforget, how you angered Hashem your God Master of all strength to empower you? If you wanted
in the desert. From the day that you left the land of Egypt until to overcome your anger so badly, why didn’t you
you came to this place, you have been rebelling against Hashem” dedicate at least a quarter of an hour a day to pray
(Deuteronomy 9:7). Remember well: for 40 years, you rebelled for that?” To that question, you will have no reply.
against Hashem! This is the message to all generations: see and And so heaven will censure you and prosecute you ….
study this well. We must study this not in order to disparage our
forefathers but so that we will learn from their tests and from their If you pray and afterwards stumble, there is no claim
errors. Then we will be able to proceed upon the proper path. This
is because the essence of the goal in learning the Torah is to know against you. But if you do not pray and entreat, no
how to conduct ourselves in our own lives, not in order to know excuse will be accepted.
what happened in the past. The Torah is not a book of history. The
Torah teaches each person the proper way to live his life. And the That is what I said on that cassette recording.
proper way is the way of work: “man was born to toil” (Job 5:7).
In truth, this person was still far from keeping Torah and mitzvot,
Therefore, Moses rebuked the nation of Israel with the words, and far from praying, but these simple words—that there is a
“Hashem did not give you a heart to know” (Jeremiah 24:7). They Creator of the world Who can help and Who wants to help, and
had to awaken on their own to entreat Hashem to turn their hearts from Whom a person should request help—penetrated his heart
to heeding Him and keeping His mitzvot. This is discussed in the and deeply inspired him. He had never heard such a simple and
Gemara (Avodah Zarah 5). And Tosafot explain there (s.v. ad) that, accessible solution. He also saw from his long experience that no
after having seen numerous times how they had fallen prey to other solution had truly helped him. These words filled him with
grave sins—such as the golden calf, the spies, and their unending new hope.
self-pity and weeping—the people of Israel had to come to their He harnessed all of his will and the fire burning within him to
own realization that they were in danger and that they must seek
Hashem’s help (cf. the introduction to Hishtapchut Hanefesh). If they apply this advice. He began to devote time at night after work to go
to a place where he would be alone, and there he pleaded before
would have turned their hearts to examine their ways and their sins
from the start, they would have understood the darkness and danger the Creator of the world in his simple words to rescue him from
they were in. They would have reflected on the fact that even after the trait of anger and to put an end to his quick temper, and he
asked Hashem to help him withstand tests. He prayed and pleaded
having heard Hashem Himself declare “I am Hashem your God”
and “You shall have no other gods,” they had descended to the a great deal in his own words—in particular, before any situations
that he knew were liable to trigger an outburst. At such times, he
terrible nadir of the sins of the golden calf and of ingratitude, for
which Moses rebuked them at great length. would pray a great deal and at length, and cry out to Hashem to
save him and help him.
Moses speaks to each individual: know what the true work is.
This was not easy for him. Sometimes he thought that he is
The true work is to request of Hashem every day: “Give us a heart speaking to himself, and that no one hears him, heaven forbid.
to truly serve You.” As the Gemara says: “When the Holy One,
blessed be He, said to Israel, ‘If only they would have this heart,’ But because he so strongly wanted to see a change in his life and
because he felt that he had no other idea and no other recourse,
they should have responded, ‘Give it to us!’” As mentioned earlier,
this “heart” refers to the will. Everyone must know that his work and his inner truth told him that this advice constituted all of his
hope, he clung to this thread with all his might and all of his good