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Orchard of Delights
of his life so David could live. Thus, David, viewed his entire life as
a gift, and, therefore, he experienced each day, as if “today I have
given birth to you.” This constant awareness of God’s mercy and
life-giving force helps explain how David reached such lofty heights
in praising God.
The capacity to renew one’s self is truly one of the great secrets of
attaining personal fulfillment and happiness. For without it life can
quickly wear people down, entangling them in tedious and boring
habits, rote thoughts and actions. Failure to renew one’s self dooms
a person to an uninspired and frustrating life, what the famous
American author Henry David Thoreau poetically referred to as “a
life of quiet desperation.”
On a national level, renewal is truly one of the great secrets of
Jewish survival. For what other people has had to begin again so
many times due to its long and tortured history? No matter what the
circumstances, the Jewish people has persevered and renewed itself
countless times in communities around the globe, generation after
generation. This essential power exists in every Jewish soul and is
one of the secrets of Jewish survival. The miraculous ingathering of
the exiles and the rebuilding of the ancient homeland in Israel today
clearly bears witness to this truth.
Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh notes that the verse, “This month
will be for you the beginning of the months, it will be for you the
first of the months of the year” is the 1820th verse in the Torah.
This number is the product of seventy multiplied by twenty-six. The
Hebrew word for “secret” (sod) has the numeric value of seventy,
while God’s four-letter name equals twenty-six. These two words
appear together in the following verse: “The secret of God is for those
who are in awe of Him” (Psalms 25:14). Thus, by consecrating the
month of Nisan and intercalating the Jewish calendar, the Jewish
people enter into the very “secret of God.” Further substantiating
the mystery of this endeavor, God’s four-letter name appears exactly
1820 times in the five books of Moses!
The “secret of God” alluded to in this verse relates to how we
connect our experience of time to its Divine source. Every day in
the Morning Prayer Service, we state the following: “He renews in
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The portion of Mishpatim begins with the following verse: “And
these are the ordinances (mishpatim) that you shall place before
them” (Exodus 21:1). The Midrash’s commentary on this verse, cited
by Rashi, exemplifies the careful attention the Rabbis paid to every
word in the Torah and the illumination they gained from doing so.
In my estimation, one of Rashi’s most important insights on the
Torah was written to explain the words, “that you shall place before
them”:
God said to Moses: “Do not think that [it will be sufficient for] you
to teach them the laws two or three times until they have memorized
them and then you will not have to bother to explain the deeper
reasons and explanations to them. This is why it is written, ‘you
shall place before them’ – like a set table before a person, fully ready
for dining.”
In other words, it is not enough to teach people what to do without
explaining the deeper reasons and ideas contained in the Torah’s laws.
This may seem obvious and self evident, but unfortunately in the
last few generations the vast majority of Jews were taught in a way
that barely explained what the Torah teaches let alone the Torah’s
reasons and deeper explanations. Rashi’s insight clearly provides
incentive and impetus for both teaching and immersing one’s self in
revealing the Torah’s many layers of meaning, a goal which can be
accomplished by adopting the PaRDeS system of learning.
When young people are taught in such a superficial manner,
they usually conclude that the Torah has nothing to say to them
as individuals and that the Torah has nothing to contribute to
contemporary society. In a technological and communications
driven world how can Torah be seen as relevant when it is presented
one-dimensionally, devoid of its deeper meanings and wisdom? How
can it speak to every sector of modern life when its surface wisdom is
barely scratched?
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