Kedushat Levi

Still another facet of the line:‎אלה תולדות נח, נח איש צדיק, תמים ‏היה בדורותיו‎, may be appreciated by the reader after we have ‎‎“digested” Rashi’s commentary on Genesis 7,7 ‎ויבא נח..... אל ‏התבה מפני מי המבול‎, “Noach (and family) entered the ark on ‎account of the waters of the deluge.” Rashi uses this verse ‎to state that Noach was deficient in his faith in G’d. [Rashi based ‎himself on Bereshit Rabbah 32,6 who explains the extraneous ‎words: “on account of the waters of the deluge,” as telling us that ‎Noach did not enter the ark until the rising waters of the flood ‎made this unavoidable.”] This exegesis appears to fly in the face ‎of an explicit verse in Genesis 6,22 according to which Noach ‎carried out every single one of G’d’s instructions without ‎exception.

How could the author of the Midrash accuse Noach of ‎being lacking in faith? If someone spent 120 years building an ‎ark, anticipating a deluge, because G’d had told him to do so, how ‎can this be interpreted as “lack of faith?”‎We must bear in mind that all the holy “sparks” are possessed ‎of an urge to serve their Creator, just as do the different ‎categories of angels all of whom vie to fulfill the wishes of their ‎Creator while being in awe of Him. The tzaddik, being a ‎mortal human being and burdened with an evil urge within him, ‎may not always serve his master with a similar degree of single-‎mindedness. He may be sidetracked by thinking of money, or the ‎allure of secular attractions, including good-tasting fruit, etc.

One ‎of the causes distracting the tzaddik from serving his ‎Creator with the same degree of single-mindedness as the angels ‎is that in order to bring the sinners closer to G’d, he must first ‎befriend them. The sinners are sinners because the have within ‎them some of the 288 sparks that “fell off” the Shechinah, ‎as we explained on page 21. ‎[A ‎רשע‎, sinner, who too has been created in the image of G’d, ‎contains within him some of these sparks, though they have ‎become tainted through their close association with the sinner. ‎Ed.

]‎‎ In the process of “outreaching,” as it is commonly known in ‎our time, the exposure of the highest ranking type of ‎‎tzaddik to the lure of secularism is such that he may ‎momentarily forget his true calling, feeling drawn to these ‎‎“perks” of olam hazeh, as advertised by Satan in eye-‎catching colors. A tzaddik engaged in such activities may be ‎viewed as being engaged in a ‎מלחמת מצוה‎, “a holy war,” on behalf ‎of his Creator.‎

This idea is alluded to in the wording in Chagigah 3:1. ‎The Mishnah there discussing different degrees of holiness, ‎i.e. that ‎קדשים‎, sacred parts of sacrificial animals, have a higher ‎degree of holiness than t’rumah, the portion of the farmer’s ‎harvest that has to be given to the priest. An example given by ‎the Mishnah illustrating this is that whereas two vessels ‎which require ritual purification through immersion in a ritual ‎bath may be cleansed even when one of them is inside the other, ‎this ruling is not valid when the vessels in question belong to a ‎higher level of holiness known as ‎קדשים‎, vessels used in handling ‎the remains of sacrificial animals, for instance. Apparently, the ‎author of this Mishnah relates the rules pertaining to ‎cleansing vessels that have become ritually impure to their ‎respective origins.

In other words: the holier one’s origin, the ‎more stringent the rules for recapturing one’s purity once it had ‎been lost. The wording of the Mishnah, i.e.‎חומר בקודש ‏מבתרומה ‏‎, can be understood allegorically as: “the reason why ‎higher ranking holiness is subject to more stringent steps of ‎purification than lower ranking holy vessels, is because the higher ‎ranking ones had been inside the lower ranking ones.”

The word ‎תרומה‎ chosen by the Mishnah, has a double meaning, i.e. it ‎is something in need of being elevated further. Applied to the ‎צדיק‎ in our parable, it means that the tzaddik engaged in ‎‎“outreach,” must be much more on guard against being drawn ‎into the sphere of the sinner than the kind of tzaddik who ‎does not venture to mix with the sinners even in order to bring ‎them closer to G’d. A tzaddik faced with this dilemma will ‎do well to remind himself that the allures of this world are ‎transient, and cannot be compared to the delights in store when ‎the soul rejoins its place in heaven after having successfully ‎discharged its duties while within a mortal body.

‎ When our sages in Avot 6,10 stated that everything that ‎G’d created, He created only for the sake of His glory, this is ‎another way of saying that He desires to have satisfaction from ‎the conduct of His creatures.

This is also the meaning of psalms ‎‎119,98 ‎מאויבי תחכמני מצותך כי לעולם היא לי‎, “Your commandments ‎made me wiser than my enemies; they always stand by me.” The ‎letter ‎מ‎ in the word ‎מאויבי‎ must be understood in the sense of ‎‎“more than.” When read thus, the word is a reference to the evil ‎urge, which is not only David’s enemy, but the enemy of every ‎human being, implanting within us the powerful desires to taste ‎the gratifications advertised. However, the psalmist, upon ‎reflecting that what is eternal must be far more worthwhile than ‎that which is merely transient, redoubles his resolve to serve only ‎the Creator, rejecting the deceptive allure of physical delights. ‎

Applied to the allegory in the Mishnah in Chagigah ‎that we quoted, an addiction to the delights of this transient ‎world, when compared to an addiction to serving the eternal ‎Creator is like placing a tainted vessel inside one that is not ‎tainted, hoping to purify it by immersing only the outer vessel in ‎a ritual bath. Keeping the waters of the ritual bath “at arm’s ‎length,” is simply not good enough to cleanse oneself from the ‎pollutants absorbed through contact with the defilements of the ‎earthly environment. The inner vessel had lost some of the ‎brightness with which it had been endowed as a result of G’d’s ‎original light having shone upon it before it became ‎contaminated through contact with the sinner.‎