Does God Need You? Parashat Behar

0:06things that literally you wouldn't even want to happen to your enemies, would happen to somebody that gets this answer wrong. Why? Because if you get this answer wrong, that means you are incapable of following the Torah. Now, in the beginning of the parashah of Behaalotcha, we see that HaKadosh Baruch Hu is commanding Moshe Rabbeinu, as He did many times before and after, to speak to Am Yisrael and give them a specific set of instructions. And the first set of instructions that He tells them is, Speak to the children of Israel and say to them: When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a Shabbat rest for Hashem. So, this is the mitzvah of Shemitah, where the land has to rest every seven years.

1:12And the Torah goes into the details of this mitzvah. Why does the land have to rest every seven years? There are obviously many teachings about it. How do the people that are farmers that depend on making a living by growing their crops every single year. How do they make a living? There's an answer for that. We've addressed a lot of these things in the past, but tonight we're going to address the obvious—something that perhaps has been staring us in the face many, many times. We've addressed it to a certain extent in the past, but of course, in the way of kedusha, you always want to find more friends. When you have insight into Torah, you have a truth of Torah. Insight of Torah, you have a truth of Torah. It's not enough for you yourself to know it, and it's not even enough for you to find one sage that says the same. You want to find friends; you want to find as many sages as you possibly can saying the same thing. The only thing is, Hashem is not going to give it to you on a silver platter. You have to find it. Now, the question that we all have to answer is

2:25if we want to be real true servants of Hashem, it is not about Shemitah itself. In fact, it has nothing to do with Shemitah, but rather something that is repetitive in the Torah and even starts as early as Sefer Bereishit, the book of Genesis, right from the beginning, where Hashem says, "Shabbat Shabbaton LeHashem." does it mean Shabbat literally translates to "Shabbat for Hashem"? So wait, are we keeping Shabbat for God? As if to say, does God need the Shabbat? Because that's actually what it says. Again, here it says that the land has to observe Shabbat. Shabbat means rest, a rest for Hashem. Now, we have countless verses in the Torah that tell us that Hashem doesn't sleep, He doesn't rest. So how could it say on one end "rest for Hashem"?

3:36then it says He doesn't rest, so what does it all mean? This is why we always have to go to the commentary of the sages that we received already at the time of Mount Sinai because this will elaborate every single point. Now, of course, this is extremely important. And the reason why this is important is because you may not see what's on the line when you first see this verse. Whether you translate it the right way or you translate it the wrong way, what's the big deal? On one end, you could easily look at the Hebrew and say, well, it says, Shabbat for God. You look at the simple English translation by ArtScroll and many others, and you'll see it says the same thing: Shabbat for God. Now, why do we need to delve into this any further? I mean, it says it, so we just simply take it at face value. The problem with doing that is that the Torah is not literal. The Torah is not a literal Harry Potter book.

4:47history book. There are meanings in every single thing, and one who does not take that into account has lost everything. By that, I mean that if they go on towards the rest of the parasha, they're going to learn many more details, but they're only going to find out what's on the line, and if they get these details wrong in the next parasha... if they get these details wrong in the next parasha that we have this week, which is Parashat Ki Tavo, where it first tells us to follow the Torah, to learn Torah, to observe the Torah and the commandments. But if we don't, He gives us several dozen verses full of the worst possible threats you could ever imagine. Things that, literally, you wouldn't even want to happen to your enemies would happen to somebody that gets this answer wrong. Why? Because if you get this answer wrong, that means you are incapable of following the Torah, and

5:57because you're not sure who you're following. It's the very basis of the Torah. If it says Shabbat for God, but it doesn't mean Shabbat for God, yet you think it's Shabbat for God, you have a very serious fundamental problem. And that problem could be very costly, as the Torah says that if you do not accept My word and will not perform all of these commandments, and you will despise My statutes, your soul rejects My ordinances, and you do not perform all My commandments, so that you violate My covenant. I too will do this to you, meaning the deal is off, the protection is off, the sustenance is off—all of the good things that a person wants from God. The deal is off. And if that's not enough to get a person to change, God continues to give us more warnings of things that would happen. things that have happened to us multiple times throughout history, whether it's strengthening the enemy to the point where the enemy became superior over us, or it's stopping the rain, stopping the money coming in, stopping the food coming in, destroying the crops in the fields, or if it's simply

7:26losing all blessings from all places, whether inside the home or outside of the home, and that's even before Hashem says that He will exact retribution for you, where He'll actually take revenge against those people with a plague, with war, with famine, a fury of decrees will be put on those that violate the covenant, destroying everything and anything relevant to them. We're literally removing them from the earth, but in a very painful and slow process. Now, anyone that wants to know more details about it, perhaps we'll have some time to do some more later, but you could also watch some of my other lectures about Parashat Bechukotai. We have to go back to how we get this to stop. I don't want to get threatened by God. I don't want to go to Gehinnom. I certainly don't want to live Gehinnom in this world. So obviously, I’ve got to get this question right. What does it mean?

8:35Shabbat for God, what does it mean, "anything for God"? When it says "for God," does it mean for God like you would say to your wife or your husband, "this is for you," as in you did this for them, or does it mean something else? As I've mentioned to you in the past, the Targum is something that we got at Mount Sinai as Moshe Rabbeinu... spoke to the people of Israel, teaching them the Torah. He also interpreted the Torah for them, and that's called a Targum. Onkelos, the righteous convert from a couple of thousand years ago, made this much more popular again after a period of time when it became less common. It used to be that the person reading from a Torah scroll would read, and then there would be somebody that would do the Targum at the same time. allowing the entire community to not only hear the Torah but also understand what's being said. So the Targum is very much a foundation of the Torah that we got at Mount Sinai and not something that was written a thousand or fifteen hundred years later like other parts of the Torah that were oral and then later on put in, and pay, you know, ink to paper. So the Targum of Onkelos gives us the insight, and Onkelos says

10:01every single time that you will see in the Torah where it says anything remotely close to "for Hashem" or something referencing that Hashem would have any type of physical feelings or any physical attributes, he always clarifies what it means with the Targum, and he says in a Shemitah, meaning the Shabbat and the Shemitah, relinquishing before Hashem, not to Hashem, but before Hashem. Why does he do this? Says the Ahavat Yonatan and also the Me'at Tzori, another sefer that we found, Baruch Hashem. that without Onkelos, the Hebrew "leHashem," which translates literally to "for Hashem," might be misinterpreted to imply that the respite in working the land is needed by Him, which is impossible for Hashem. Hashem needs and lacks nothing.

11:17Onkelos, therefore, explains that the verse means that the resting of the Shemitah should be before Hashem and for His sake, not for the sake of improving the land as farmers sometimes do when they leave a field to lie fallow for a season. So Onkelos says this, and then Rashi follows and Onkelos is explaining that the land shall rest for the sake of Hashem, rather than to increase the output, meaning that there would be a benefit in letting the land rest. As we discussed last night, the Gemara says that if somebody has a field, he shouldn't plant on the entire field but rather only on half of it, because that will allow one half to recover and and one half to produce. The following year, the one that recovered will produce double what it would typically produce. And then the one that produced the first year will rest. In this way, the land will not only produce and stay healthy but actually produce more as a result of this process than if you had planted in the entire field. So many times, people say, "Okay, yeah, I'll keep the Shemitah because it's actually good for my land."

12:41So the Torah says, no, no, no, you're not supposed to do it, not supposed to do this mitzvah because it's good for your land. Although that's a reality, it's still not the reason we do the mitzvah. You're doing this for the sake of Hashem, meaning in order to follow His mitzvot. Not because He needs it, because that's impossible, as the sages say. God needs nothing, but rather, this is your way of serving your Creator and fulfilling His commandments because that's your job. That's your role in the world. The master, the king, does not need the servant, but the servant needs the king. so here we see that a couple of sages were just added to the list of a slew of sages that we already have that have clarified this big question, or at least what seems to be a big question for some people, of Hashem not being literally for Hashem.

13:47Abdu'l-Mahdi is the Creator of the world.