By Rabbi Moshe Pogrow
“Vayehi ra’av ba’aretz.” With these words, we begin a story that at first seems strange. Avraham left the land Hashem had promised him. He did not rely on Hashem, Who provides for people in the wilderness, and it appears that he even compromised the welfare of his wife to save himself!
Yet even if we concluded, as the Ramban does, that “Avraham Avinu inadvertently committed a grave sin by placing his virtuous wife before a stumbling block of iniquity because of his fear of being killed...[and] leaving the land about which he had been commanded because of the famine was another sin”—nevertheless, it would not perplex us. The Torah does not try to portray our great men as perfect. It does not present the life of any one person as an ideal from which to learn right from wrong: when the Torah wishes to give us a model, it gives us Hashem Himself.
The Torah is not an anthology of good deeds. It tells stories not because they are necessarily worthy of copying, but because they happened.
The Torah does not hide from us the faults and weaknesses of our great men, and this is exactly what gives its stories credibility. Knowledge of their errors does not detract from their stature; on the contrary, it adds to it, making their life stories even more instructive. Had they been portrayed as free of passions and inner conflict, their virtues would have seemed to us as merely the consequence of their loftier nature, not acquired by personal merit, and certainly no model we could ever hope to emulate.
Take, for example, the humility of Moshe Rabbeinu. Had we not known that he was capable of anger, we would have assumed that his humility was an inborn trait, not within our capacity to emulate. It is his outburst of “Shimu na hamorim!” that makes us understand his true greatness: we thus realize that he acquired humility through hard work, self-control, and self-refinement, and that we are all obligated to emulate him, since it is within our capacity to do so.
Also, the Torah relates no sin or error without telling us of its consequences. Let us learn from our great teachers of Torah—among whom the Ramban is certainly one of the most outstanding—that we must never attempt to whitewash the spiritual and moral heroes of our past. They do not need our apologetics, nor would they tolerate such attempts on our part. Emes, truth, is the seal of our Torah, and truthfulness is the guiding principle of its teachers.
Based on the commentary of Rav Shamshon Raphael Hirsch zt”l on Chumash, with permission from the publisher.
