We learn from here the great power of a character trait. It has the ability to cloud a person's judgment and to bring even the most righteous of people to sin.
Rabbi Yisrael Salanter ZT”L used to explain that fear of Heaven alone is not sufficient to prevent a person from sin, since the trait of “Desire” has the power to confuse and cloud his judgment. Therefore, we cannot be satisfied with fear of Heaven alone. We must work on our ourselves to fix our character, to remove bad traits from our hearts and to habituate ourselves to good traits, so that the tendency to act according to our natural traits will not cloud our judgment and bring us to see falsehood as truth, and vice versa.
The Baal HaTurim comments that the final Hebrew letters of each of the first three words of the Torah (Beraishis(ת) Bara (א) Elokim (ם)) can be rearranged to spell, “Emes” – truth. This alludes to the fact that Hashem created the world with Divine Truth, as it says, “The beginning of your word is Truth.” (Tehillim 119:160) One may ask, if the beginning of Hashem’s word is Truth, shouldn’t Hashem have chosen to start the Torah with words that place the allusion to Emes in the beginning letters of each of the first three words? The answer to this question may be illustrated by the following story.
During the infamous Cantonist Decree, the Russian army would force young Jewish boys to serve for many years in the army. This was especially hard on Jewish children, who were often given the most dangerous jobs and were pressured to give up their Jewish faith. To protect their children from being taken, Jewish families in Russia did everything they could to keep them out of the army.
In one village, there was a butcher who discovered that his son might be drafted. Every community had to provide four recruits for every thousand people who lived there. Instead of letting his son be taken, the butcher made a terrible choice. He bribed local officials to send an orphan boy who was studying in Yeshiva to take his son's place. The orphan had no one to advocate on his behalf and so, he was drafted and taken into the army.
When the other Jewish people in the village found out what the butcher had done, they were very upset. Some people wondered how Hashem could allow something so unfair to happen to an orphan. When the Chofetz Chaim heard about this situation and the questioning of Hashem’s ways, he simply answered, "Wait."
Time passed - five years, then ten years, then twenty years. During this time, the butcher and his son seemed to be doing very well. However, after more than 25 years, something unexpected happened. The butcher's son got very sick with a dangerous illness called cholera, which affects the intestines and is highly contagious. When he died, the Chevrah Kadisha (Jewish burial society) was too afraid to handle his body because they were afraid that they might catch the disease. As a result, the butcher had to bury his own son by himself, using his own shovel, because no one else would come near the body.
The story teaches us that even though we might not understand why unfair things happen at first, that is because we do not have the full picture of what will transpire.
Getting back to our question, that is why Hashem chose to place the allusion to Emes in the letters at the end of each of the first three words of the Torah. We often see the Emes of Hashem’s ways only in retrospect, at the end, when we have the full picture of what has transpired. Only then do we realize the justice and perfection of His ways.
