Foundation of the Subject
Now, I want to introduce here an important point that you have to understand if you’re going to fulfill this subject properly. And that is that it’s not only a matter of laws, of the nitty-gritty details that the Torah demands of us in being careful with our fellow man. Because you have to understand why it’s so; why is it so that our fellow man deserves such great care, such tremendous deference? And I’m going to make an attempt to explain that in the time we have left because it is a very important part of the subject.
So some people who think in a superficial way, they say because otherwise how could society survive? It’s the best thing for everyone if there are laws and rules and details. It’s good if there are batei dinim and judges who make peace between people by applying the Torah laws. That’s how society functions best.
Don’t you see today what’s doing outside when the wicked judges and politicians stopped enforcing the laws? Look; if you stand on the street today and a taxi passes by you, you’ll notice there’s a glass wall, a complete wall between the driver and the passenger. Now how long ago was that instituted? When I was a boy they didn’t have a thing like that in a single taxi.
When I was a boy, none of the stores had metal grating to protect the windows of the stores. In those days, you could walk through the streets in a poor neighborhood at night. I was sitting on a bus recently and behind me were sitting two Italian laborers from Canarsie; laborers, tough guys. And one said, “You know Billie, there was once a time I used to go walking at night here with my wife. But I don’t go out anymore on the streets at night.” And he was a tough guy, not a little fellow. And so you see before your eyes the difference when there are batei dinim that make sure nobody wrongs a fellow. And so you might say that’s why the Torah is so makpid on how careful you are with your fellow, because that’s the best thing for society.
Honoring Hashem
And that’s true, but it’s not it — it’s more than that, much more. There’s a very strong foundation that is holding up this entire subject and we’ll explain it now. The mishna in Avos (4:1) says like this: הו∆יז≈‡ „ָּבּכו¿מ – Who is called a man who deserves honor? ֹ̇ויƒר¿ּבַה ̇∆‡ „≈ּבַכ¿ּמַה – If he honors his fellow man. That’s an honored man. You hear that? Who is called honored in the Torah? Someone who honors his fellow man.
Now, you can give different definitions of what it means to ‘honor’. You’re polite to people. You say thank you to people. You never say mean words. If they greet you, you answer them. You encourage them, you praise them. You help them when they need something. Very good. Excellent. But the minimum is that you’re careful with him; you won’t hurt him, you won’t steal from him or cheat him or damage his property. That’s the basics of honoring your fellow man.
So Hashem says, “If you do that you’re honored by Me. I’ll give you honor.” And the mishna brings a proof from a possuk: רַמ¡‡∆ּנ∆ׁ ̆ – Like it says, יַ„¿ּבַכ¿מ יƒּכ„≈ּבַכֲ‡ – ‘Those who honor Me, I shall honor.’
Honoring Who?
But there’s a big question here because what proof is that from the possuk? ‘Those who honor Me’ we understand means that when you come to the beis haknesses you walk in politely. You don’t talk divrei chol. You behave respectfully, you don’t yawn, you don’t stretch your arms. Alright, that’s יַ„¿ּבַכ¿מ – that’s honoring Hashem. But here we’re trying to bring a proof that if you honor your fellow man, Hashem will honor you. And the possuk says “If you honor Me, I’ll honor you.” Is that called honoring Me?
Yes! The answer is that when you honor someone that’s called honoring Me. Only that we have to understand why that is so. And so we’ll go back to the beginning of the Torah. ̇∆‡ הָׂ ָ̆ﬠ יםƒ ֹ̃ל¡‡ ם∆ל∆ˆ¿ּב יƒּכ םָ„ָ‡ָה – Man is created in the image of Hashem. Man is so great that when the malachim first saw him, וׁ ̆¿ ̃ƒּבהָירƒׁ ̆ יוָנָפ¿ל רַמֹלו יםƒכָ‡¿לַּמַה – they wanted to sing before him the same song that they sang before Hashem every day. They wanted to say, “Kadosh! Kadosh! Kadosh!” They were so amazed by man’s greatness that they made a mistake and they thought, “That’s Hashem!”
And where does that greatness come from? חַּפƒיַו יוָּפַ‡¿ּב – Hashem breathed into man’s nostrils, ַ̇מ¿ׁ ̆ƒנ יםƒּיַח – a neshama that would live forever. Because ן‡ַמ חַפָנ יה≈ילƒּ„ƒמ חַפָנ¿„ –when you breath into somebody else, you breath from yourself. Hashem breathed of Himself, kaviyochol, into man and therefore in every person there’s an endless fountain of greatness.
Angelic Sight
Now when we see a man, we see nothing. There are ears sticking out from his head; it’s quite comical — two ears sticking out. He has two holes in his nose. We look down on man because his chitzoniyus, his exteriority deceives us. And therefore it’s easy to think “so what if you mistreat an adam?”. Of course, it’s not a nice thing, of course you won’t do such a thing on purpose, but after all he’s just 180 pounds of protoplasm.
But the malachim, they look beyond the exteriority and they see what’s inside of adam. And they are amazed because they see something that resembles Hakadosh Boruch Hu; they see his innate greatness. So much so that they made that error; they wanted to say shirah.
Now we shouldn’t take this error lightly because malachim are יםƒרֹוּבƒּ‚ םָּלֻּכ יםƒרּרו¿ּב םָּלֻּכ יםƒבהוֲ‡ םָּלֻּכ. They’re the whole aleph beis of perfection and these gifted creatures, they recognized the immense greatness of man. And the story is said for us. It’s repeated in order we should know we have to aim for that; we have to know what an adam really is.
Gadlus HaAdam
We’re not talking about an oived avodah zara, a corrupt person of today, but the original man — he’s without Torah, without tefillah, without tefillin, without Shabbos, without kashrus; he’s not commanded in mitzvos — and this man, we have to understand that he stands all alone on the surface of the earth. He outweighs, he’s more important than the vast remoteness of space and the stars beyond the Milky Way, a huge world much bigger than the sun and there’s so many of them that when they’re together in the distance it looks like a sea of light. And each drop is a huge world! There are galaxies there. And all that is less important than that one man.
Now that is something that we have to think about all our lives before it can sink in. And don’t think that people didn’t understand that. There are certain places where the subject was studied at length. In Slabodka, the Alter zichrono livracha of Slabodka spoke for forty years on the subject of gadlus ha’adam.
When the Alter was saying farewell to the yeshivaleit in Slabodka so he was sitting at the window of the train and the train began moving. He was talking to his talmidim and they were walking on the platform alongside the train while it was moving. Along came a big Lithuanian policeman and he was waving them away. So the Alter said like this: “Mir viln em grois machen uber er lozt nisht – we're trying to make him great but he won't let us.” Slabodka was trying to make mankind great. In Slabodka you talked about tzelem Elokim all the time. “We're trying to make him great but he doesn’t let us.” They would rather imagine they’re frogs, monkeys. They don’t want to hear it. But we, at least we, should hear it. Man is infinitely great! Every man! Every woman! Every child!
The Stepping Stone
Now, I understand that these words don’t find an echo in your minds immediately. Especially today, it takes a big wrench for us to divorce our minds from the world’s attitudes. Of course today the world is full of apikorsus, but even before the apikorsim gained control of the press and the schools that they have today, it was impossible without labor, hard work to gain that concept of the greatness of adam.
But you must understand that it’s part of the Torah—I say ‘part’; it’s all of the Torah — and so it has to be learned. It’s expected of us to plant this seed in our minds and nurture it. And as the years go by, it’ll take root and it’ll produce branches and fruit because the result of this information is tremendous. It’s a yesod hayesodos of Torah, the knowledge of the greatness of mankind.
But not only is it an important attitude in its own right, it’s a stepping stone. That’s the point here. This yesod is a foundation for all of the dinim bein adam l’chaveiro. It’s not poetry. It’s not theory and abstraction. It’s not idealism. No! That’s what it really is. A man is the image of Hashem and we’re expected to act towards a man as if he was a reflection of Hashem, which he is. He’s a magnificent creature, something infinitely great, and that’s why we have an infinite responsibility towards him. Hakadosh Baruch Hu Himself put upon that little man, that bundle of nerves and flesh and muscle, the seal of tzelem Elokim and we have to respect the man because of Him.
Holy Faces
You’re going to mistreat a tzelem Elokim? You have to know you’re mistreating Hashem. That’s what the Gemara in Sanhedrin (58b) says. ֹעוֹלו ר≈טֹוּסַה ל≈‡ָר¿ׂ ̆ƒי ל∆ׁ ̆ – If you give somebody a slap in the face, הָינƒכ¿ׁ ̆ ל∆ׁ ̆ ֹעוֹלו ר≈טֹסוּוּלƒ‡¿ּכ – you’re slapping Hashem in the face! That’s not poetry! It’s real!
I was once as a boy on Simchas Torah in the synagogue. They were dancing around in a ring and then one man had an altercation with the man next to him — something happened between them — so he gave a slap while they’re dancing Simchas Torah. Now had he dropped the Torah, ooh! What a tragedy! He dropped the Torah! Everyone would come fast. They would ask shailos who should fast, when, what to do, how much tzedaka to give. But he gave him a slap? Nothing. A slap is a thousand times worse than dropping a Sefer Torah! You’re slapping Hakadosh Boruch Hu in the face. That’s what the Torah means םָ„ָ‡ָה ̇∆‡ הָׂ ָ̆ﬠ יםƒ ֹ̃ל¡‡ ם∆ל∆ˆ¿ּב יƒּכ. That’s how you have to respect a man’s face.
A Tzaddik’s Breath
But not only a slap. A slap is terrible of course. Only a meshugene would slap another Jew. A meshugas. But even if you mistreat someone in other ways. You walk on his grass. You overcharge him. You hurt him. You use his chair like it’s a ride. You stick your foot out in the aisle where he might fall. You keep him up at night because of your talking, your laughing. There are thousands of things! It’s most of the Torah living! One of our biggest functions in life is to make people great, to recognize the greatness of human beings so much that we want to be careful with them.
I’ll tell you something, a story. You might think it’s unimportant but I think it’s very important. I knew a tzaddik whose head was in the heavens all the time; his mind was always occupied with great thoughts and yet I noticed that he never spoke to anybody unless he perfumed his mouth first.
You know if someone is careless and he’s talking to somebody sometimes he lets loose a flow of polluted air from his mouth. Oh, is it difficult to bear that halitosis! Now, he’s too polite to run away from you, but you’re a mazik. You’re annoying him. But this man, I watched him carefully and I saw that for years he carried a little packet of Listerine pellets in his pocket. He never came to speak to anybody unless first he perfumed his mouth.
Living Idealism
Why? I knew him very well and he was a man who lived with the ideals of tzelem Elokim. He knew that every adam is a tzelem Elokim, and he didn’t want to do anything, the smallest thing even, to make his fellow man uncomfortable.
That’s a man who understands the lesson of our parsha, of the foundation that came before Matan Torah — you have to treat your fellow man with respect because it’s not a man; it’s tzelem Elokim, that’s how great he is. Once you understand that you’ll treat him and his feelings and his property with the greatest deference!
And that’s what the Torah requires of us. It’s Torah! Not only it’s Torah — it’s kol haTorah kulah in a nutshell. And once you understand that rule you’re ready for Kabolas HaTorah. Only that הָׁ ּ̆רו≈ּפ¿ךׇ„יƒ‡ – there’s a very big peirush on that rule, רֹמ¿ּ‚ ילƒז– and so get busy learning the peirush.
Have a Wonderful Shabbos
