פרשת בחקתי

If you will do my decrees and, observe my commandments and perform them…

            This week’s פרשה starts off by telling us that if we follow (go) in ה'’s ways we will be זוכה to all the rewards in the upcoming פסוקים. רשי translates the phrases בחקתי תלכו as meaning אמילים בתורה, people who toil in תורה. Why are we describing studying תורה as studying the laws of חוקים? חוקים are not well known and have lots of hidden meanings, shouldn’t we be describing תורה by the מצות that we are able to understand?

            One answer to the questions above may be because we can work our entire lives studying the תורה and trying to figure out all the intricacies and secrets that are hidden and NEVER come close to understanding it fully.

            To clear this up I want to bring a “modern” example. Take ourselves. We live in this world, go to school, and do all the things that we do in our daily lives without even really thinking about it. To be honest most of us take these for granted. We ASSUME that when we wake up in the morning we are going to have breakfast in our cabinets. We ASSUME that when we go to school, we are going to have competent teachers (for the most part). There are all these things in our lives that we have gotten used to having. Let me ask you a question, where do all of these things come from? In short the answer is, we REALLY have no idea. We have no idea what it takes to make the cars that we drive, the roads that we drive on, even the food that we eat. But if we learn how to do some of these things, we take on planting a garden, we learn mechanics, we start to become more able to understand the things around us and how they run.

            This, I believe is similar to what the פסוק and the רשי are saying. In order to get the rewards that are in store for us we need to work to understand the תורה. We as Jewish people are never stagnant, we are either growing towards ה' or falling away. As long as we are working on finding these treasures we will be זוכה to live the lives that we were promised.

Have a Great Shabbos

Yoni Spigelman