 |
 |
|
|
Let us learn a posuk with Rashi
"I sent messengers… to Sichon king of Heshbon, words of peace, and I said:" (2: 26).
Rashi comments: "Although God did not command me to send the messengers and to make overtures of peace toward Sichon, I learned [to do so] from what we received in the wilderness of Sinai, that is from the Torah that itself preceded the creation of the world. When God came to give the Torah to Yisrael, he first took it to Esau and Yishmael. It was clear that they would not accept the Torah. Nonetheless, He made a special gesture of peace toward them. I too (Moshe), went to Sichon with words of peace."
Rashi provides Moshe's justification for calling to peace. God had previously told Moshe: "I have delivered [to you] Sichon the king of Heshbon the Amorite, and his land; begin to drive him out and provoke war with him..." (2: 24). " The explicit directive of God does not seem to leave room for friendly words or an invitation to peace. That gesture was Moshe's own addition to history.
Moshe (in Rashi) defends himself by explaining that he learned the importance of sending messengers with words of peace from the actions of God himself at the time of the giving of the Torah (according to a famous medrash). Rashi understands God's behavior in the medrash as consistent with Moshe's action here. God knew that giving of the Torah to Yisrael would be a divisive act: other peoples would be jealous and that would bring about new tensions and difficulties in history. This is true generally of human nature. Sometimes, even though we don't desire a particular thing for ourselves, we feel distress when someone else comes to posses it. Esau and Yishmael did not want any part of the Torah. (In the medrash, they complain that it does not accommodate their lifestyles and mores.) However, God knew that they would still be jealous of the presentation of the Torah to Yisrael had voiced their unqualified acceptance of Torah immediately. God only offered the Torah to the rejecters to demonstrate that their jealousy toward the people who accepted the Torah is unfounded.
Moshe was commanded to go to war with Sichon. War is obviously the opposite of peace—peace and war rhetoric being mutually exclusive. Yet Moshe thought that there was a principle involved. Even if we must go to war there needs to be, he thought, efforts made in the direction of peace at the same time. War, we might think, places a kind of moratorium on peace. Quite the contrary, Moshe concluded that though he would go to war obedient to the Divine command, the possibility of peace is always credible: peace must be encouraged and attempted even against the certainty of a Divine imperative to war.
Moshe sent the messengers to Sichon with words of peace though he knew that the war itself was inevitable.
Gut shabbos,
Chaim Brovender
Return to Yeshivat Hamivtar - Orot Lev
|
