Miller's Musings Parshas Noach: Arise From The Depths

בס''ד

This week’s Miller’s Musings is sponsored:

 יחיאל בן אלעזר יוסף  לעילוי נשמת

There are those that see religion as the root of all evil and conflict in the world, when in truth it has less to do with religion and more to do with the pursuit of power.  The downfall of the generation before the flood was due to their obsession with material gain leading to violence, robbery and a general state of anarchy.  The devastation began with the waters pouring forth from “the springs of the great depths”.  Rashi tells us that this was a case of Middoh Keneged Middoh, the punishment paralleling the sin that it resulted from.  The people sinned ‘greatly’ so the flood began in the ‘great’ depths. Reb Yeruchom Levovitz asks what the exact parallel in fact was?  The greatness of the depths was qualitative, whereas the greatness of their sinning was surely in quantity, the vast amount of wrongs they had committed?

As is often the case, the answer lies in understanding that the question is based on a false premise, in this case that a multitude of sins only produces a quantitative increase, when actually this is not the case.  Reb Yeruchom explains that the difference between a person transgressing once and multiple times, is not just the additional transgressions, it also changes the very nature of that sin.  When a person falls once, the wrongdoing has a particular negative quality to it, but as a person falls prey to his Yetzer Horah and repeats this failing, the nature of the sin changes and becomes more than just the sum of its repeated misdeeds.  The very fact that the offence has been perpetrated a number of times changes the kind of sin that it is, giving it a new status as a ‘sin committed many times’, rather than a one-off lapse in standards.  The terrible qualitative ‘great’ damage caused by the buildup of sin after sin of this immoral generation, was punished by the waters that sprung forth from the ‘greatest’ depths.

In essence none of us like to sin.  We would all prefer to live our lives in a way that would bring pride to ourselves, our families and of course Hashem.  But when we slip up we sometimes lose focus and lose faith in ourselves.  We feel that it makes no difference if we sin a bit more once we have already started doing that which is wrong.  This is a tragic mistake however, because each additional lapse of our character does not just add on to our tally of sins, it creates a new and more potent version of those sins and damages our true essence in ways that are much more than the cumulative sum of those transgressions.  Never let yourself slide down in this way due to an apathy created by feelings of failure.  Rather move on from your mistakes, embrace the possibility of redemption and strive higher to a new beginning far away from the depths that could otherwise have awaited us.  

*May the holiness of Shabbos illuminate our path to greatness*

לעילוי נשמת לאה בת אברהם   

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