A Head Full of Chesed

By Rabbi Moshe Krieger, Yeshivas Bircas HaTorah (www.bircas.org)

In this week’s parsha, the Torah tells us something surprising. A convert from Ammon or Moav can never marry into Klal Yisrael. As the pasuk says, “an Ammonite or a Moabite may never enter the congregation of Hashem, forever” (Devarim 23:4). This is very different from the way the Torah treats other nations. A convert from Mitzrayim or from Edom may marry in after three generations. But from Ammon and Moav, never. Why are they treated so harshly?

The pasuk gives two reasons. When Klal Yisrael left Mitzrayim, Ammon and Moav would not let them pass through their land, and they did not come out to greet them “with bread and water on the way” (Devarim 23:5). Worse, they hired Bilam to curse them and destroy them. Because of this coldness, they can never come into Klal Yisrael.

The Ramban (23:4) asks a strong question. Many nations refused to let Klal Yisrael pass through their land. Why single out Ammon and Moav? He answers that of all people, they owed Klal Yisrael a tremendous debt of gratitude. Ammon and Moav descended from Lot, and Avraham Avinu had given himself over completely to save him. When Lot was captured in the war of the kings, Avraham risked everything to rescue him. The children of Lot should have felt a special closeness to the children of Avraham. Instead, they showed the very opposite.

But there’s still something hard to understand. Lot himself was a man of great chesed — kindness. He learned to welcome guests in Avraham’s home, and he gave himself over for it. In Sedom, a place where kindness was treated as a crime, he still brought guests into his house. The Midrash tells us that his own daughter gave bread to a poor man and was killed for it. How did such a family fall so far? How did the children of Lot become so cold that they couldn’t even offer bread and water to a passing nation?

Rav Aharon Kotler explains with a sharp point. Lot was a man of great chesed, but it was only imitation. He saw Avraham doing chesed, so he did chesed too. But it didn’t come from a real desire for the other person’s good. Inside, there wasn’t genuine care for the guest. And chesed that’s only on the outside doesn’t last. It doesn’t pass down to the next generation. This is how a family that once produced a Lot could, a few generations later, produce a nation with no kindness at all.

The Madnei Shmuel adds another layer. Why, specifically at that moment, did Ammon and Moav act this way? The pasuk in Bamidbar tells us they were afraid of Klal Yisrael (Bamidbar 22:3). But afraid of what? Rashi (Devarim 2:9) says they weren’t afraid of war — they knew Klal Yisrael had been commanded not to fight against them. So what were they so afraid of? Something small. Maybe that Klal Yisrael would make them work, or take their money. They had just seen the strength Klal Yisrael showed against Sichon and Og, and they worried that strength might be turned against them somehow.

But this was pure imagination. Klal Yisrael had no such plan. They only wanted to pass through the land on their way to Eretz Yisrael. Yet Ammon and Moav’s minds were filled with fear.

That fear pushed everything else out. This is really the heart of the matter. Their minds should have been filled with one thought: Avraham did so much for our ancestor — how can I do good for his descendants? Instead, their minds were filled with fear and suspicion, and there was no room left to think about helping anyone.

Chesed is a very essential part of the world. The Nefesh HaChaim writes that Hashem created the entire world so that people could do chesed for one another. Hashem Himself acts with chesed, and He wants us to follow in His ways. As the pasuk says, “the world is built with chesed” (Tehillim 89:3).

Rabbeinu Yona (Shaarei T’shuva 3:13) adds that Hashem doesn’t just want isolated acts of chesed. He wants us to love chesed. The pasuk asks, “What does Hashem want from you? Only to do justice, and to love chesed” (Michah 6:8). Loving chesed means genuinely wanting the other person’s good — not simply doing something for him, but truly caring about his welfare. Rabbeinu Yona says that this takes real thought.

Each person needs something different. One person needs money, another needs the right connections, another simply needs some encouragement. Some people you have to think deeply about — what exactly is he lacking, and how can you help him. And often you can’t help a person directly; he won’t accept it that way, so it has to be done indirectly. It takes real thought to figure out what someone is missing and how to give it to him. But a person who puts that thought into it will come up with beautiful ways to help — ways he would never have thought of otherwise.

The greatest example I ever saw of this was my father-in-law, Rabbi Elimelech Meller. He was a true genius, but what stood out about him even more was this: his mind was always on how to help the next person. Whoever he met, he greeted with a big smile, asked how they were doing, gave them his blessing, and if he had some advice, he gave that too. He always tried to lift a person’s spirits, often with a short Torah thought.

Once, a man learning full-time in kollel asked if he could learn with him. My father-in-law never turned him down. He told the man to come to his house that night, after the kollel’s evening seder. Before the man arrived, he quietly set the whole table with cake and drinks. When the man asked why he had prepared all this, he said, “How can you learn without eating first? You’re coming straight from kollel — you must be hungry.”

At a wedding once, he was asked to move up and sit with more distinguished guests. He refused. “I can’t make the people I’m sitting with now feel that I left them for someone better,” he said.

When he was asked to test his grandson on the whole Tractate of Baba Metzia  he tested him only on the part he knew well. He said “I don’t want him to get discouraged”. After he tested him he praised him, and built him up with encouragement no one expected.

When his wife passed away, in his grief he said something I can never forget: “When I had a wife, I had someone to do good for. Now who do I have to do good for?” His whole life was about finding someone to help.

This is one of the great themes of Elul. Elul is a time of teshuvah — repentance — but it’s also a time to strengthen bein adam lachaveiro, our relationships with other people. The mashgichim point out that the name Elul hints at “ani ledodi vedodi li” — I am for my Beloved and my Beloved is for me — our closeness to Hashem. But it also hints at “ish lereieihu umatanos la’evyonim” — each person giving to his fellow and to the poor. Hashem wants us to strengthen our bein adam lachaveiro especially now, during these very days.

The mashgichim of Kelm worked hard on this. They would say: greet everyone, and greet them with a warm, open face, really thinking about the other person as you do. Rav Chaim Shmuelevitz used to say that bein adam lachaveiro is never forgiven — not even on Yom Kippur. Even when we do teshuvah, we still have to go make things right with our friend.

May we be zocheh to strengthen our bein adam lachaveiro, to truly want the good of every person, and to have a meaningful Elul.