“כִּי תֵצֵא לַמִּלְחָמָה עַל אֹיְבֶיךָ וּנְתָנוֹ
יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּיָדֶךָ” “When you will go out to war against
your enemies, and Hashem, your God will deliver him into your hand…” (Devarim 21:10). Our parshah begins
with a grammatically confusing pasuk. The pasuk begins with when the Bnei
Yisrael will go out to war against their enemies, “אֹיְבֶיךָ”. From the fact that there are two
letter “yuds” in this word, we know that the word is a plural. However, later
in the pasuk, it says that Hashem will “deliver him into our hands”, in
the singular tense. Why the change in tense? The medrash says on the later part
of the pasuk that if you keep all the laws in the pesukim that follow, then
Hashem will deliver your enemies into your hands. But those pesukim speak about
the laws of a captive woman and if you are not successful in war then there
will be no captives! So how can fulfilling the laws of a captive make you
successful in war when the war is already over by the time the captives have
been taken?
The Kli Yakar explains that the pasuk is
referring to only one enemy: the Yetzer Hara (the Evil Inclination); the most
dangerous, frightening, and personal enemy a person can have. We see from pesukim in last week’s parsha
that wartime is when he is at his strongest (See commentaries to Devarim 20:1).
The pasuk here is promising that Hashem will help you defeat the Yetzer Hara in
your battle against him. But still the question arises; Rashi explains that the
reason we allow a soldier to bring a woman captive home with him is because the
Yetzer Hara will be too strong to resist so Hashem would rather he do it with
permission. So how can Hashem tell us that He will help us defeat the Yetzer
Hara and then allow us to do something only because our Yetzer is too
strong? If it has already been defeated, what is there to worry about? Where is
Hashem’s promise of victory?
In order to understand this better, let
us go through the laws of a captive woman. When you first bring her home from
battle, you must shave her head and have her grow out her fingernails. She must
not wear fine clothes and she must mourn in your house for her family that she
has left behind. All these measures are taken to insure that you will come to
dislike her (as we did not want her to be taken back from the war in the first
place). The juxtaposition of this topic with the next one, which is someone who
loves one of his wives and hates the other, teaches us that if you do
end up marrying this captive, you will grow to hate her.
The Kli Yakar explains that following
these instructions will help you conquer your Yetzer Hara. Any feelings you
might have had for her during the war will be wiped out by the time she is
finished with her mourning, thereby removing your one remaining desire from
your Yetzer Hara! Chazal tell us that when you battle your Yetzer Hara, if you
cannot defeat him, the final attempt should be to remind yourself of your
eventual death. When you contemplate the fact that one day you will have to
answer for all your deeds in front of the Heavenly Court, you will surely be
able to overcome your current desires and inclinations. When she is mourning
for her family in your house, it becomes a shiva house, a place where you can
be reminded of your mortality on a constant basis.
We can now explain the beginning of the
pasuk as well. The multiple enemies written about at the beginning of the pasuk
are both the external and internal enemies we face when we go to battle. The
reason why the end of the pasuk mentions our defeating only one enemy is
because that in order to defeat our external enemies, we must first defeat our
internal one: the Yetzer Hara. While we are still mired in sin, we cannot hope
to defeat our enemies around us. However, we do have a promise from Hashem to
help us succeed. As long as we begin the battle, Hashem will finish it for us. In
fact, by the physical battle we potentially do not have to do anything at all! Once
we have defeated our Yetzer Hara, Hashem takes charge of our external enemies,
and the war is over before it has even begun.
Currently, we are also in a battle, the
battle of Elul. As we approach Rosh Hashanah, we must prepare ourselves for
judgment. But as we try to get better, our Yetzer Hara tries even harder to
make us slip up and fail. Let us internalize the lesson of this week’s parshah that
as long as we follow the Torah and commit ourselves to becoming better, we have
a guarantee from Hashem that we will succeed; He will battle for us.
However, we must take the first step. If we show Hashem that we are committed
to changing ourselves, only then will He help us defeat the Yetzer Hara. But if
we do make that commitment, then we are guaranteed to succeed.
Shabbat
Shalom!
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