My grandfather, Mordechai Schusterman, passed away in 1995. This Shabbos is his yahrtzeit. He ended off his will with the following:
"The one request I have of my children and grandchildren is that they should not be haughty." (In Yiddish: ניט בלאזן פון זיך don't blow hot air about yourself).
This week's Torah portion, Parshas Behar, opens with a seemingly odd detail. G-d gives Moshe the laws of Shemita, the Sabbatical year, and the Torah goes out of its way to tell us that this happened on Mount Sinai.
Rashi, the classic commentator, asks; All the Torah's laws were given at Sinai, why mention it specifically here?
Sinai itself is teaching us something.
Mount Sinai was the lowest of all the mountains. When the Torah was about to be given, every mountain showed up before Hashem with its credentials. Mt. Tabor said: I'm the tallest. Mt. Carmel said: I helped split the Red Sea. And little Sinai? It just stood there. Hashem chose Sinai. Not despite its smallness, but because of what that smallness represents. Mount Sinai wasn't a valley or flat ground; it was elevated above the terrain around it. It had genuine height and real qualities.
The Rebbe points out that the other mountains weren't wrong to see themselves as elevated. The problem was that they came to G-d boasting about them. "Look at me. Look at what I've got. Give me the Torah because of my greatness."
True bitul, true humble self-awareness, doesn't mean you don't know your own worth. Rav Yosef in the Talmud said, "Do not teach that humility has ceased, for I am here." He knew he was humble, and he said so out loud and fascinatingly that's not a contradiction. Knowing your qualities while not being driven by them, that's the real thing.
The Torah describes Moshe as "more humble than any person on the face of the earth." And yet Moshe knew he was the one chosen to receive the Torah. He knew his greatness.
How did he hold both?
He understood that his gifts came from Above. If Hashem had given those same qualities to someone else, that person might have done more with them. His humility wasn't false modesty; it was an accurate accounting of where greatness actually comes from.
And because of that humility, he became the vessel through whom the Torah was given to the world.
My grandfather wasn't a Rabbi; he was a printer and worked hard. He also merited to read the Torah for the Rebbe in 770 for close to 39 years. He knew struggle and hard times. And yet, the single ask he put in his will was: don't be haughty.
That's Mount Sinai.
Humbleness is the prerequisite for receiving the Torah. (Shavuot is coming up in two weeks www.harfordchabad.org/shavuot)
Is there a relationship in your life where your ego is in the way? A conversation you haven't had because it would require admitting you were wrong? A person you've been looking down on, even subtly?
Sinai teaches that the way up is actually down. That the vessel for the greatest thing in the world, the Torah itself, was the smallest mountain. My grandfather, who lived that lesson in his own modest, devoted life, left it as the only inheritance that really matters.
Good Shabbos,
Rabbi Kushi Schusterman
P.S. Rabbi Heschel is giving a class in Pirkei Avos, Ethics of our Fathers, every Shabbos morning at 9:15 am between now and Shavuos. It's the ultimate guide to the nurturing very qualities my grandfather was talking about. Come join and learn with us.