פרשת כי תבוא תשכ"ג - הפטרה

Arise, shine, for thy light is come, And the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee.

Arise, shine, for thy light is come, And the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee.

בא אורך Thy light is come, if taken in a good sense; but I think that it means thy light has set, and it has become dark; that is,²The Hebrew text has the word במו, which can be translated as if to say, or that is, but usually it introduces some quotation from the Bible; very probably it was originally followed by the words בי בא השמש because the sun was set (Gen. 28:11). the evening is come, and the light which has shone for thee hitherto, is gone, but in its stead the glory of the Lord will henceforth shine over thee; comp. The sun shall be no more thy light by day, etc. (ver. 19). By the words Shine, etc., the restoration of the kingdom of Israel, or of the prophecy is meant.

For, behold, darkness shall cover the earth, And gross darkness the peoples; But upon thee the LORD will arise, And His glory shall be seen upon thee.

Then thou shalt see and be radiant, And thy heart shall throb and be enlarged; Because the abundance of the sea shall be turned unto thee, The wealth of the nations shall come unto thee.

Surely the isles shall wait for Me, And the ships of Tarshish first, To bring thy sons from far, Their silver and their gold with them, For the name of the LORD thy God, And for the Holy One of Israel, because He hath glorified thee.

And thou shalt speak and say before the LORD thy God: ‘A wandering Aramean was my father, and he went down into Egypt, and sojourned there, few in number; and he became there a nation, great, mighty, and populous.

ארמי אבד אבי A SYRIAN DESTROYED MY FATHER — He mentions the loving kindness of the Omnipresent saying, ארמי אבד אבי, a Syrian destroyed my father, which means: “Laban wished to exterminate the whole nation” (cf. the Haggadah for Passover) when he pursued Jacob. Because he intended to do it the Omnipresent accounted it unto him as though he had actually done it (and therefore the expression אבד which refers to the past is used), for as far as the nations of the world are concerned the Holy One, blessed be He, accounts unto them intention as an actual deed (cf. Sifrei Devarim 301:3; Onkelos).

lost is an intransitive verb. If the Aramean referred to Lavan, then the verb would be in the transitive hif‘il or pi‘el form. Besides, what sense is there to say, “Lavan tried to destroy my forefather, and he went down to Egypt”? Lavan never considered going down to Egypt! The plausible interpretation is that the Aramean refers to Yaaqov, as if Scripture had said, “When my forefather was in Aramea, he was lost” — meaning, he was a pauper, without property. Compare, “give strong drink to him who is lost” [Proverbs 31: 6], where it is immediately followed by, “let him drink, and forget his poverty” [Proverbs 31: 7]. Thus the lost Aramean was my forefather. The intent of this passage is: I did not inherit this land from my forefather, for he was a pauper when he came to Aramea, and he was a stranger in Egypt, where he was few in number. Afterwards, he became a great nation; and you, God , brought us out of slavery, and gave us the good land. Do not object to Yaaqov’s being called an Aramean, since similar apellations can be found. Consider “Yeter the Ishmaelite” [I Chronicles 2: 17], even though he was really an Israelite (for so it is written [II Samuel 17: 25]).

ארמי אובד אבי, my father, i.e. Yaakov, who was for a while a wandering lost person without a home of his own, was not at the time able to establish a nation deserving or fit to inherit this land.

ארמי אובד אבי, as if the Torah had written” my father Avraham was an Aramite, lost, and exiled from his birthplace Aram.” G’d had told him in Genesis 12,1 “go forth for yourself from your homeland, etc.” Later on, Avraham himself relates to Avimelech the king of the Philistines, (Genesis 20,13) that G’d had made him wander, away from his father’s house, etc. The meaning of the word אובד here is similar to תועה, the root Avraham used to describe wandering without specific objective, almost like walking because one is lost. The word occurs clearly in that sense in Psalms 119,176 תעיתי כשה אובד בקש עבדך, “I have strayed like a lost sheep; search for Your servant, etc.!” We also find the word in this connotation in Jeremiah 50,6 עמי רועיהם התעום, “My people were lost sheep; their shepherd led them astray.” In other words, the recital by the farmer goes back to the Jewish people’s origin, the farmer saying: ‘our forefathers came to this land from an alien country and now G’d has given it to us.