“Glimpses no wrongdoing in Jacob, and sees no vice in Israel, God their Lord is with them.”
“This is a nation that rises like the king of beasts, and lifts itself like a lion. It does not lie down until it has devoured its prey and drunk the blood of its kill.” (Numbers 23:21, 24)
The Talmud (Berachoth 7a) discusses the following verse (Psalms 7:12): “God rages every day.” How long does this rage last? But one moment. And how long is one moment? One fifty-eight thousand eight hundred and eighty-eighth part of an hour (1/58, 888th). No creature has ever been able to identify precisely the moment of God’s rage except the wicked Balaam, of whom it is written (Numbers 23:8): “He knows knowledge of the Most High.” How could Balaam, who did not even know the mind of his animal, know the mind of the Most High? The meaning is, therefore, that only he knew how to identify precisely the moment in which the Holy One, blessed be He, is enraged. This is just what the prophet said to Israel (Micah 6:5): “O my people, remember now what Balak king of Moab devised, and what Balaam the son of Beor answered him . . . that you may know the righteous acts of the Lord.”
What does “that you may know the righteous acts of the Lord” mean? R. Eleazar says: “The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Israel, ‘See, now, how many righteous acts I performed for you, in not being angry during the period of the wicked Balaam. For had I been angry, not one remnant would have been left of [the enemies of] Israel.’ ” This too is the meaning of what Balaam said to Balak (Numbers 23:8): ‘How shall I curse, whom God has not cursed? And how shall I execrate, when the Lord has not execrated?’ This teaches us that God was not enraged at all during that period. And how long does his rage last? But one moment. And how long is one moment? R. Abin (some say R. Abina) says, ‘As long as it takes to say rega, “moment.” ’ And how do you know that God’s rage endures only for a moment? For it is written (Psalms 30:6): ‘His rage is but for a rega, moment, while His favor lasts a lifetime.’ ”
Let us understand what R. Abin meant when he said that a rega (moment) is as long as it takes to say rega. He argues with the opinion cited earlier in the passage, that a moment is one fifty-eight thousand eight hundred and eighty-eighth part of an hour, which is a very small amount of time. To maintain that a moment is as long as it takes to say rega means that it all depends on the speed of an individual’s speech. There are those who speak quickly, and those who speak slowly.
God rages every day, but for how long does this anger last? Only a moment. It is an example of God’s loving-kindness that He is angry only for a moment, for who could possibly stand before the wrath of God?
In Parshath Bereshith, the first chapters of Genesis, on the verse (Genesis 1:27) “God created man in His image,” Rashi (ibid.) explains: “Everything else was created at God’s verbal command, while man was brought into existence at God’s hand.”
We have already pondered the meaning of this teaching, for to create with speech seems to be a higher form of creation than to create by hand. How is it that everything else was created at God’s command, while man, who is higher than everything, was created by His hand? As we have explained, the holiness from above does not enter into the essence of the rest of creation but remains in the words of God’s verbal command. With the Jew, however, the holiness reaches into his every action. He is created, so to speak, at the very hands of God, and he is essentially and entirely holy.
This also explains the eternity of the Jewish people. Everything else was created with a verbal command, with God’s speech that is high above, shining upon them only from a great distance. The light is not fixed inside them and does not exist within them; it is like a flash of lightning that illuminates them for a short time. This is not the case, however, with the Jewish people. They were created at God’s hands, and so their holiness is in their makeup. Wherever they are, it exists within them, and so they are eternal. The very physical corpus of the Jew is eternal, because when a person expends his strength for Torah and worship, and he makes a part of Torah and worship out of his body’s energy, his whole body is elevated to the eternal world, existing forever. Only the food he consumed during his lifetime, which was added temporarily to his body, is subsequently lost.
This is the meaning of “God rages for as long as it takes to say rega.” It is all part of God’s loving-kindness that it is just momentary, affecting only those parts of the body that were created by God’s verbal command. The wrath is only in order to purify, whereas if, God forbid, the suffering were drawn out, it would also touch upon that part of the Jew that was created at God’s hands.
This is why the Jewish people have the ability to sustain themselves in their suffering. Right from the beginning, the Jewish person does not fall; he merely lays himself down. But even with the act of laying himself down, he brings down his enemies, because the Jew is created at the hands of God, blessed be He, and His holiness persists into the essential core of the Jewish person. This is what the verses quoted above are hinting at: “God their Lord is with them. . . .”
“This is a nation that rises like the king of beasts.” It gets up again, buttressing and encouraging itself. “It does not lie down until it has devoured its prey and drunk the blood of its kill.” The Jew never falls utterly. At most he will lay himself down, and even then, as he does so, he does more damage to his enemies than to himself. This is why “He rises like the king of beasts.” Even when he is in the most terrible distress, “He lifts himself like a lion.”