We continue with the letter Mem of Chapter 119, arriving at the two verses that conclude it: "How sweet are Your words to my palate" and "From Your precepts I gain understanding." These two verses deal with the taste and meaning found in Torah: the sweet taste revealed to one who delves deeply into its words, and the inner integrity that the Torah implants within a person's heart until he naturally despises falsehood.
מַה־נִּמְלְצוּ לְחִכִּי אִמְרָתֶךָ מִדְּבַשׁ לְפִי׃ - How sweet to my palate are Your words, sweeter than honey to my mouth!
Rashi explains that nimletzu means they became sweet, and Radak likewise explains: they were sweeter than honey. Radak adds that melitzah refers to refined, ornate speech. There were people skilled in melitzah, crafting rhymes and grand, poetic statements. To this day one can hear such speech among Arab nations: pompous, boastful speeches filled with lofty imagery and empty declarations of "we will erase," "we will slaughter," and "the Zionist entity will not survive." Regarding such people it is said, "He Who sits in heaven laughs" - one who speaks so loftily and threatens destruction does not know what tomorrow will bring. In any case, that is the essence of melitzah: magnificent, elevated speech. King David says: This is how the words of Torah appear to me - sweet and eloquent as honey, their expression deeply precious in my eyes.
The word imratecha ("Your word") is in the singular, which seems difficult, since nimletzu ("are sweet") is plural. Radak explains: each and every one of Hashem's utterances is sweet; not one of them is missing. Therefore, it is phrased in the singular - there is not a single utterance that is not sweeter than honey.
The Malbim focuses the verse on the term amrot (sayings or utterances). "How sweet to my palate" - when I taste Your utterance with my palate, it refers to an intellectual tasting: discerning the meaning and flavor of the ideas. Torah words are called divrei ta'am ("words of taste and reason"). The etrog has both taste and scent, corresponding to Torah and good deeds - the taste represents Torah. Among Yemenite Jews, when someone was asked to share words of Torah, they would say to him: "Give a taste" - meaning, share an insight, share a vort. The "taste" is Torah.
According to this, the Malbim explains, those Torah narratives that appear simplistic to us - how sweet and refined they are to the palate of one who delves deeply into them! One who looks only at the surface sees nothing special, but one who looks deeper discovers internal depths and allusions, seeing how precise Scripture is to write specifically this way and not another. For example, in Megillat Esther the word order alternates: at times "Queen Vashti" and at times "Vashti the Queen." The Vilna Gaon and the Malbim explain that the entire dispute between Ahasuerus and Vashti was centered on this: Are you queen because of me, or am I king because of you - since she was the daughter of Nebuchadnezzar. When she spoke of herself, she said "the Queen" first: everything stems from the fact that I am royalty. But he said to her: No, you are Vashti first, and only afterward did you become queen. The entire dialogue is built upon this linguistic precision. One who reads superficially does not notice this at all, but one who reflects perceives: "How sweet to my palate" - what wonderful taste there is in seeing how the Torah concealed within these stories their deeper essence.
An additional explanation can be offered for this verse. When a person observes mitzvot solely out of obligation, he finds no taste or sweetness in them; moreover, they feel heavy, like a burden. When Rabbi Uri Zohar became observant - and he was not merely an entertainer, but an educated intellectual who had studied at university - he related that when people first told him there were proofs for Judaism, it sounded absurd to him: Proofs for the existence of the Creator? For the revelation at Mount Sinai? For the giving of the Torah? He said: I am willing to come and listen, and I will refute these proofs. He arranged with several friends to travel up to Jerusalem, but on that day, each friend had a different excuse; he was the only one who went. After extensive debates with that rabbi, he arrived at the conclusion that the Torah is true and said: There is no choice; I must become observant. It was not out of emotional fervor or a spark of passion, but purely rational. It was very difficult for him to accept, but he felt obligated.
He recounted that he used to stand in prayer and say beforehand: "Master of the Universe, I do not understand why I need to pray, and I do not connect to the texts I am reciting, but I know that this is what I must do - and therefore I am doing it. I only ask that You open my heart, so that I may truly connect to what I am doing." And so it went, prayer after prayer, until through Hashem's lovingkindness he merited to reach the stature he ultimately achieved.
"All beginnings are difficult," as the mussar works state. When a person wants to practice piety, the main difficulty is in "starting"; that is where the terrible struggle lies. Ask anyone who quit smoking where the difficulty lay - the first month; after that, things begin to flow. The same applies to Torah study: "He has placed me in dark places" - this refers to the Babylonian Talmud. A person opens a sugya and sees only darkness: he does not understand the terms, does not understand the Gemara's question, what Tosafot wants, or how everything connects. But after reviewing the sugya again and again, opening the Rishonim, and delving into it - "The people walking in darkness have seen a great light": the sugya shines, he grasps the matter, finds flavor in his learning, and merits to delight in Hashem.
מִמִּשְׁפָּטֶיךָ לֹא־סָרְתִּי כִּי־אַתָּה הוֹרֵתָנִי׃ - I have not turned aside from Your judgments, for You have instructed me.
This is what King David says: initially, "I have not turned aside from Your judgments" - why? "For You have instructed me." You said this is what must be done, and I performed it solely out of obligation. But once I persevered on the path and became increasingly connected to the words - "How sweet are Your words to my palate, sweeter than honey to my mouth!" The phrase "I have not turned aside" belongs only to the start of the journey; afterward, it becomes complete connection, born of yearning and the sweetness of the Torah.
מִפִּקּוּדֶיךָ אֶתְבּוֹנָן עַל־כֵּן שָׂנֵאתִי כׇּל־אֹרַח שָׁקֶר׃ - From Your precepts I gain understanding; therefore I hate every false path.
Ibn Ezra explains: when I contemplate the secret of the precepts planted in the heart, they steer me away from every false path. "That God made man upright, but they sought out many calculations" - fundamentally, man was created upright, created with a conscience. If there are people who lost their conscience along the way, it is because of actions they took that led them there; but ordinarily, a person possesses a conscience: not to murder, not to harm one's fellow, not to distress him. This is the inner uprightness that the Holy One, blessed be He, placed within man. Any person understands with simple, honest intuition that falsehood is negative - unless his name is Lavan, who started with a "white lie" and ended up where he did. A person might lie and say, "One has to manage," but ask him how he will raise his son - he will tell him: do not lie. No one educates their children to lie. Consequently, because these precepts are placed in my heart and instruct me in the upright path, I detest falsehood.
Radak adds: the precepts that Hashem commands man are rooted in human reason. Something that reason rejects - quite apart from the prohibition itself - a person hates in any case. That which reason defines as abominable, cruel, or malicious, a person naturally detests. And reason utterly rejects falsehood: consider for a moment, if the world ran on lies, nothing could function. One could not do business with a person whose every word is a lie, who agreed on a price only for it not to be the price, or who agreed to purchase goods without any intention of taking them. Falsehood between husband and wife, falsehood between a father and his children - the world could not endure. Certainly, the world is founded on truth. Not that the entire world today is aligned with truth, but there is a baseline of necessary truth by which the world functions, and a person understands this by nature, even without the Torah's command.
The Malbim bases the verse on the specific term pikudim, which are the mitzvot entrusted to us to commemorate the miracles that the Holy One, blessed be He, performed for us throughout history. They protect us against false beliefs: if someone comes to deny history and claim that the Exodus from Egypt, the splitting of the Red Sea, and the giving of the Torah never happened - the mitzvot come and prove that they did. It is inconceivable that in a single generation all parents decided to deceive their children: "Let us make up a story, say there were plagues to make it interesting, and sit down for the Seder night." Everyone, a million people, decided to dupe their children? "Fathers do not bequeath a lie to their children," as the Ramban states, and certainly not collectively. What is more, no one in history recalls such a decision ever being made, nor was there even a single person who protested the lie and passed down to his descendants: "We do not observe the Seder night; it is a fabrication." Three thousand years have passed, and no such tradition exists.
This is the power of experiential memory. Take Holocaust Memorial Day as an example: could one establish a memorial day for the Holocaust if there had been no Holocaust? What would you base it on? You document, recount what occurred, provide photographs and testimonies. Yet even so, this does not stop Holocaust deniers from denying it. Some argue: if only we had video footage of the Exodus from Egypt, we would not doubt - yet there is footage of the Holocaust, and people still deny it. Abu Mazen earned a doctorate for a research dissertation denying the Holocaust, a mere thirty years after the events. Clearly, footage proves nothing to someone who chooses not to believe: Hollywood can depict a man walking on Mars, and to this day there are people claiming the moon landing was a conspiracy - look at the flag, look at how it stands - though every claim has an answer. A denier will deny even what took place yesterday. We are therefore not addressing them, but rational people, people of sound logic. A lie with good public relations may succeed, but that does not make it truth.
And as we saw in earlier verses: "The insolent have smeared me with lies; with all my heart I will keep Your precepts" - since they claim there was no Giving of the Torah and no Exodus from Egypt, I cling to the precepts with which we were entrusted to remember history, and through them their mouths will be stopped. Likewise, "Let the insolent be ashamed, for they have subverted me with falsehood; I will meditate on Your precepts." Furthermore, through contemplating the precepts, one also comes to understand the true tenets of Divine Providence and reward and punishment, as expressed in many places throughout the Torah: the generation of the Flood sinned and Hashem swept them away, as did the generation of Enosh and the generation of the Dispersion - illustrating how the Holy One, blessed be He, punishes the wicked; and on the other hand, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their descendants arrive in the Holy Land - demonstrating how the Holy One, blessed be He, bestows good upon the righteous. From this we derive Divine Providence, and from this, reward and punishment.
We have already explained that an orach (path) differs from a derech (way). The derech represents blatant, central falsehood, whereas the orach represents the small details. Most people alter the truth specifically in the details: they do not invent an entirely new story, but they add a detail to spice it up, giving it a bit more color. Someone once asked the Chafetz Chaim: "The Rav always says not to believe lashon hara, but how can one not believe it when the speaker seems so reasonable and matter-of-fact?" He replied: "Know that most people in the world are untruthful, and everyone exaggerates." And indeed, observe - everyone exaggerates, and one who does not pay attention fails to catch himself; but one who pays attention suddenly realizes: Wait, here I exaggerated; here I said something that is not one hundred percent accurate. Always listen to the Gedolim when they recount a story: "There were two, perhaps three people there." What difference does it really make? Yet he is precise. "The story happened this way, though I heard from a certain sage that it was slightly different." He is exacting in the details to the utmost degree, because a person of truth is careful to convey a message in absolute truth alone. This is what David says: not merely a way of falsehood, but "every path of falsehood I have hated" - even in the smallest details.
The holy Alshich explains all the verses we have seen as a single progression, in which King David describes from whom he learns. "Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies" - the enemies are Doeg and Achitophel, and regarding them he says: Even from them I gain wisdom, but only in what they received by tradition from their teacher. For the matter did not originate with them; they are merely a conduit that transmitted the teachings, and I do not learn from what they deduced from their own hearts. By contrast, "I gain understanding from the elders" - from the elders I derive understanding even in matters they deduced on their own, one thing from another. For the elders are upright and decent, unlike the wicked enemies, and consequently a conclusion they reach through their contemplation is a genuine insight from which there is much to learn. Yet better than both of these is what I understand from the Torah myself, because then I understand from within, and I will neither lack nor deviate from the truth. And this is "I have not departed from Your ordinances, for You have instructed me" - what I delve into on my own is the truest path.
And what is the test that this is indeed so? To this the continuation speaks: "How sweet are Your words to my palate, more than honey to my mouth!" For Chazal taught that everything a person innovates and understands in the Torah in this world was already received by his soul at Sinai; and through his toil in Torah, the Holy One, blessed be He, enables him to bring it from potential into actuality. Once he has brought it into actuality, that novelty is accessible to all, and many after him can arrive at it as well. We once mentioned here the story of the Beit Yosef, who sat for an extended period pondering a difficult question, researching and contemplating, until a wonderful resolution occurred to him, bringing him immense joy. A few days later, he passed through the Beit Midrash and heard two students: one asked the other that very question, and the other immediately offered the answer over which the Beit Yosef had racked his brain for so long. He felt disheartened by this. The Maggid angel said to him that night: Do not be disheartened that you saw them state with ease what you toiled over so intensely - for it was you who brought that novel insight down into the world, and once brought into the world, it is already here and accessible, so someone else could readily offer it.
This is what King David says: What I understand in the Torah is called "Your word" (imratecha), because it is essentially what You spoke, Master of the Universe, and You already revealed it to me back at Sinai. The insight I arrive at through deep engagement with Torah stems from what my soul heard there. Therefore, it is the most delightful thing to me: what a person innovates on his own is always sweeter to him, for a person innovates according to the root of his soul and according to what resonates with him. Sometimes one person presents a chiddush and it does not appeal to us, while another presents a chiddush and it is sweet to our palate; but what a person himself conceives and innovates is always sweeter to him, because it matches the root of his soul and his intellect. And when I contemplate that matter in thought, it has a sweet taste; and when I articulate it with the speech of my mouth, it becomes sweeter still - "more than honey to my mouth."
The Alshich adds: See how much greater is the virtue of what I innovate and understand on my own over what I learned from the elders and from the enemies. Through what I learned from them, I had to: "I restrained my feet from every evil path" - if I were drawn after worldly pleasures, I had to stop myself, restraining my feet. But through "From Your precepts I gain understanding" - what I contemplated on my own, what my soul received from Sinai - I no longer need to restrain my feet from pursuing desires; it has become second nature to me, and I hate them naturally. This is "therefore I have hated every path of falsehood": I do not need to struggle against temptation or convince myself, for from the outset I abhor the evil ways, which are falsehood. And how did I attain all this? Through Your precepts, by meditating and toiling in them. Thus explains the holy Alshich, and with this we conclude the letter Mem.