"To make their land a desolation, an eternal hissing." An eternal hissing: everyone who passes by it will be appalled and will shake his head. "To make their land a desolation, an eternal hissing." Through their deeds they will cause their land to become a desolation. The land will be desolate. And do not think this is only temporary, but rather an eternal hissing for many days. As for "an eternal hissing," Rashi and Metzudat Zion also explain that hissing means producing a sound by pursing the lips. This is familiar to you. And what is the matter of hissing? When people saw something important that had been destroyed, they would hiss. Whoever remembers, about twenty years ago this was fairly common, today they have stopped with it. But once, when a person wanted, before it happened or after, he would whistle. That was the custom. And this is written in the pasuk: "they hissed and shook their heads." Everyone who passes will be appalled and will hiss. The meaning is that whoever would pass would whistle as a sign of shock. There is in this a matter of astonishment, and "will be appalled" also means astonishment. Like the language of desolation, a place that is, how shall we say, desolate, so it arouses astonishment. So everyone who passes by it will be appalled, will be astonished at the destruction, and will shake his head. Shaking his head is what we do today while clicking our lips: wanting to say, so, then, we move the head right and left. This is an expression; it is what is written about the friends of Iyov who came to console him. To console him is the same idea, that when a person wants to express sharing in the grief and pain over another's situation, he shakes his head to the right and to the left.
"Like the east wind I will scatter them before the enemy. The back and not the face will I show them in the day of their calamity." Like an east wind I will scatter them, a wind that blows powerfully scatters everything, so I will scatter them. And do not say that they will have rest there in exile. The Malbim says: "the back and not the face will I show them." That is to say, they will always turn their backs to flee, meaning that even among the nations there they will be pursued, as it is written, "and among those nations you shall find no rest." That is to say, even while they are among them they will have no salvation.
"And they said: Come, let us devise plans against Yirmiyahu, for the Torah shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet. Come, let us smite him with the tongue, and let us not heed any of his words." After Yirmiyahu informs them of Hashem's thought for good, what is the reaction? We must do something here, we must do something. What? Eliminate Yirmiyahu. To eliminate Yirmiyahu, we turned off the red light that keeps bothering us in the car over the engine, we turned it off, that's it, now hit the road. You can drive freely, no problem at all, no more light coming on. This was always the way when they wanted to get rid of and easily solve problems: they silence the rabbis, they silence those who rebuke at the gate, they silence those who say we need to correct our ways, and then what? Look, you see, no one said anything, so everything is wonderful. Don't you hear that no one is saying anything? Don't you hear that no one is rebuking? So everything is wonderful. We have a wonderful nation, we have wonderful youth, we have a wonderful army, everything is wonderful. Sir, everything is wonderful, and do not accuse. Do not accuse, everything is fine. You see that there were already media people back then. "And they said: Come, let us devise plans against Yirmiyahu." We need to eliminate him. "For the Torah shall not perish from the priest." Now understand. They make a calculation: if we eliminate Yirmiyahu, but with him there is a problem. Yirmiyahu had three qualities. The first quality: he was a priest, a teacher of halachic ruling. He was wise, he gave good counsel. And he was a prophet, speaking the word of Hashem. So they say: true, we do not have a single all-encompassing, complete sage who contains within himself, like him, all three qualities. But we do not have to; the authorities can be distributed. There need not be one person who has everything. What do you need? Torah? You are right, in Yirmiyahu there is Torah, but the Torah shall not perish from the priest. The Torah shall not perish from the priest, we still have priests who have Torah in them, from them we will receive Torah. What will you say, you need a counselor? Yirmiyahu was a wise counselor. They said: nor counsel from the wise. There are people who are indeed not priests but they are wise, so we can receive counsel from them. What will you say, but if Hashem wants to speak with us, what about prophecy? Nor the word from the prophet. There are also other prophets from whom it will be possible to receive a word, apart from Yirmiyahu. And therefore they say: "Come, let us smite him with the tongue." What does "let us smite him with the tongue" mean? What is the intent of the words? We saw that they did not succeed in eliminating Yirmiyahu, it was a failed attempt when they said "let us destroy the tree with its fruit," they tried to kill him by placing poison in his food. They did not succeed, now they wanted to strike him through slander and defamation. And then they say: "Come, let us smite him with the tongue, and let us not heed any of his words." He will surely want to justify himself and explain his deeds; we will not let him, we will not listen to him. Let us not heed any of his words, whatever he comes to say to justify himself. An additional explanation the Malbim gives: let us smite him with his tongue. What does "with his tongue" mean? With his own tongue. We will fabricate a charge against him, we will hand him over to the government, and we will say: come hear what prophecies he says, come see what harsh things, he is rebelling against the king. In these prophecies he casts fear into the heart of the nation and he is rebelling against you. And we will see later on that Yirmiyahu indeed became entangled in a very complicated way with the kings of his generation, and he was cast into the courtyard of the prison and into the mire of the pit and what not. He went through very hard things. So let us hand him over, let us smite him with the tongue, meaning with his tongue, with his prophecy. And even though in the end, if the nation heeds his prophecies, he would have merit, for behold in the end he spoke words of admonition and the nation heeded, we will not even give him this merit. And therefore we will not heed any of his words. We will not heed the words he said, for if we would need to repeat the words, we would repeat the entire prophecy and then there might also be an awakening here. Let us not heed all of his words, but rather bring only part of his words, what are called quotations. Journalists are experts at this, the media is expert at this, when they want to defame and blacken someone's face, they extract some incidental and trivial sentence from his words, until that person needs to say, my words were taken out of context. Sometimes it is true, sometimes you read what the person writes and you understand completely that the person is not connected to anything at all. But in any case, many times it really is the media that extracts some sentence and makes a feast of it. So we will not heed all his words, for perhaps we might be persuaded, we will only pull out a few catchy phrases from his words, and with them we will already blacken his face and show that he is rebelling against the king.
"Give heed to me, Hashem, and hear the voice of my adversaries." The Radak explains: they say that they will not heed me, but You do heed me, Master of the Universe. And "give heed" here the Radak explains means: heed my prayer. "And hear the voice of my adversaries" means: hear not their voice but hear what they pray about me, as if to say, hear what they speak about me, what they request and expect will happen to me. "Give heed to me, Hashem": Metzudat David explains that Yirmiyahu comes here to show, Master of the Universe, look at me compared to them. I pray good things for them, and in contrast they are the ones who quarrel with me, they take counsel against You, take counsel against me meaning to kill me. I request good for them and they request evil for me. In contrast, the Malbim explains that here this is a request for judgment. "Give heed to me, Hashem" means: You, Hashem, be a judge between me and the nation, between me and those who rise against me, and You will see whose claims are just. And according to this he now argues: "Shall evil be repaid for good? For they have dug a pit for my soul. Remember my standing before You to speak good on their behalf, to turn away Your wrath from them." And is it fitting that evil be repaid for good? In place of good that you received, is it fitting that you repay evil? For all my prophecies, says Yirmiyahu, were for them, for their benefit, to bring them back in repentance, to nullify the evil decrees. For Master of the Universe, remember my standing before You to speak good on their behalf. Here he says something very wonderful. We explained several times in the past that the difference between accusation, which is an improper thing, and a very harsh prophecy that contains extremely sharp words, which is a proper and beautiful thing, the difference is who is the addressee. If the addressee is the Master of the Universe, this is very grave and improper. And if the addressee is the nation, then it is proper and beautiful. The mitzvah of rebuke is sometimes also a commandment to say harsh things, even things that are hard to hear; this is the mitzvah of rebuke. To rebuke, certainly the words need to be such that will be heeded, but from the aspect of rebuke it is to rebuke. And we see the prophets throughout the way rebuking with harsh and sharp words. This is the mitzvah of rebuke. But in contrast, if the prophet turns even once, and even with a small and slight statement of all that he rebuked the nation, and turns with it to the Master of the Universe and says: Master of the Universe, its officers are rebellious, companions of thieves, and all sorts of such expressions, he is considered as accusing the nation, and the Holy One, blessed be He, will say to him as He said to Eliyahu. When Eliyahu said "I have been zealous for Hashem," He said to him: Eliyahu, you need to find yourself a replacement. You cannot lead this nation, because whoever leads the nation cannot be zealous in such a way that he comes and accuses the people of Israel. "They have forsaken Your covenant" and other sharp expressions that the Holy One, blessed be He, did not want Yirmiyahu, did not want Eliyahu to continue and prophesy to them. This too is what happens here. The prophet says: "Shall evil be repaid for good? For they have dug a pit for my soul," a pit meaning a hole to cause me to fall. "Remember my standing before You to speak good on their behalf, to turn away Your wrath from them." Yirmiyahu says: behold, all my words before You were always for good. That is to say, all my harsh prophecies were only in relation to the nation. Only when I stood before the nation did I say to them sharp and harsh words. But when I stood before You, what did I say? Only good things. Remember my standing before You to speak good on their behalf. This is a sign and a proof that I only desire to do them good. For if my desire were to do them harm, then I would have come and accused them before You.
"Therefore give their children over to the famine and deliver them over by the power of the sword, and let their wives become bereaved and widows, and let their men be slain by death, their young men smitten by the sword in war." And so Yirmiyahu says: Master of the Universe, these who now bring about evil, bring disaster upon me, and what they are really trying to do is silence the entire prophecy, when the whole prophecy now comes to protect the nation, comes to save it from the terrible trouble about to descend upon it, and these who instead of arousing the nation, on the contrary, still calm it with all sorts of vain comforts, these people are wicked, evil, and corrupt, for they are in fact sinking the entire ship, and they do not even pay attention to what they are doing. And therefore it is better for the nation, Master of the Universe, that these people, these who fight against me, these who come to silence the voice of truth and want the nation to walk in falsehood, they are in the category of one who incites and leads astray. For these people, about them it is said: "you shall not pity, nor shall you have mercy, nor shall you conceal for him." For about them it is said that one must kill from infant to suckling, like the law of a city led astray; those who incite and lead astray against the people of Israel, toward them there is no compassion. For if you have mercy on them, then you are being cruel to the whole of Israel. If you have mercy on them, then you have brought the people of Israel to the edge of the pit. And therefore, Master of the Universe, now I request that those same people who mislead the nation, those same people who try to attack the lives of the prophets in order to silence the word of Hashem, if so, I request, Master of the Universe, that You deliver them over to the sword. Why is this called "deliver them over"? The Radak explains: "deliver them over by the power of the sword" means from the language of the blood flowing by the sword. One could say that "deliver them over" is like "kill them," but the Radak says that this is not the intent, rather the intent of the words is from the language of blood flowing, so "deliver them over" means their blood should flow by the power of the sword. And the Malbim explains why several expressions were stated here. The Malbim says: give their children; their children remain in the city, they do not go out to war, so give their children to die in famine. They themselves go out to war, so give them to die by the sword. From this their wives will become bereaved, this because of the sons who died, and widows because of their husbands who died by the sword. And their men, who are their men? We already spoke about their children, we spoke about the husbands who go out to war; their men are those who are not fighting men, they do not go out to battle, they will be slain by death, meaning they will die strange deaths. And their young men, those are the mighty ones who went out to war, they will be smitten by the sword in war. "Let a cry be heard from their houses when You bring a troop upon them suddenly, for they have dug a pit to capture me, and they have hidden snares for my feet." Let a cry be heard from their houses, that is, when You bring a troop upon them suddenly there will be a great cry from their houses. The Malbim explains that the cry we are speaking of here is a cry that contains a justification of the judgment. Let a cry be heard from their houses, that they will say: this is because we afflicted and pursued Yirmiyahu. Let a cry be heard from their houses, for they have dug a pit to capture me. So they will cry out and say: we dug a pit in order to capture the prophet. This is the cry that will be heard. This cry is in the nature of a confession. They will confess and say: this punishment is deserved by us, for we pursued the prophet and therefore now this is our punishment. And by this it will become known to all that what they dug me a pit for, what they wanted to do to me and to bring me down, it turned out that this matter was false. But as long as no confession is heard from their mouths, that they admit that as a result of their evil deeds this happened to them, then the nation will not connect the two. The nation will say: some disaster happened to them, unconnected to the prophet. And what they said about the prophet, hear, it is apparently true what they said about him, what they attributed to him and accused him of, that his words are false and that he desires the nation's harm. The nation would not know to connect the two. Therefore I request, Master of the Universe, that a cry be heard from their houses when You bring a troop upon them suddenly, and what will the cry be? For they have dug a pit to capture me. That in their cry they will confess and say: we dug a pit and hole to capture the prophet, but we are guilty. And through this everyone will know that I am a true prophet and all my claims and prophecies are from You. The Malbim explains "they have dug a pit," that the intent is when they would make it, note there are two things here. "For they have dug a pit to capture me, and they have hidden snares for my feet." The Malbim says: what is the difference? When they want to capture an animal, they dig a pit. A pit is a hole. The purpose of the hole is so that the animal will fall inside and then it is captured and cannot come out. But how do you call it to come inside? How do you draw it in? So the way is by preparing snares in the animal's path. Snares means that on the sides they prepare places that the animal is afraid of. The animal moves away. "They have hidden a snare for me" means a place that is a trap, a place that causes harm, and the animal sees it and moves away. And then in fact a situation is created in which the animal has no choice but to arrive at the same point that I wanted it to reach. So they dug a pit to capture me and hid snares for my feet so that these snares, this laid trap that is in the nature of a snare, would necessarily bring me to that place of the pit so that I would fall into their hands. Rashi explains something very interesting. Rashi says: for they have dug a pit to capture me, that they suspected him of adultery. Rashi says: as it is written, "for a harlot is a deep pit." It turns out then that not only was Moshe suspected of adultery, and it is written there that the congregation of Korach brought their wives so that the bitter waters would test them to see whether they had been secluded with Moshe, but that same suspicion they brought against Yirmiyahu as well.
"And You, Hashem, know all their counsel against me for death. Do not atone for their iniquity, and do not blot out their sin from before You. Let them be caused to stumble before You; in the time of Your anger act against them." Master of the Universe, do not accept this cry. As we explained, they will cry out and confess and say: it is all because we came out against the prophet. So, heaven forbid, perhaps there is here some confession that will be accepted by Hashem and there is here the principle of "one who confesses and forsakes will be shown mercy." I request, Master of the Universe, do not atone for their iniquity. Do not erase the iniquity through the confession, for normally the confession atones for iniquity. And we have already spoken several times that the matter of repentance in the Torah is mentioned only in the matter of confession. That is to say, whoever searches where the mitzvah of repentance is mentioned in the Torah, it is what is written, "and they shall confess." This is the mitzvah of repentance. And so, when they confess there is here a confession that atones for iniquity. The most terrible of all is when he says "I have not sinned." "Behold, I contend with you for your saying, I have not sinned," for the essential point is missing here. What is the essential point in repentance? It is the confession. The confession is to confess and say: I have sinned, I have transgressed, I have rebelled. And so, Master of the Universe, do not atone for their iniquity by virtue of the confession they will confess. And even after the punishment, do not blot out their sin from before You. Even after the punishment let their sin be written before You as an eternal remembrance. And the Malbim explains one more thing, that the punishment should not be through hiding of the face. I will explain. We have spoken about this several times in the past, the Malbim has mentioned it many times, that there are two types of punishments. There is a punishment that the Holy One, blessed be He, gives, and it is a providential punishment. A providential punishment means that the Holy One, blessed be He, supervises the punishment and brings it exactly according to what the person needs for his correction in accordance with what he did, all measured and with providence. And there is a punishment that is not providential. What is a non-providential punishment? Is there something in the world that is not by providence? There is a reality in which, when a person acts wickedly, the Holy One, blessed be He, as it were, removes His providence from him and hands him over to the natural order. To the natural order means the stars and constellations. That is to say, according to your fortune. If there will be an accident, an accident. If there will be damage, damage. It could be that according to your fortune there will be success, so there will be success. Now in a certain sense this situation is better, because with a providential punishment it is necessarily a punishment. Whereas when it is only a matter of hiding of the face, it is not necessarily a punishment. It could be that in terms of the stars and constellations the situation is fine, so you will have no punishment. But on the other hand, in the case where in terms of the stars and constellations your situation is bad, then it is sevenfold worse than a providential punishment. For a providential punishment is given in precise doses and with providence from Hashem. Whereas when Hashem, as it were, abandoned him to fortune and the Holy One, blessed be He, hid His face from him, then he can have many and evil troubles, as it is written in the Torah in the aftermath, "and I will hide My face from them." And as we have spoken several times, there are those who ask: where was God in the Holocaust? And the answer is: He was not there. What do you mean He was not there? The answer is: He was not there and He announced in advance that He would not be there. The Holy One, blessed be He, said: on that day many evils and troubles will befall it, and the Holy One, blessed be He, says: "and I will surely hide My face from them on that day." The Holy One, blessed be He, says: I will not be there, do not look for Me. So that in fact to ask where He was, the primary question should be: and where were you? And where were you before the Holocaust happened? When the Holy One, blessed be He, called and cried out morning and evening, and where was the nation when Yirmiyahu calls them to return in repentance? And where were you during 200 years of Enlightenment; that is to say, the Holocaust period is 130 years of Enlightenment, when people said: be a Jew in your home and a man when you go out. That is, it is a shame to be a Jew in the progressive, enlightened German street. There be a person, be human; at home be a Jew. As much as this statement is antisemitic and terrible today, this is the statement that back then in his time Mendelssohn and his fellows, these are the maskilim of that generation, these were the expressions. So that in fact to come and ask where God was immediately raises the question: and where were you? Since the Holy One, blessed be He, called and cried out first. And therefore this too is what he requests here. Master of the Universe, I request that this punishment too that You bring upon them, this punishment should not be a punishment of hiding of the face, only a punishment with providence, that they be caused to stumble before You. A punishment of hiding of the face, as we said, is not immediate, for a punishment of hiding of the face could be that much time passes until the punishment comes according to fortune. But if I request that it be with providence, then the punishment is immediate. Where were there punishments with providence? In the wilderness. In the wilderness we were under constant providence. The clouds of glory and the pillar of fire before them and the Ark in their midst and the Divine Presence with them. Every smallest thing, 24,000 killed. Here a calf, 3,000 killed. Here at Taverah the fire of Hashem burned among them, there the spies. Every smallest thing brought about a reaction. This is a providential punishment. So since my prophecies here now are not accepted because there are people who challenge the prophecy, here there is no room to give them a punishment in another 30 years. Here the punishment must be immediate. And what is an immediate punishment? A providential punishment. Only with providence is the punishment immediate. And he further requests: in the time of Your anger act against them. This means that this should not be a punishment that comes to atone for iniquity. There is a punishment that is from compassion and mercy. The Holy One, blessed be He, has mercy and atones for iniquity through the punishment. He requests: Master of the Universe, no, that the punishment be an expression of anger and burning wrath. In the time of Your anger act against them. And here too not a punishment that comes on its own from hiding of the face, but rather act against them, this too is an expression of a providential punishment as we explained earlier, that the act here is attributed to the Master of the Universe. And he emphasizes and says: do not atone for their iniquity, and do not blot out their sin from before You. Do not atone for their iniquity: iniquity is intentional, and their sin is also unintentional. And all these, Master of the Universe, do not blot out from before You, that their sins and iniquities always be remembered before You.