Bamidbar: 5783 - This week's insight from Rabbi Shimon Zonnenfeld: In our parsha it is written "Take the Levites from among the Children of Israel" 5 times. What is hinted at in the word "among"? At the conclusion of the Daf…

00:00 Speaker 1 Rabbi Tzaleh, please.

00:03 Speaker 2 In the weekly parsha, Hakadosh Boruch Hu says to Moshe, “Take the Levi’im from among the Children of Israel.” What does “from among the Children of Israel” mean? It appears several more times in the following parshiyos, Parshas Naso and Behaaloscha. Five times it says, “Take the Levi’im from among the Children of Israel.” Why “from among”? It could have said, “Take the Levi’im from the Children of Israel.” What does “from among the Children of Israel” mean?

00:26 Speaker 1 A good question.

00:28 Speaker 2 So there’s a beautiful explanation from a rabbi in Jerusalem. If we take the word Yisroel—yud, shin, reish, alef, lamed—and spell out each letter, yud is spelled yud-vav-daled. What’s in the middle? The inner letter is vav. Shin has yud in the middle. If we take the middle letters from all the letters of Yisroel, they spell Levi’im. And that’s the meaning: “Take the Levi’im from among the Children of Israel.” What’s inside Yisroel, at its heart, is the Levi’im.

01:10 Speaker 1 Beautiful.

01:10 Speaker 2 And this also connects with Matan Torah, which we’re approaching now. It says, “And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests”—all the Children of Israel, a kingdom of priests. As the Rambam writes, anyone whose heart moves him to serve is considered like a kohen. So every Jew who wants to serve Hakadosh Boruch Hu is considered like a kohen, like a Levi.

01:37 Speaker 1 Like a Levi.

01:38 Speaker 2 The inner part of the Children of Israel. And this also connects with Tractate Gittin, which we’ve just begun studying. There’s the well-known halacha that when a person is compelled to write a get, he is compelled until he says, “I want to.” But isn’t that a coerced get, which is invalid? As the Rambam explains, every Jew wants to do the will of Hakadosh Boruch Hu; it’s only his yetzer hara that compels him otherwise. When he is compelled, his true desire is revealed. And that’s the meaning of taking the Levi’im from among the Children of Israel. Inside, every Jew is part of a kingdom of priests, and he wants to do what Hakadosh Boruch Hu wants. Wishing everyone a blessed Shabbos.

02:19 Speaker 1 How fortunate you are.