CHAPTER SUMMARY

The people of Kiryat Yearim, who have been given the Aron by the residents of Beit Shemesh (who could not handle its presence in their midst), place it in a house and appoint a watchman over it. It stays there for 20 years (Malbim on pasuk 2 records Hazal’s view that this 20 years extended until King David brought the Aron to Yerushalayim), and during this time the Jews followed God.

Shmuel then tells the people that if they truly wish to follow God, they should remove all the idols from their midst and serve God alone. The people do so, and then Shmuel gathers them for a national meeting at Mitspah, where they offer a water libation to God, fast, admit their sins (Malbim on verse 6), and Shmuel judges them on civil matters (various comm., including Malbim).

When Plishtim hear about the Jews’ gathering, they assume it is for war, and come forward as well. The Jews, in fear, ask Shmuel to pray for them for help with Plishtim. Shmuel offers an olah; as he is praying on their behalf, the Plishtim attack. Hashem scares them with a loud noise (interestingly, Malbim suggests that they simply heard the voice of God that was being heard by Shmuel), so that they flee before the Jews. At the point that the Jews stop chasing the fleeing Philistines, Shmuel erects a monument, Even haEzer, to mark until where God had provided salvation.

From then on, the navi notes, the Plishtim ceased to enter the Jewish borders of Israel, and the Jews even recover cities that they had lost to the Plishtim, and there was peace between them. The text then notes that Shmuel judged the Jewish people all the days of his life, making a circuit through Israel each year, and then returning home, where he also judged the people and built an altar to Hashem.

WHAT DO THE PEOPLE OF KIRYAT YEARIM DO DIFFERENTLY?

The people of Kiryat Yearim, who we only meet in the conglomerate, seem to have understood something that neither Plishtim nor the Jews of Beit Shemesh did. In their town, the Aron flourishes, as do they. What was different in their experience? Two factors seem most germane. First, they select a place for the Aron-- the house of Avinadav-- and also appoint someone to watch the Aron on a regular basis (Avinadav’s son, Elazar).

I find it interesting that there is no mention of these people being kohanim or levi’im, as if there were no such people around. Assuming that is true, it is striking that the people of Kiryat Yearim nonetheless figure out the essential elements of the kohanim and levi’im’s role in properly safeguarding the Aron’s sanctity. They realize that proper treatment of the Aron involves dedicating a place for its use, and a person to serve it (which is what the Mishkan and the Levi’im fundamentally were).

Presumably, Elazar did not have to spend his entire day fending off people coming to treat the Aron improperly. His role, then, was not primarily guarding the Aron against intrusion, but serving as an honor guard, a sign of the people’s reverence. The mistakes of Plishtim and Beit Shemesh, then, were in their treatment of the Aron, in not realizing the ways in which we signify our reverence for an object connected to God—we provide it with kedushat makom, a sanctified place, as well as a mesharet, a servant, to serve it.

THE JEWS’ RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD

Verse 2 notes that the Jews vayinahu after God—which means either that they gathered to follow God or that they cried out (from the word nehi) to repent and return to God. Radak especially elucidates that second meaning, suggesting that it was a direct result of the miracles of the Aron. In seeing objects connected to God forcing proper treatment, the Jews were reminded of God’s presence and power, bringing them close to Him.

Verses 3-4 describe Shmuel reminding all the Jews that if they wish to fully serve God, they need to remove the various idols from their midst, which they do, and then serve God alone. Radak sees this as clarifying the comment at the end of verse 2, that when they saw the way the Aron was treated, they realized their need for teshuvah, which Shmuel then explained to them. Malbim, however, sees this as chronological—the people all followed God (after seeing what happened with the Aron), and then Shmuel pointed out to them that they needed to remove the idols.

Malbim’s perspective raises the possibility that the Jews could conceive of themselves as following God even though they were still in possession of various idols. That reminds us of the possibility we saw previously, of Plishtim recognizing God’s power and yet still serving their own idols. It means that the challenge of monotheism, for Jews and non-Jews, was not to convince them of God’s power, but to convince them of God’s sole power.

THE MEETING AT MITSPAH

Having eradicated (or at least lessened) the presence of idols among the Jewish people, Shmuel convenes a national gathering of prayer and fasting. That meeting occurs at Mitspah, which Radak (verse 5) reminds us was the place where there was an altar and a place of prayer. Radak there also points out that while the Aron was at Kiryat Yearim, the central altar was at Nov. Without going into the halakhic ramifications of this situation—one interesting one is that people were allowed to have bamot yahid, personal altars for personal sacrifices, which means that centralized religion was greatly weakened—it is worth noting that a split in locale between the Aron and mizbeah meant that the different functions of the two objects was split as well.

Ideally, the experiences of God that emanate from the Aron (probably a representative of Torah and its study) and from the altar (making offerings to God, perhaps akin to our prayer) are found in one location. When we see them split for a period of twenty years, we can already know that the Jewish people’s experience of God is weakened by virtue of its bifurcation.

During the meeting in Mitspah, the people note Plishtim are coming to war and beg him to pray for them, despite their many sins. This is one of the incidents that suggested to the author of a recent article in Megadim, a journal on Tanakh published by Yeshivat Har Etzion, that in that time only prophets prayed. Without agreeing with that generalization, it is apparent that the people expected Shmuel’s prayers to have a greater effect than their own (a sentiment shared by many today, who see a rebbe’s prayers as more worthwhile than their own).

SACRIFICES AND MONUMENTS

Surprisingly, Shmuel offers an olah, a saccrifice to God. I call this surprising because later on in the book, when Shaul tells Shmuel that he took some action because he needed to make an offering to God, Shmuel belittles the importance of offerings, at least as compared to the value of obedience to God. Seeing him offer a sacrifice here prepares us for that incident, by showing that is not the sacrifices themselves to which he will object, but using sacrifice as an excuse to ignore other commandments-- sacrifices supplement one's service of God, they do not replace it.

After the Jews beat the Plishtim-- the verse actually says that they chased them until under Beit Kar--Shmuel sets up a stone, calling it Even haEzer, saying it was until here that God helped us. Aside from providing us with the name of a section of Shulhan Arukh, we can note this incident as another example (there are several in Humash, in earlier books of Tanakh, and later in this one) of defining places in terms of the experience of God had there.

As we watch people in Tanakh do this, we can imagine the Land of Israel dotted with sites referring to moments of God's salvation. To a lesser extent, the State of Israel at least used to have such a recollection of the various battles it had won (or lost) on the road to independence; I remember for example, taking a tiyul to see the monument to the 35 people who attempted to relieve the outpost at Gush Etzion during the War of Independence. Such monuments help a society remember its roots, but if those monuments are to Hashem, they also insure that people are always thinking of God's impact on the nation's life,a wholly salutary experience.

PEACE AND PROSPERITY

In the aftermath of this war, some kind of peace is established with Plishtim-- although, in Hazal's timetable, Shmuel was only judge of the people on his own for ten years. During that time, the verse tells us, Shmuel's practice was to be a circuit judge in the original sense of the term, to make a circuit throughout the land every year, returning to Ramah for some period of time as his home base.

The picture of Shmuel devoting his life to the people, circulating among them every year to allow them to be judged, raises an issue for all public servants that we can consider now and again next week. To what extent did Shmuel have the right to expect those who wished to be judged to come to him, and to what extent was he right to bring himself to them? Here, the question seems churlish-- why should we ask whether he needed to inconvenience himself in this way? If he wanted to, and the people benefited, what is the question? We will return to this issue next week, be"H. Shabbat Shalom.