Kabbalah Library

245. What is the reason that Moses reproved them in this singing? It is because they were destined to come into the land and for the Shechina to be among them. Because of it, He reproved them.

246. The Creator is destined to reprove Israel in two places, and the nations of the world rejoice. One, where it is written, “The Lord has a strife with Judah and will punish Jacob according to his ways.” They hear the nations of the world and rejoice, saying “Now they will be obliterated from the world.” When the Creator saw that they were happy, what is written afterwards? “In the womb, he grasped his brother’s heel.”

When they heard this, they said, “Is this repentance for Israel’s iniquities? That is, they were surprised, since first he said that he had come to punish Jacob according to his ways, for which He should have forgiven the many iniquities that Israel had done, but in the end, he only mentioned what Jacob sinned while in the womb, a sin for which there are no punishments at all.

247. It is like a woman who had a quarrel with her son. She went to complain and to sue him. She saw the judge sentencing life and death sentences. Some of them were by flogging, some by hanging or burning. She said, “Woe, what will I do with my son?” In other words, she feared he might sentence her sun to one of those punishments. When the judge finished the sentence, he said to that woman, “What did your son do to you?” She said that she complained against him for afflicting her in her abdomen while she was pregnant with him. Naturally, the judge did not do anything to him for this.