Nach Summary; Melachim Aleph 8-13
1)PEREK SUMMARIES
Perek 8 – The aron is brought to the mikdash. Shlomo hamelech gives a prayer to HaShem and blesses the people. Shlomo makes a large festival for the people.
Perek 9 – HaShem appears to Shlomo and blesses him if he goes in the ways of David, his father. A description of the means used by Shlomo to finance the building of the mikdash.
Perek 10 – The Queen of Sheba hears about Shlomo’s wisdom and comes to test him out with a riddle, which Shlomo solves. She gives him presents. A description of Shlomo’s vast wealth.
Perek 11 – Shlomo’s many wives influence his heart away from perfect service of HaShem. HaShem tells Shlomo that as a result, his kingship will be nearly completely stripped from his son. Yeravam escapes Shlomo’s grasp. Shlomo dies and Rechavam, his son, takes over the throne.
Perek 12 – Rechavam is given an ultimatum by the people to lower taxes. He ignores the advice of the senior advisors and instead raises taxes. The people split from him and join Yeravam. Rechavam rules over Yehudah in Jerusalem, and Yeravam rules everywhere else. HaShem’s punishment to Shlomo in Perek 11 has come true. HaShem prevents civil war. Yeravam builds idols to stop the Jewish people going down to Jerusalem for aliyah leregel.
Perek 13 – A Navi prophecises by the mizbayach of Yeravam and is killed when he disobeys HaShem’s orders not to eat, by eating upon instructions of another prophet.
2) DVAR TORAH
The final perek of last week (13) is extremely interesting. Basically, HaShem tells a prophet not to eat. Then another prophet comes along and relates to the first one that ‘HaShem told me to feed you.’ He eats, and is killed as a punishment. What can we learn from this?
(this bit I basically heard from R Zvi) Mark Twain writes that he trained as a canal/river navigator; it was his job to learn the varying depths of the canal off by heart to be able to steer the boat up the canal/river and to know exactly which parts were too shallow to avoid them. Now on his final training day, he was finally given a try at steering and thus totally controlling the boat. There is some stick attached to the boat that goes into the water and can measure depths, and there was another person in charge of that. So, Mark Twain (that was his pen name) steers the boat gracefully, remembering each and every turn and the depths he had memorised, when suddenly the man with the depth-stick kept shouting that the water was getting shallower and shallower. Mark continued, for he knew the river well, but was worried at the man’s shouts. Finally, when the man shouted a dangerously shallow reading, Mark stopped the boat suddenly, for fear of it hitting a rock or something. The captain came up and told Mark that he had failed his test; the depth-stick man was just there to test him.
The same is true in our Jewish lives. We know that HaShem is very real and that His Torah is true, yet we are often swayed by opinions and forces of the liberal western world around us. The trick is to stick as close as possible to one’s own clear knowledge and traditions that have been going on for 3 thousand years, and not to be swayed by the shallow man in the corner; despite how alluring his words are.
