Vayikra: When Leaders Make Mistakes

Hi, this is Rabbi Laskin with the Parsha in 5, where in 5 minutes we try to give you a little insight into the Parsha to hopefully enhance your Shabbos, if not your life in general. And this is a brand new safer we're starting Vayikra. As known in uh Latin as Leviticus. Yeah? Known in to the Chazal as Toras Kohanim. And it's primarily dinim that have to do with the Kohanim and with the avodah. And Vayikra is a basic introduction to the basic korbanos. There is the korban olah. And the korban olah which is completely consumed. The only thing the Kohanim get are the hide. Everything is burnt on the mizbeach. It can be made from an animal, can be made from a bird, it can be made from a mincha, from uh flour. And then if you want to bring a mincha which is also an olah, it's uh not completely consumed, interestingly enough. Only the kemitzah is, there's a handful, and the rest are given to the Kohanim to eat, but it's also an olah. And then there's shlamim, a peace offering. Why? Cuz everyone gets a piece. I get a kohen gets a piece, you get a piece, the mizbeach gets a piece. Yeah? And shlamim can come from different types of animals. And then you come to a chatas. And a chatas there's a number of different types. There's a regular person's chatas, which is a she-goat or a ewe, e w e, a female uh sheep. Or it's of a nasi, of the king. King has to bring a goat. And then there's two special ones, which is a par. It's a uh bull. And one is brought by the kohen gadol if he does a cheit. And the other one is brought by the Sanhedrin. If the Sanhedrin paskins that something that you're chayav kares for is permitted and people act upon it, then they have to bring a korban. I'm not going to go into all of the machlokesim in Horiyos, whether the Sanhedrin brings it or each shevet has to bring it or Klal Yisrael brings one or yeah, only the shvatim that sinned. It's a big long machlokes over there in Horiyos. I'm not getting into that. We're going to go real simple over here and say that it's the Sanhedrin brings it. They're not chayav to bring it if the gadol hador wasn't there because he would have corrected them. And uh it means everybody's on board. And the Sanhedrin and it can't be that they just say there's no issur of eating dam. They can't just say you're not allowed to eat blood. Has to be a particular type of blood, a particular detail in it that they got wrong cuz if they just said there's no such a thing as blood, it doesn't count cuz they obviously know what they were talking about. It means that they came out with a psak that was wrong and the Jewish people acted upon it. Do you understand the frightening implications of this? Because the way Judaism works is we trust the Sanhedrin, we trust the people who are in charge. And this says that sometimes they can give a psak that's wrong and that is going to affect how the Jewish people behave and they suddenly over an aveirah. How does this work? So the answer is that sometimes there's a punishment that we our leaders make a mistake. Rebbi Yochanan ben Zakkai goes to Vespasian and says to him, "You're about to become uh emperor of Rome." And sure enough he was right. And he says to Rebbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, "I'll give you whatever you want. What do you want?" And he asks for certain things. And the Gemara says, "Why didn't he ask to not destroy the Beis Hamikdash?" And the Gemara gives two answers. The first is Rebbi Yochanan ben Zakkai was afraid that if he asked for too much he would end up with nothing. Second answer is you're right, he made a mistake. Cuz part of the punishment is that Hakadosh Baruch Hu hides the correct approach from our leaders. We have to always daven that our leaders have siyata d'Shmaya. Yeah? When we say Yekum Purkan on Shabbos morning, we're davening that Hakadosh Baruch Hu should give the wisdom to our leaders to give us the right advice. And may it be Hashem we should be zocheh to that in our own lives. Shabbos.