תלמוד בבלי
תלמוד בבלי

Chasidut על סנהדרין 134:22

Kedushat Levi

“Israel saw the Egyptians’ corpses dead ‎on the beaches of the sea.” The need for the ‎Torah to write this verse has been explained by our ‎sages in Sanhedrin 67 as follows. “The reason ‎why sorcerers, magicians, are called ‎מכשפים‎ in Hebrew, ‎is that they ‘weaken’ G’d’s entourage in the celestial ‎regions” [their very existence and apparent ‎power seems to contradict the absolute power of G’d. ‎Ed.] It is a known fact that there are two ‎methods of defeating one’s fellow man. Either one ‎accuses him outright of being evil and thus ruins his ‎reputation, or one praises him to high heaven, thus ‎making others jealous of him and causing the ‎opponents of the righteous total frustration thereby. ‎This is the meaning of our sages when they said that ‎‎“the sorcerers weaken the entourage of the Almighty.” ‎The so-called ‎פמליא של מעלה‎, are the “opposite.”
[If I were asked to explain this very briefly, ‎I would say that the very existence of forces that are ‎clearly part of a supernatural realm. i.e. the forces that ‎enable a false prophet to perform miracles, appears to ‎contradict the concept of ‎אין עוד מלבדו‎, “there is no real ‎force other than G’d Himself.” G’d obviously had His ‎reasons for creating such forces, but to the uninitiated ‎human being such forces pose a serious challenge to ‎his faith in the uniqueness of G’d. In other words, this ‎‎“divine” entourage undermines rather than ‎strengthens our belief in the exclusivity of G’d. Rabbi ‎Mordechai Elon has an excellent article on this entitled ‎ואשא אתכם על כנפי נשרים‎, on Parshat Yitro and ‎‎Mishpatim. Ed.] ‎ ‎
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