Success Is Not Proof: Tzidkat HaTzaddik 64–65

Jacob Shore included in category Faith & Practice and series Learning Tzidkat HaTzaddik

2026-10-28 2026-10-28 3419 words 15 minutes

Learning Tzidkat HaTzaddik 64–65 with my father: Rav Tzadok on why divine help isn’t proof, the oven of Achnai, Korach’s followers, mesirat nefesh and Tachanun.

Series - Learning Tzidkat HaTzaddik

Contents

Things are going well. Your plans are working. Doors keep opening. You feel that is helping you, and perhaps He really is.

Does that mean you’re right?

My father and I were learning of . opens ס״ד by saying that it doesn’t.¹

פעמים שרואה בבירור שה׳ יתברך מסייעו ומסכים עם מעשיו, עם כל זה אינו ראיה כי מעשיו ישרים באמת.
Sometimes a person sees clearly that Hashem is helping him and agreeing with his actions. Even so, that isn’t proof that his actions are actually right.

I like how little room he leaves for the obvious escape. He doesn’t say that you imagined the help. He lets you have the help. Fine, Hashem helped you. Now what have you proved?

Maybe rather less than you thought.

The rope is available

Rav Tzadok brings the statement of :

בדרך שאדם רוצה לילך, מוליכין אותו.
A person is led along the path he wants to take.

I described it as being given rope.

“To hang yourself,” my father added.

Well, potentially. What you do with the rope is up to you.

His qualification is important. He’s talking about someone who thinks he’s following the way of Torah. Even , from within his own distorted understanding, had a . He had some account of why what he was doing made sense.

Rav Tzadok is very good at finding the חשבון behind things that look plainly wrong. That doesn’t make the חשבון correct, but it gives you something more to understand.

Rav Tzadok then brings . Withholding the rain was difficult before Hashem, and nevertheless Hashem helped Eliyahu hide from , allowing the situation to continue. Divine assistance and the desirability of the whole undertaking weren’t identical.

That’s already uncomfortable. You can be serious, holy, committed, and helped—and still have more to think about.

A miracle is a gold star

Then he gets to לא בשמים הוא, “It is not in heaven.”

In the argument about the , produces miracles in support of his position. The other sages don’t accept them as grounds for deciding the . Rav Tzadok reads this through the same principle: perhaps the miracles happened because Rabbi Eliezer wanted to go along this path.

My father described the usual explanation as God delegating His authority. Hashem entrusted the Torah’s interpretation to the sages. You have to work within that process. A miracle doesn’t replace an argument.

Here Rav Tzadok gives me another way of understanding why the miracle can’t settle things. Hashem might help a person for reasons that don’t establish the correctness of his opinion. His sincerity can be real. His greatness can be real. The miracle can be real.

It proves that you got a gold star. It doesn’t prove you’re right.

My father picked up the distinction: we’re talking about someone’s motives. A person can mean well and still be wrong about what he is doing.

But you can question whether someone is right without questioning his motives. He may have excellent motives. He may even be considerably better than you. You still have to think about what he’s saying.

The complaint after Korach

Rav Tzadok uses this to explain something that otherwise sounds almost unbelievable.

After ’s rebellion, the people complain to and :

אתם המיתם את עם ה׳.
You killed God’s people.

You have just watched an extraordinary divine judgment. The earth has opened. People have been swallowed. And your response is: this is Moshe’s fault?

The seems impressive even by biblical standards.

Rav Tzadok gives their complaint an actual argument. Of course Moshe and Aharon are great. Of course they have enormous merit. Of course Hashem might do something extraordinary for them. We aren’t disputing any of that. But perhaps this happened because they wanted it, and because their merit was so great. לא בשמים הוא. How does the miracle prove that they were right against Korach?

“We get it, Moshe. God likes you.”

That makes the complaint intelligible. It doesn’t make the complaint correct. I found myself wanting to answer that Moshe’s humility matters here: he would want to be corrected if he were wrong. But that’s my attempt to deal with the difficulty. Rav Tzadok’s immediate purpose in this paragraph is to explain what the people could have been thinking.

My father initially thought Rav Tzadok was resolving that difficulty himself. I clarified that the answer about Moshe’s humility was mine; Rav Tzadok was explaining the complaint. I think that distinction matters. We hadn’t made all the difficulties disappear.

A side conversation about Ramchal

A theological answer can still be very small comfort

My father pointed out the other side of the discussion: if things go badly, that doesn’t mean you’re bad.

I said that was certainly true, though it wasn’t specifically what Rav Tzadok was saying here. I also said I didn’t think it needed saying.

“No, it always needs to be said,” my father replied.

Fair enough.

That led us into . My father brought up the explanation in that suffering here can be connected with reward later, while someone else’s present good fortune may be the reward he receives in this world. His objection wasn’t that he could prove the explanation wrong. As he put it, the things he has trouble with might be “very inconvenient truths.” But he didn’t find the explanation motivating or comforting.

I tried to separate two questions. One is the theological problem. If Hashem is just and runs the world, how can a decent person have a rain cloud permanently stationed over his head while everything the biggest jerk on earth touches turns to gold? You need some account of how those things can coexist.

The other question is what that account does for the person standing under the rain cloud. You can answer a theological difficulty and still offer very small comfort in ordinary life.

My father also said that he doesn’t think you can think your way to God. He was describing faith as a more basic relationship, something that isn’t simply the conclusion of an intellectual exercise. I agreed with the sentiment, though Ramchal was clearly pursuing a much more systematic project than either of us was attempting in that conversation.

Then there was the experience of reading . My father described being inspired by the lofty vision while feeling that he hadn’t even reached the first level. You keep reading, and when you look in the mirror, you see a cockroach.

I knew what he meant. My response was that I had sometimes had to detach what I was reading from myself just to get through it. That isn’t a judgment on whether Ramchal is right. It is a description of what happens when I read him. He often seems to be addressing a very different sort of person from me.

We contrasted that with Rav Tzadok’s short, dense pieces, whose themes gradually become familiar as you keep learning. I imagined Ramchal looking at a book of two hundred and something little paragraphs and asking: what is this? Where are the chapters? Where’s the dialogue?

That conversation was still in the background when we reached . My father was asking what the religious language actually asks of a person, and why it so often sounds as though the point is to be put out.

Now hand over your will

אות ס״ה is, I think, the punchline to ס״ד.²

If getting what I want doesn’t establish that my will is aligned with Hashem’s, what do I do with my will?

Rav Tzadok begins with מסירת נפש.

My father stopped me to ask for a definition. He had heard the expression plenty of times, but the way people used it made it sound painful.

This is one of those expressions you can hear for years without stopping to ask what it means. In ordinary conversation, it often means putting yourself out, or being put out. Something was difficult, inconvenient, a tremendous . I wanted to do something pleasant, but I did the instead. I was מוסר נפש.

There is a cheeseburger I am not eating. Please appreciate the scale of my sacrifice.

That’s a recognizable use of the expression. But it can leave you hearing מסירת נפש as a religious term for being miserable about something you had to do. Much of our discussion was trying to unpack what is underneath that everyday use.

מוסר means to hand over. can refer to the self, the life, and what moves a person. We began with the will: what is it that I’m handing over when I put myself out?

I want X. But if Hashem wants Y, then at some deeper level, Y is what I want. I want my will to become responsive to His, even when that requires giving up something I very much wanted.

This is a lovely idea. I am not claiming to do it particularly well. During the learning, I started to say I wasn’t capable of it, then backed off. Maybe I don’t try hard enough. I don’t know. Usually I don’t do it.

My father raised the obvious difficulty: wouldn’t that leave you constantly questioning your intuitions, even your moral intuitions? How do you know what Hashem wants? Life isn’t a rulebook in which every situation arrives with its answer attached.

I didn’t have a way to make that problem disappear. Your intuitions aren’t always clear either. When he asked how you know whether it’s the , or whatever, my answer was: you don’t know. I suggested we keep reading and see whether the passage made the idea clearer.

Rav Tzadok’s own language goes further. He speaks of being prepared to leave the world if one is not in accordance with Hashem’s will, and connects this with ’s “טוב מותי מחיי,” better my death than my life. We were beginning with the familiar experience of giving up what you want. As the passage develops, willingness to give up life itself becomes central too.

Asking and then falling on your face

Rav Tzadok connects this to after prayer: falling on one’s face, associated with what we generally call . He cites the ’s understanding of it as giving oneself over to death.

We spent some time on what the practice looks like in different communities. For the point here, the important thing is the movement itself.

You have just stood before Hashem and asked for what you want. Then you fall on your face.

I don’t know that Rav Tzadok spells out the contrast quite this way, but it seems to me to be sitting there in the sequence. I’ve asked for what I want. Now I give myself over. If my will is off, help me put it right.

My father said this at least gave him an understanding of why the practice was there. He had understood the words; he hadn’t understood why we did this particular thing after prayer.

Korach’s people were serious

And now Rav Tzadok does something very characteristic of Rav Tzadok.

Korach’s 250 men weren’t fools. They were , leading figures. He treats them as people of enormous stature. He also says they believed Moshe could punish them.

So what were they doing?

They knew of a future in which people would no longer need to teach one another to know Hashem:

והיינו: שידעו כי לעתיד לא ילמדו איש את רעהו, ויהיה מדרגה זו ש״כל העדה כולם קדושים״.
They knew that in the future people would not teach one another, and there would be a level at which “the whole congregation are all holy.”

As it is written in Jeremiah:

ולא ילמדו עוד איש את רעהו ואיש את אחיו לאמר דעו את ה׳ כי כולם ידעו אותי למקטנם ועד גדולם.
No longer will each man teach his neighbor and his brother, saying, “Know Hashem,” for all of them will know Me, from the least of them to the greatest (Jeremiah 31:33).

The knowledge would be there. כל העדה כולם קדושים, Korach’s own words in Numbers 16:3: the whole congregation would be holy.

They thought they had reached that state already.

It’s hard to read the tea leaves of time.

But their mistake wasn’t casual. They wanted that state so intensely that, if they hadn’t reached it, they were genuinely willing to die. A life without it seemed intolerable to them.

Obviously, there is a fatal flaw in this plan.

Still, Rav Tzadok says that although they were called sinners, there was a great in this. That is why, in his reading, their fire pans merited becoming a covering for the .

“Well, they got their wish,” my father said.

They did. They knew what they were signing up for.

He also pointed out how different this was from the usual picture of opportunistic slimebags with a clever question about . Here was a whole account of what they might have been thinking and desiring.

It also gave me another way to hear those familiar questions. Why should a garment entirely of need a thread of תכלת? Why should a room full of need a ?

We don’t want one thread. We want the whole thing. We don’t want holiness confined to this particular point of access. We want everything to be holy already.

That’s a connection we made in the discussion; those examples aren’t in this paragraph. But it seems to fit the longing Rav Tzadok is describing. They didn’t want to receive everything through Moshe. They wanted to know directly.

Their desire had something great in it. Their judgment was disastrously wrong. Rav Tzadok lets you see both.

Get out of the way

Toward the end, he brings a question of the . Why does Hashem tell Moshe and Aharon to separate themselves from the congregation before punishing it?

Surely He can save them while they’re standing there.

God is pretty good at precision strikes. He doesn’t need to say, “Everybody stand back, I’m doing a demolition.”

“It’s not a Scud missile,” my father added.

Rav Tzadok’s answer connects their need to separate with their own greatness in מסירת נפש. Then they fall on their faces, giving themselves over.

This is where we returned explicitly to the meanings of נפש. It is your life force, and it is what drives you. As I put it in the discussion, it can mean your ability to move, as a living being, and what moves you. מסירת נפש can therefore speak of handing over your will, and it can speak literally of giving your life. We had started with the everyday “I put myself out” use; by this point, we were dealing with the tension between those deeper meanings.

I don’t think we fully untangled the relationship between Moshe and Aharon’s separation and their falling on their faces. Those last lines are compressed even for him. But the language keeps drawing their surrender into relation with the surrender of the people opposing them. That resemblance is part of what makes the passage so unsettling.

You begin with the reasonable idea that people can mean well and be wrong. By the end, you’re looking at an extraordinarily intense spiritual desire that helps explain why someone was willing to make a terrible mistake.

Spiritual indigestion

This is also where I think you need some care with Rav Tzadok.

You learn , and the good guys are good guys and the bad guys are bad guys. Then you learn Rav Tzadok, and if you only understood what this person was trying to do, or what that person’s intention really was, you would see the depth of it.

My father said that the two-dimensional way of reading had always troubled him. The people didn’t seem like living beings. This reading gave you some way of getting inside their situation.

I agree. I get a lot out of that. But you can also come away feeling that every terrible act was just an almost imperceptible spiritual miscalculation.

Sometimes there are also bad people doing bad things. And a profound reading of a story doesn’t exhaust the story. My father emphasized that the still has legitimacy. The deeper reading can be true without removing the plain one.

Here, even within Rav Tzadok’s reading, the men are still called . He doesn’t need to erase that word to recognize their longing.

My father compared the pieces to a . Each one is very rich. That was part of why we had decided to keep our sessions to an hour rather than try to learn Rav Tzadok in quantities that leave no time for reflection.

He then supplied the consequence of trying to eat the whole box: spiritual indigestion.

You can follow his reasoning and even repeat the ideas afterward, but that doesn’t mean you’ve absorbed them. I’ve had that experience reading him too quickly: I could tell you what he said, but most of it hadn’t got into my hard drive.

The hour gives us plenty to think about. Reading more isn’t necessarily going to help it settle.

Tzidkat HaTzaddik, אות ס״ד. Rav Tzadok cites Makkot 10b, Sanhedrin 113a, and Bava Metzia 59b, and applies the argument to the complaint in Numbers 17:6. ↩︎
Tzidkat HaTzaddik, אות ס״ה. The paragraph connects מסירת נפש, נפילת אפים, Korach’s 250 men, and Moshe and Aharon. The explanation of the relationship between the two numbered passages, the prayer sequence, and the תכלת and מזוזה examples includes my own reading of the discussion. ↩︎

Jacob Shore

Hi, I'm Jacob. I'm a language nerd, developer, and spiritual wanderer.