משנה
משנה

Chasidut על אבות 6:9

Kedushat Levi

This idea is alluded to in the wording in Chagigah 3:1. ‎The Mishnah there discussing different degrees of holiness, ‎i.e. that ‎קדשים‎, sacred parts of sacrificial animals, have a higher ‎degree of holiness than t’rumah, the portion of the farmer’s ‎harvest that has to be given to the priest. An example given by ‎the Mishnah illustrating this is that whereas two vessels ‎which require ritual purification through immersion in a ritual ‎bath may be cleansed even when one of them is inside the other, ‎this ruling is not valid when the vessels in question belong to a ‎higher level of holiness known as ‎קדשים‎, vessels used in handling ‎the remains of sacrificial animals, for instance. Apparently, the ‎author of this Mishnah relates the rules pertaining to ‎cleansing vessels that have become ritually impure to their ‎respective origins. In other words: the holier one’s origin, the ‎more stringent the rules for recapturing one’s purity once it had ‎been lost. The wording of the Mishnah, i.e.‎חומר בקודש ‏מבתרומה ‏‎, can be understood allegorically as: “the reason why ‎higher ranking holiness is subject to more stringent steps of ‎purification than lower ranking holy vessels, is because the higher ‎ranking ones had been inside the lower ranking ones.” The word ‎תרומה‎ chosen by the Mishnah, has a double meaning, i.e. it ‎is something in need of being elevated further. Applied to the ‎צדיק‎ in our parable, it means that the tzaddik engaged in ‎‎“outreach,” must be much more on guard against being drawn ‎into the sphere of the sinner than the kind of tzaddik who ‎does not venture to mix with the sinners even in order to bring ‎them closer to G’d. A tzaddik faced with this dilemma will ‎do well to remind himself that the allures of this world are ‎transient, and cannot be compared to the delights in store when ‎the soul rejoins its place in heaven after having successfully ‎discharged its duties while within a mortal body.‎
When our sages in Avot 6,10 stated that everything that ‎G’d created, He created only for the sake of His glory, this is ‎another way of saying that He desires to have satisfaction from ‎the conduct of His creatures.
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