ספר שמות

Exodus 16,28.G’d said to Moses: “‘how long will you ‎refuse to observe My commandments and My ‎teachings?”Pertaining to this verse [which ‎sounds as if G’d accuses Moses, personally, of not observing His ‎commandments, Ed.] Rashi,; says (based on the ‎Talmud in Baba Kamma 92) that sometimes when a farmer ‎wishes to uproot a weed growing too close to a cabbage, he ‎inadvertently uproots the cabbage at the same time. What the ‎Talmud has in mind is that sometimes keeping company with the ‎wicked will result in the innocent becoming afflicted with the ‎fallout of the afflictions that the wicked will be struck with.‎In order to understand how our sages dared to explain this ‎verse by attributing to G’d that He would hold Moses responsible ‎for keeping company with the wicked when Moses had been ‎appointed as the leader of the Israelites against his will, and only ‎after arguing about his being unsuitable for such a task for seven ‎days, we may have to refer to another comment by Rashi on ‎‎16,22: ‎ויבאו כל נשיאי העדה ויגידו למשה‎, “the princes of the entire ‎congregation came to tell Moses.” [the fact that a double ‎portion of manna had descended on the camp on the eve of the ‎Sabbath. Ed.] On this verse Rashi writes that the ‎fact that the princes had been taken by surprise is proof that ‎Moses had not told anyone of G’d’s command that this would ‎occur on the Sabbath eve. G’d had told Moses about this already ‎in verse 5 of our chapter, but Moses had withheld this ‎information, part of which was that the people should prepare ‎their food for the Sabbath. Rashi says there that Moses was ‎punished in our verse for withholding this information from the ‎people, so that he is lumped together with them as guilty of not ‎observing G’d’s commandments. In other words, Moses was ‎punished for not warning the people in good time how to prepare ‎for the Sabbath, seeing that there were numerous tasks that ‎could not be performed on the Sabbath, including cooking, ‎baking, etc.‎It is clear then that Moses was punished for not telling the ‎people immediately about the Sabbath at the end of the week. ‎Nonetheless, we need to understand how this failure to tell the ‎people about the Sabbath and there being no manna on that day ‎was such a serious act of omission that it warranted such a ‎punishment. Would the fact that the people had known about ‎the absence of manna a few days earlier have made such a ‎difference that all of them would have stayed in their tents ‎without testing if indeed there was no manna on that day?We have read in a book called sefer yereyim, the book for ‎the truly reverent Jews, that every commandment requires ‎preparation before it can be performed properly, i.e. at the best ‎possible level. One needs to purify oneself in thought and deed ‎before setting out to perform the commandment. The reason is ‎that by preparing oneself for the performance of the ‎commandment one demonstrates that one is happy to have the ‎opportunity to perform this commandment. It shows G’d that ‎one looks forward to the opportunity to perform the ‎‎mitzvah. Having prepared oneself for performing the ‎commandment ensures that one will do so meticulously. One’s ‎heart and soul will be part of the act of performance.