“He [Moshe] was along the way, at the hotel, Hashem confronted him, and wanted to kill him.” (Bereishis 4:24)

Moshe Rabbeinu accepts Hashem’s proposal that he should be the one to take Bnei Yisrael out of Egypt. On the way down to Egypt, he almost gets killed because he did not perform a bris milah on his son. Chazal tell us the reason he didn’t do this bris is because he figured, “If I do a bris now, I won’t be able to immediately travel, since there will be danger to my child, and then I won’t be following Hashem’s order to immediately go down to Egypt to take out Bnei Yisrael”. He therefore decided to postpone the bris.

The obvious question is that Moshe Rabbeinu had sound reasoning to do what he did, so what in fact did he do wrong that caused Hashem to almost kill him!?

The gemora (Brochos 5a) tells us that if a person sees that suffering has befallen him, he should check his actions. The gemora continues “If he doesn’t find anything wrong with his actions, he should attribute the difficulties to negligence in his Torah study.” But if he was negligent in his Torah study, shouldn’t he have discovered this in his first search of his actions? The classic answer is that it does not mean regular “bitul Torah” – not learning Torah when one should have been. Rather it refers to his not doing a mitzvah to its fullest extent, showing that he neglected his learning regarding that mitzvah. If a person were to check out his actions, including even the mitzvos, it could be that there is some aspect of lack of fulfillment due to his lack of learning about that Mitzvah, and that is the reason he is being punished.

An example of this is Reuven, who switched his father’s bed from the tent of Bilha to the tent of Leah. This was considered a sin for Reuven. Now from Reuven’s perspective he was acting correctly. He only realized afterwards that he hadn’t understood the full extent of his actions, and as the Midrash tells us, Reuven did teshuvah for this. He ended up meriting the prophet Hoshea as a descendant, who said, “Shuva Yisrael ad Hashem Elokeicha”.

Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchok Ruderman (1900-1987) asks, “Reuven was not the first one to do teshuva, so why was he given this special merit through Hoshea? He explains that Reuven was the first one who despite not having done any specific sin, he still understood that he was obligated to do teshuva. All of us must judge our own actions using this same approach (consider whether our actions were what Hashem wanted, not merely whether we committed a sin or not). Rav Ruderman continues to explain that Moshe Rabbeinu could have done a bris on his son and left the baby behind with his mother, which is exactly what he ended up doing in the hotel. This lack of fully analyzing a situation is considered a sin for great people like Moshe.

How can we apply this in our own lives? We may find ourselves on the way to shul or seder, and are approached by someone offering us the opportunity to do a mitzvah. If we respond, “I can’t do it now because I am already involved in going to…”, that may be true, but on the other hand maybe the right thing to do is to go to shul or learn later. In other words, just because we have a heter to do or not do something, doesn’t mean that this is the correct way to go. Perhaps we should delay our davening or learning to a later time and attend to the mitzvah which just came our way?

These kinds of decisions can distinguish between a person who is just trying to fulfill his obligations and a person who is trying to grow. Sometimes the way to grow is to continue with your regular schedule, but in certain circumstances the way to grow would be to deviate from your regular schedule.

As we now enter the weeks of shovevim, a time during which we should be making a reckoning of the actions that we do, may we merit this year not only to have less sins, but that our mitzvahs should be more complete.