As any ba'al koreh will tell you, there are two paragraphs in the Torah, very near each other, that begin exactly the same way: "Ki tetze l'milchama al oyvecha...." - "When you go to war against your enemy...." Clearly, the pasuk may be taken at its simple meaning, that there is a proper time to wage war against those who would destroy us, and that when we do, we must regard our enemy as exactly that - our enemy, having no mercy upon him, for he would have no mercy on us if, G-d forbid, he was victorious. (Pointedly, our sedra closes with the mitzvah to utterly wipe out Amalek.) But why two identical p'sukim ? Chazal say there is another "enemy" against whom we must also wage war - the Yetzer HaRa , the negative inclination to pursue sin, to give in to temptation, to "go through the motions" and perform mitzvot in a lackluster fashion. This enemy, too, is insidious, and plays on our baser instincts, on our tendency to be lazy, skeptical and complacent. We have to be strong, to go the extra mile - especially in Elul - to be ultra-scrupulous and diligent in mitzvot . And so, I offer the following amazing story I heard recently. A young yeshiva man on a plane was sitting next to two non-Jews when his kosher meal - a deli sandwich - was served. He took the sandwich out of the wrapper, placed it on his tray and went to the bathroom. When he returned, before he ate, he was suddenly struck by a thought: there is a law called Basar She'nitalem Min Ha'Ayin . If meat is removed from its container, has no signs of the hashgacha and is then left alone for a while, we may not eat it, for fear it was switched for treif meat when no one was looking. So, what to do with this sandwich? The man deliberated and decided, "I won't eat it." The men in his row ate their meals, but his remained on the tray. After 10 minutes, the man next to him said, "Why aren't you eating?" Rather than say he wasn't hungry, the Jew proceeded to explain why he had not eaten. The non-Jew was quite incredulous, "What unbelievable laws you people have!" And then he made an amazing confession: "I had always heard that kosher meals on flights are much better than non-kosher ones, and so, while you were away, I switched meals. That is my sandwich in front of you." The awesome power of a mitzvah - it's the plane truth. (With special thanks to the Curtis family of London.)
