Soro’s lifetime was a hundred years, and twenty years, and seven years – the years of Soro’s life.
Chazal[2] attach their comments about this pasuk to a verse in Tehillim.[3] “Hashem oversees the days of the simple-hearted/temimim.” Just as their days are pure-hearted and innocent, so are those years. Thus, Soro at twenty possessed the innocent beauty of a seven-year-old. At the century mark, she was as sin-free as when she was twenty.
We get the consistency part – how the achievements or features of one stage of her life carried over to those that followed. But what does any of this have to do with being pure-hearted, with her temimus?
“I will allow you to walk amongst those here who stand.”[4] The explanation of the Shalah HaKadosh is well known: Angels can only stand. They do not and cannot move from one madregah to another. Their roles and stature are fixed. Whatever they comprehend about Hashem does not change over time. Human beings, however, do not stand still. They walk. That is, they move between positions. They are able to learn more, to move closer to Hashem if they choose. Chovos HaLevavos writes that the tzaddik is always changing – so much so, that he is a perpetual ba’al teshuvah. Each day he comprehends more of G-d’s greatness. When he looks back at his behavior the previous day – when he understood less – he is full of regret!
But this is a description of only one kind of Tzadik: the rare, deeply discerning talmid chacham who stands at the summit of his generation. Such a tzadik’s spiritual state is fully dynamic. Always striving to comprehend more, he is never at rest. There is so much further to go! He is always looking for the next insight, the next level of comprehension.
There are many tzadikim, however, who are not such incisive Torah scholars. Their tzidkus relates to their actions, not their intellectual accomplishments. To be sure, they also struggle – but their battle is to keep away from any aveirah whatsoever, and to fully discharge their mitzvah responsibilities. They don’t move from madregah to madregah. Rather, they fight to maintain their wonderful madregah, without regard for reasons for mitzvos and the like. We should call them temimim: they are pure-hearted, not knowing the opposition of different ideas and the struggle to resolve them.
We now realize what Chazal found in the pasuk in Tehillim they cited. It is specifically in the lives of temimim that you will find consistency from day to day, and from year to year. In the tzadik-talmid- chacham model, consistency is not pursued. Constant flux and change is. Soro left the deep-dive into Torah to her husband. She focused on consistency in her actions. It was the sameness across the decades that we celebrate.
We also understand why Soro’s years are given starting with the largest number first, rather than progressing from the lowest number to the highest, as the Torah usually does. For the tzadik, the achievement is in the change – in the progress towards the end. (His hope is that in retrospect, his younger years don’t cause him embarrassment in his old age!) For the tamim, however, the honor is in the looking back – that her purity at age one hundred was like that of a twenty-year-old. All the years in between had not marred the purity. It was a long life of consistency.
- Adapted from Divrei Shaul, by Rav Yosef Shaul Nathanson, the Sho’el U-Meshiv ↑
- Bereishis Rabbah 58:1 ↑
- Tehillim 37:18 ↑
- Zechariah 3:7 ↑