Good morning, good morning.
Today we're going to look at the words mipega ra: Hashem should save us from pega ra. Pega ra would be: save us from injuries or tragedies or disasters, damaging things that are bad for us. I was thinking about this this morning: a good example of pega ra is that people don't usually get into many accidents in their lifetime, they say, but there are a lot of near misses, like accidents that almost happened but didn't happen, though they could have happened and were close to happening. And we don't even know about the ones we narrowly avoided.
Sometimes we think this way—or, we don't think this way, but we act this way. We end up waiting for something bad to happen, and then either it happens, or it happened and didn't end up being as bad of an ending. Then we make a seudat hoda'ah, a meal for thanking God, or we thank God without the meal, without the public acknowledgment. But there's room to argue that a person should be more grateful if they didn't even get into the accident in the first place, right? “Thank you, Hashem. Today I didn't get in an accident.” Why do you have to wait to get in an accident and then not get hurt, to then say, “Thank you, Hashem, that I didn't get hurt”?
So I think the prayer is kind of along those lines: “Hashem, save me from damaging things that could happen to me today.” When we're driving to work, we don't usually get in that car every day and say, “Hashem, thank you. Sorry, Hashem, please protect me from having an accident today.” Can it happen? Sure. Did it happen today? No. “Hashem, thank you. Today I didn't have an accident. Protect me today from not having an accident. Protect me today from not getting hurt.”
And this, I guess, leads to the deeper concept that Hashem protects us all the time from things that we don't even know exist. We didn't even realize that we're in this position. There's a phrase we say in Tachanun, in the supplications after Amidah (standing prayer) in the morning: Ki hu yotzi mereshet raglai. Because he takes my feet out of a trap.
The wording I thought was interesting when I read this pasuk (verse) many years ago was that he takes from a trap my feet. That's really how it's phrased: Ki hu yotzi. He removes mereshet, from a trap; raglai, my feet. You could remove my feet from a trap, or you could remove a trap from my feet. What's the difference between those two statements? I think maybe the pasuk means that I look up to God because I realize that there are going to be traps that I'm going to step into, and I don't even realize that there are traps. So instead of looking around for traps, I'll just look out to God. And God will remove my feet from the traps. Hashem has to kind of come in and protect me from that, because there are things that we get into that we don't even realize are traps. And Hashem has to get involved and remove our feet from them.
So I'm asking Hashem today to give us this protection. Help us be saved from ourselves. Help us be saved from damaging things that could happen today, even when we don't realize that, even when we don't realize that they're damaging, and even when we don't realize that we almost got into the damaging thing. And b'ezrat Hashem (with God's help), we should have protection today. We should have protection today from anything that could be damaging us, known and unknown. Have a great day.