T280 PNC - Litigation Is the Torah's Punishment for Uprooting Business From Torah

When a person is dragged into beit din to be judged in dinei Torah, that itself is the punishment and the Torah's vengeance upon him. Why? Because all masa u-matan (commerce) is itself Torah. The law of trading a cow for a donkey is Torah; all the more so, when you actually do that transaction, it is certainly Torah (as taught in the name of the Baal Shem Tov). Therefore in business one must bind one's thought only to the Torah and the laws clothed within the deal. Whoever uproots the business from the Torah and falls into the business itself — not binding his thought to the Torah inside — his punishment is that afterwards he must be judged in dinei Torah. Then he has to bring all the words, thoughts, and dealings he had during the transaction, from beginning to end, and bring them back into Torah by reciting them before the dayanim, who rule on each detail. The whole business is finally turned into Torah — by force, retroactively. That is the vengeance of the Torah on one who tried to remove it.

The punishment is that he must bring all the words of the transaction and make them into Torah. Even a single word or thought that goes missing will ruin the verdict — every detail must be recovered and presented before the judges. The depth of the litigation matches the depth of the original uprooting: someone who only superficially uprooted gets a smaller punishment (he must be judged but is shown to be in the right); someone who uprooted more deeply suffers greater consequences and loses in court.

Even before the litigation stage, the principle: in commerce only the externality of one's thought should be on the dealing; the inner thought must remain bound to Torah. And one must do business with emunah, speaking words of truth — "Did you deal in faith?" (Shabbat 31a). Why is faith essential? Because business is itself the elevation of fallen sparks (nitzotzot of fallen kedushah). The clarification of those sparks from the klipot is achieved primarily through emunah. Faith dwells always with the fallen kedushah — "This is Yerushalayim, in the midst of the nations I have set her" (Yechezkel 5:5); Yerushalayim — the faithful city, faith — is among them always. The fallen sparks cling around faith, and faith raises them. That is what business actually is when done right: lifting fallen sparks through emunah.