T64 (Tinyana) PNC - Mah She-Anu Ro'im — Mammon as the Fallen Ashirus of the Nevi'im, and the Shigaon of the Wealthy

**"Mah she-anu ro'im, she-kol ha-negidim ha-gedolim, ki-m'at kulam, hem meshuga'im mamash."** Rabbeinu opens with raw observation: *what we see, with our own eyes, is that almost all the great wealthy ones are actually crazy.* He doesn't soften it; he doesn't make it metaphor. "Anyone who is wealthy has *shigaon gadol*." And then the **da**: it isn't a coincidence and it isn't their personality — *the mammon itself is making them insane.* Now the etiology, which is the whole chiddush of the torah: **mammon comes from the *fall* of the ashirus of the *nevi'im*.** Chazal teach (Nedarim 38a): "all the prophets were wealthy." That ashirus was a *holy* wealth, the wealth that goes with prophetic vessels capable of holding ruach ha-kodesh. And there is a famous structural feature of the prophetic state Rashi flags on **"וַיִּתְנַבֵּא"** (Shmuel I 18:10): *v'ishtatei* — *and he became crazed.* Prophecy itself, when it descends on a navi, looks from outside like the navi is going out of his mind. Now stand all of that up: when the holy ashirus *falls* — when the same shefa-channel is severed from prophetic vessels and pours instead into mammon-vessels in a person who has not built himself to receive — **the prophecy-resemblance of madness arrives without the prophecy.** What was *appearance* of insanity in the navi (with the truth of nevuah hidden inside) becomes *shigaon gamur*, complete actual insanity, in the wealthy gevir. The shigaon is the same shigaon; only the inner content has been hollowed out. **The diagnostic implication is unsparing.** When you see a man whose wealth has made him cruel, paranoid, self-important, untouched by suffering around him, unable to hear another human being — you are not looking at a *moral* failure first. You are looking at a *kelei*-failure: shefa keyed to nevuah is pouring through a vessel that isn't built for it, and the empty form of *meshuga* shows through because the *navi* part is missing. The tikkun, by implication: build the inner navi-vessel — emunah, hisbodedus, mesirus la-Hashem — *first*, and only then the same shefa lands as ashirus that does not derange.