Now that we are in the month of Adar II and Purim will shortly be upon us, I've added the Ma'amre Purim of Rabbi Shalom Noach Berezovsky (author of the Netivot Shalom) to my breakfast reading list. This rabbi's writings always put me in a good mood for the day because he always seems to have something positive to say.
R' Berezovsky's oft-made point is that it's not just a teaching about God and Abraham: it's a message for us too. Why? Because every one of us also faces our own "ten tests", as it were.
Though many commentators have compiled their lists of ten tests, their identity is immaterial. The mishnah does not list them and, on a close reading of the Torah and its associated midrashim, one can find over 30 candidates for inclusion in the list of ten.
The real reason why the identity of the tests is unimportant can be found in R' Berezovsky's comment, whatever tests God sends us -- and by implication Abraham too -- it is always the same thing that is being tested. That is our bitachon, our trust in God. Whether our tests involve expense, hardship, illness or anything else, the outcome will either reveal that we trust God and have confidence in him, or that we do not.
Pirkei Avot has another mishnah that deals with tests: at 5:6 we are reminded that our forefathers in the desert tested God ten times. It occurs to me that these tests too are on the theme of bitachon: they are not however tests that God has any problems in passing. They are tests of quite a different order, since they reflect our own absence of bitachon. Why otherwise would we have behaved as we did, in complaining and even rebelling against the God who brought us out of Egypt and split the Reed Sea on our behalf?
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