From The Rebbe's Torah on Parshat Mishpatim

I'm sharing something with you that stood out to me from the Parsha of Shabbos Mishpatim:

The Conquest of the Land of Israel

EXODUS 23:20-33..........Sixth Reading 20 "You are presently free from sin and therefore My presence can abide with you and accompany you wherever you go. If, in the future, however, you will sin, My presence will not be able to dwell with you openly. When that happens, I am going to send the angel Metatron before you to protect you on the way, and to bring you to the Land of Israel, the place that I have designated for you to occupy and settle in order to fulfill your mission of raising the world's Divine consciousness, and, in particular, to the special, central place that I have long ago prepared for revealing Myself—by situating the site of the heavenly Temple directly above the site where you will build the earthly Temple. This means that the Land of Israel in general and the future site of the Temple in particular are the locales most receptive to the spiritual consciousness of the higher worlds.

21 Even though I will send you this angel because your spiritual level will have fallen, you should still be watchful in his presence—heed his voice and do not rebel against him, for he will not overlook your iniquity. He, being an angel, does not understand disobedience to My will and is not authorized to pardon you, so he will punish you. Regardless of this, however, you should heed his voice since My Name is with him; whatever he does, he does in My Name. This is indicated by the fact that the numerical value of his name (מטטרון, 314) is the same as that of My Name Shakai (שדי).

22 For if you will diligently obey him and thus do all that I say, I will be an enemy to your enemies and persecute your persecutors.

23 For My angel will go before you and bring you to the land of the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizites, the Canaanites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, and I will annihilate them. The Girgashites, in contrast, will flee of their own accord, so I will not have to annihilate them.

24 You shall not prostrate yourselves to their gods nor serve them, nor shall you follow their practices; rather, you must shatter their idols and demolish the pillars they have set up to worship as idols.

25 Rather, you shall serve Me, God, your God, and in reward for not serving idols, I will bless your bread and your water, and I will also remove illness from your midst.

Seventh Reading 26 "In reward for doing all that I say, I will not only drive out the inhabitants of the Land of Israel, allowing you to settle it; In addition, I will grant the land a unique quality: no woman in your land will miscarry, or outlive her children, or be barren. Outside the land, these blessings will accrue only to the individual who fulfills My will, not to the whole populace. Similarly, if you fulfill My will anywhere in the world, I will grant you the full count of your days; you will not die prematurely.

27 I will send forth a dread of Me before you, and I will throw confusion among all the people into whose midst you are coming, and I will make all your enemies flee from you.

28 I will send supernatural hornets ahead of you that will wound their eyes and inject deadly poison into them. These hornets inhabit the east bank of the Jordan river and will not cross it westward, so they will only be able to drive out before you the Hivites, who live close to the west bank of the river so they can fire their poison at them, and the Canaanites and the Hittites, who live on the east bank of the river.

29 I will not drive the inhabitants of the Land of Israel out in a single year, lest the land become desolate and the wild animals outnumber you, for at this point, there are not enough of you to populate the whole land.

30 Rather, little by little will I drive them out before you, until you increase and are able to occupy the whole land.

31 Even though I postponed My original promise to Abraham of the territories of the Amonites, Moabites, and Edomites, I am now reinstating this promise. Thus, when you enter the land, I will set your borders from the Sea of Reeds to the Philistine [i.e., Mediterranean] Sea, and from the desert to the Euphrates River, for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hands, and you will drive them out from before you.

32 You shall not make a covenant with them nor with their gods.

33 They shall not dwell in your land lest they cause you to sin against Me, for you might serve their gods, and that would prove a snare to you."

EXODUS 24:9-11 [An account of what preceded the account of Nadav and Avihu]

9 On the following day, the 6^th of Sivan, whatever women still needed to, ritually immersed themselves. Moses wentpartway up the mountain, and also Aaron, Nadav, and Avihu, and seventy of Israel's elders, to prostrate themselves from afar, as God had told them to.

10 But after Moses entered the cloud, Nadav, Avihu, and the elders attempted to follow him with their sight—which they did not have permission to do—and they had a vision of the God of Israel. They saw, figuratively, that beneath God's feet there was the likeness of a brick of sapphire, which had reminded Him of the people's slavery as brick makers, while around Him was an appearance like the clearness of the heavens, for when the people were redeemed from slavery God rejoiced.

11 Yet God did not raise His hand against the nobles of the Israelites to punish them, even though they were liable to the death penalty because they gazed upon the Divine vision selfishly, as if doing so while they ate and drank. God did not kill them immediately because He did not want to upset the joyous mood surrounding the Giving of the Torah. Instead, He waited until they committed another sin—in the case of Nadav and Avihu, over nine months later, and in the case of the elders, over a year later—and punished them for both sins at the same time.

From The Rebbe's Torah