Or HaChaim on Deuteronomy 32:10/אור החיים על דברים ל״ב:י׳

1 ימצאהו בארץ מדבר ובתהו ילל ישימון. "He discovered it in a desert land, in desolation, a howling wilderness." It appears that Moses referred to a thought expressed in Pessachim 119 that the Israelites did not leave Egypt until G'd had made them to be like a fishpond devoid of fish. [the Talmud deals with the meaning of the word וינצלו in Exodus 12,36. Ed.] Finding Israel in the desert was as unlikely as finding fish in the pond referred to. In Rabbi Chayim Vital's Likutey Torah on Parshat Vayera we read that if the Israelites had remained in Egypt at the time of the Exodus they would have remained mired in that impurity forever as they would have descended to the 50th and absolute level of impurity. This is why Moses stresses "where", i.e. in what spiritually low state G'd found the Jewish people. He does not describe the area as מדבר, "a desert," but as ארץ מדבר, "desert land," as the former has absolutely no spiritual content, is completely barren of spiritual values.

2Moses also said that not only did this land not have much to offer spiritually, but it was תהו ילל ישמון, it was full of spiritually negative influences. Zohar volume one page 16 describes תהו as one of the levels of the קליפה. ילל ישימן are descriptions of similar phenomena. The reason that such phenomena flourish in those environments is the absence of spiritually positive forces. This is a reason why the Torah describes the fact that G'd "discovered" Israel in the desert land in the future tense, to emphasise that unless the Jewish people in that region enjoy the ongoing protection and supervision of G'd, i.e. יסבבנהו יבוננהו, they would be spiritually lost. Moses means that the Exodus was due to the fact that the Jews could not absorb any additional negative influences in Egypt. He protected them at the time He brought the plagues upon the Egyptians. A simple example of this is Exodus 9,6 which tells us that not even the cattle of the Israelites suffered from the plague of pestilence, not to mention the immunity of the Jewish firstborn during the last plague.

3יבוננהו, "He granted it discernment." Moses refers to the people receiving the Torah which is the source of their insight, the instrument by which G'd preserved the people "like the pupil of His eye" (Compare Proverbs 2,11 תבונה תנצרכה, "understanding will preserve you.") When Moses added the reference to the "pupil of His eye," we are reminded of Zachariah 2,12: "for anyone who harms you (the Jewish people) is as if he harmed the pupil of his own eye." The prophet meant that an eye cannot tolerate being touched by the finger of man. The reason is that whereas the eyeball is scrupulously clean, man's fingers are not. The eye symbolises spirituality, the finger, physicality. The former does not like to be touched by the latter. This is the mystical dimension of Rabbi Shimon's saying in the Zohar volume two page 211: "woe to the soul that has to suffer from alien fire." He viewed the fire which enters the soul to punish it as alien fire relative to the fire represented by the soul itself. This is why you find in that passage of the Zohar that the soul of the righteous has to immerse itself in the fiery river Dinur, etc.

4Moses compared the type of protection G'd afforded the Jewish people as comparable to the way in which we protect the pupils of our eyes. G'd protects the spirituality whereas He considers everything outside the "eye" as physical and potentially lethal even by mere touch. Israel had not attained such a level of spirituality until after it had received the Torah. When Moses first spoke of יבוננהו, and only afterwards of יצרנהו, he referred to the negative commandments.

5Another thought that may have prompted Moses to choose these expressions may be related to what we learned in Berachot 54: "three categories of people are in need of protection, one of them being the Torah scholar." The reason is that the destructive forces in the universe are jealous of the Torah scholar's achievements and status and try to harass him. Moses therefore says יבוננהו, that by giving the Torah scholar insight, i.e. the Torah, G'd has armed the scholar against such harassment. Once he possesses such insight he himself understands that he has to protect the Torah like the pupil of his eye.