A Call to Us
By Rabbi Pinchos Lipschutz
We have experienced so many tragedies recently and they
show no sign of letting up. Klal Yisroel was particularly affected by
Covid, losing so many to the new disease that claimed millions of lives
worldwide. Each death was a terrible tragedy, another stab in the community’s
hearts.
Many who survived were left with lingering effects. People
were left without jobs and businesses. Social mores were upended, and yeshivos
and schools were forced to close, severely impacting many students. Many shuls
that were closed for long periods have still not gotten back to normal. New
opportunities were created, but many were lost.
On Lag Ba’omer of this year, a terrible tragedy
thrust the Yiddishe velt into mourning. Without warning, forty-five
people, who moments before had been davening and celebrating at the kever
of Rabi Shimon bar Yochai, had the oxygen snuffed out of them. Nobody
remembers anything like that happening before in their lifetimes.
On Erev Shavuos, bleachers collapsed in the new
Karlin-Stolin bais medrash in Yerushalayim. Three people died and many
more were injured. We all mourned.
An anti-religious government was established in Israel. It
gets stronger day by day, as it plans to battle the religious community and
take apart the status-quo agreement under which the state’s relationship with
religion operates.
And most recently, last week, a 12-story apartment
building near Miami Beach collapsed, potentially leaving as many as 160 people
dead, many of them Jews. There was no warning, no bomb, and no loud boom. The
building just imploded, and in seconds, the people in it were
gone.
For some reason, the sense of awful foreboding, of communal
mourning, the feeling that we have all been hit by a gut-wrenching tragedy is
missing this time. Maybe we have become numb to disaster, or perhaps it is the
fact that this one is slowly grinding out and there is room for hope that
somehow people will be found alive amidst all that rubble. Or maybe we have
suffered so much that we can no longer mourn. We have had the wind knocked out
of us so many times that we don’t have the emotional wherewithal to sit down and
contemplate what is going on, what is happening to us, and why.
Rav Yisroel Meir Lau frequently relates the story of his
liberation from the Buchenwald concentration camp. I heard it from him. An
American chaplain, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, who accompanied the liberating
American soldiers, was gazing at a pile of dead bodies in the death camp when
he thought he saw something move. Gingerly, he approached the pile and detected
a young boy, barely alive, among the dead.
Like a malach shel rachamim, he tearfully stuck out
his hand to the emaciated child. He told him that he is an American and that
the Nazis were gone. Speaking to the boy in Yiddish, he tried to gauge if his
mental abilities were intact after having suffered so many harrowing
experiences and being near death.
“What is your name?” asked the kind rabbi dressed in an
American army uniform, as tears streamed down his face at the pitiful sight.
“Lulek,” was the reply.
“Vi alt bist du, mein kind? How old are you, my
child?” he asked little Lulek.
“Elter far dir. Older than you,” responded the
child.
Fearing that the boy had lost his senses, the rabbi began
weeping. Again he asked the skin and bones that resembled a young boy how old
he was, and again he answered that he was older than the weeping rabbi.
The rabbi looked at the boy with great pity and tried one
last time to get a sane response from the child who had been so badly affected
by the horrific suffering he endured.
“Tell me, mein kind, why do you say that you are
older than me? Isn’t it obvious that you are a young child and I am a grown
man? Why do you insist on thinking that you are older than me?”
Lulek explained quite simply: “Git a kook. Du
veinst. Ich ken shoin nit veinen. Nu, zogt mir, ver is elter? You are
crying. I have already lost my ability to cry. Am I not older than you?”
Despite his youth and having experienced four tortuous
years in a dark place where death and hunger were his constant companions, the
youth spoke with wisdom beyond his physical age.
We are thankfully very far removed from the unspeakable
horrors experienced during the Holocaust, but can it be that we have lost our
ability to cry, to be impacted by sadness, to feel pain, to realize that we are
living in an eis tzorah, and to recognize that we must do something about
it or chas veshalom the tragedies may not end here?
Relatives hung pictures of their loved ones on fences
near the collapse, reminding many of the pictures hung in the area of the Twin
Towers after they fell. The grief is overwhelming, the human misery
devastating.
What are we to do? While every situation is different and
we should not act without being thoroughly familiar with the facts and the halacha,
this week’s parsha provides an example of how to act in the time of a
plague.
At the conclusion of Parshas Bolok, we learn
that Bilam set up a situation that led Jewish men to sin with Moavite women. A
respected leader publicly committed a sinful act with the daughter of Midyan’s
leader.
The nation watched and wept, at a loss of what to do. A
plague that had already killed 24,000 Jewish people was raging, showing no
signs of ebbing.
One man was not confounded by the unprecedented outrage. He
knew the halacha and what had to be done. Ignoring the cynics and acting
with the koach haTorah, Pinchos ended the plague as well as the sad
chapter of Bilam and Midyan.
By following the halachos he had been taught by
Moshe Rabbeinu and intervening when nobody knew what to do, Pinchos merited the
blessing of eternal peace. We commonly think that the man of peace is the one
who doesn’t involve himself in communal issues. When there is a disagreement,
he stays far away, though his inaction may be beneficial to anti-Torah causes.
In fact, the Torah, in this week’s parsha, teaches us that the
opposite is true. Because Pinchos acted when he did, throwing a spear into the
practitioners of evil, he was able to end the challenge to halacha and
restore Am Yisroel to its proper condition.
Hashem conferred upon Pinchos His bris of shalom and
kehunah, empowering him to carry on the tradition of Aharon Hakohein as
an oheiv shalom verodeif shalom. Peace is advanced by the pursuit of
Torah and halacha.
Shalom, which means peace, and shleimus,
which means complete, share the same root. When everything is performed
properly and when everything is complete and whole, it is possible to also have
shalom. The world was created with Torah, the absolute truth, and
therefore the more complete the world is with Torah, the more peace and
wholesomeness there is.
On Sunday, we fasted in commemoration of Shivah Assar
B’Tammuz at the onset of the period we refer to as the Three Weeks. We
mourn the loss of the Bais Hamikdosh, the place where we brought korbanos
to cleanse and purify ourselves. With the destruction of the Bais Hamikdosh,
we lost the center of kedusha in our world. From that time onward, we
have been bereft and empty. Nothing in a Jew’s life has been the same since
then.
Subsequent to the destruction of the Bais Hamikdosh,
a sinner is forced to find his way back to Hakadosh Boruch Hu without
the benefit of the mizbei’ach and a korban. Ever since the churban,
Klal Yisroel has had to adapt to a world of hester, darkness.
Pinchos earned the blessings of shalom and kehunah
because he returned shleimus to Am Yisroel and thereby
reconnected them with Hashem. That was the task of the kohanim: to bring
Jews together and to bring them together with Hashem.
When the kohanim brought korbanos in the Bais
Hamikdosh, they created harmony in the cosmos and shleimus in the
world. Chet, sin, creates a division between the Jewish people and
Hashem. The offering of korbanos erases the divide. In our day, we can
no longer bring korbanos to erase sins and return us to Hashem’s
embrace. Instead, we must work much harder, as it is dependent upon us and our teshuvah
and maasim tovim to restore our connection as well as shleimus to
a world sullied with sin and tumah.
We know that the Bais Hamikdosh was destroyed
because of sinas chinom, which was prevalent among the Jewish people at
that time, and we know that a primary reason it has not been rebuilt is because
we are still afflicted with that fault. We are judgmental, unforgiving, and
disrespectful of people we differ with, and we don’t love every person as much
as we should.
When we calculate the recent communal
tragedies and all the personal and private tragedies that so many people are
going through in so many areas of their lives, it can be said that we are
living in a period of mageifah.
An apocryphal story is told of a rosh yeshiva whose talmidim
were accepting everything he was discussing in his shiur. He
remarked that today people accept everything in Torah but question and try to
understand the acts of Hakadosh Boruch Hu. In the past, people would question
and work to understand Torah, while accepting everything that Hakadosh Boruch
Hu did, knowing that it was beyond their ability to grasp.
We do not know why specific tragedies befall our people.
The ways of Hashem are beyond human comprehension, but we all know that our
world is not one of shleimus. We know that people are suffering. We know
that adults are suffering from illness, poverty, loneliness, and issues brought
on by social and financial pressures.
We know of children who are in pain, of youngsters who feel
that they are not given a chance and are failing. Some feel unloved, while
others perceive themselves to be under crushing pressure. Some young adults
have problems finding shidduchim, while others are dealing with abuse.
Apathy keeps us from getting involved, even on a minor level, in hearing and
perceiving problems and then reaching out to offer help.
We have to seek to achieve shleimus in our personal
lives as well. Rectifying sinas chinom and helping others is a great
place to start.
An eis tzorah is a call to us to help return the
world to a condition of shleimus. In times of tragedy, people find
within themselves untapped reservoirs of inner strength and courage. Let us be
like Pinchos, utilizing those deep inner strengths to bring shalom and shleimus
to the world by loving and helping people, and by caring enough to do
something.
Every act we undertake to make the world a better place by helping people
and seeking perfection brings us closer to the day when Pinchos, who lives
eternally as Eliyohu, will announce that the mageifos
have ended, that golus is done, and that the geulah is here.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home