Rebbetzen Tziporah: Holidays

 Dear Friends

Welcome to the tail end of the annual Israel Intensity Week. It begins with a siren and two minutes of silence ushering in Holocaust Memorial Day, followed a few days later by Memorial Day for fallen members of the Israel Defense Forces and terror victims, and capping things off with Yom Atzmaut, Israel Independence Day.

The intensity of it all shouldn’t surprise you, my fellow tribe members. Do we have an international reputation for being laid back? Obviously, the answer is loud and perhaps a bit aggressive – No.
Arguably this tendency may have begun when Hashem told Avraham to leave everything behind him and head out to the land where (to use the words of the text) Hashem said, “I will show you yourself.” 

This verse is sometimes understood as meaning “I will show you.” The word “arekka” (I will show you you) is reflective. Even though Avraham embarked on a journey that demanded absolute emunah in Hashem, it also was one that would culminate in his learning himself. Seeing his true essence and identity emerge from the continued interaction with the mission Hashem reveals here in Eretz Yisrael far more vividly than in any other place in the world was the result of his journey and of yours.

You may have heard of Effie Zuroff (I am not sure I have the name right; I heard it on the radio only once, but what he said left a deep impression on me). He just resigned from his job. He is the last Nazi hunter. The men who gave the world a whole new definition of the word evil are now in their nineties or dead. Going back a few decades, if you were to find yourself in a café somewhere in South America hobnobbing with your friends, enjoying the gemutlchkeit of your replanted German culture sans the beer, you might suddenly feel a hand on your shoulder. You would turn around and find yourself facing a man you have never met. As soon as you heard him say, “I was looking for you,” you would realize that the game is over. You would have met Effie Zuroff.

They are gone, safely in hell. People of my generation and that of my children and grandchildren have seen survivors, the eyewitnesses to the unspeakable. When we are no longer in this world (and arguably way before then), the Holocaust may end up as interesting as the Babylonian exile’s beginning, or the Inquisition. Certainly intellectually informative, but not what most of us think about when planning a milchig sheva brachos or studying for a mid-term. It will be shelved in the file called Then, which isn’t really relevant to Now.

Or is it? The horror isn’t the hero of the show, the stars of the show are the survivors, and those who didn’t survive, but knew in ways that we never will know, may Hashem preserve us, that whatever you want to be, you don’t want to be a Nazi. The sheer courage that belonged to the generation of the parents of most of my schoolmates in Bais Yaakov was not appreciated at the time. They were loved and respected, but the kind of admiration that makes you aspire to be more wasn’t always there. 

As a group, they remained foreign. They didn’t speak English as one would in Oxford. By and large, the kind of jobs that they took to support their families didn’t give them much status. Today you can look at the bravery and the determination they had, and stand in awe. The way this is done in Israel on Memorial Day is by formally standing at attention. Arguably it is a somewhat ironic attempt to dress the significance and pain of their lives in fashionable Westernized clothing.

 The silence is not. It’s something that you need to keep yourself from becoming a victim of spiritual amnesia. It gives you time to ask yourself questions about what it means to choose life, to step back and think about the giants, people like the Bobover Rebbe, who dedicated themselves to helping his people rediscover their potentials and to keep moving forward. The caring, the acceptance, and the concrete help that he gave was always impressive. 

When I learned that he was only in his forties and had already managed to lose those closest to him when he became the father of hundreds of others, astounds me. The way to memorialize both the survivors and victims is, in my opinion, to commit yourself to not letting yourself ever forget who you are, and what your mission is – never will be like that of people who aren’t Jews.

My husband’s son, Luzzie (okay, Elazar) Gottlieb came to speak about the Israeli army when it was their time to be memorialized. He is tall, wears Chassidic clothing, and is part of the kashrut administration of no less than the Badatz of the Aida Chareidis. One look at him (and his wife and baby who came for the ride) makes you wonder whether some bizarre mistake was made in scheduling him to speak about the soldiers of Israel’s army. 

No mistake.

Years ago, (during the second Lebanese war, or maybe it was the second war in Gaza, but who’s counting), he felt a need to give what he can and do whatever he can do for the soldiers. As a chossid, his Rebbe had told him many times that that is what every Jew is meant to feel. He was learning, but wanted to do something more, something specific and direct. He and a friend headed down to a base located near the last place civilians were allowed to go. They came with two gifts. The stuff you need to make a great barbeque, and a couple of dozen or so tzitzis, to give away to any soldier who'd want to put them on and earn a bit more merit. He came back later with a couple of hundred. The demand was so real, so pure, the bond was clearly mutual. They wanted him to talk to them about what religion is about. In the course of time, his visits became a regular part of life on the base. Some of the soldiers came to his home for Shabbos. The commander of the base called him aside with a problem, the white tzitzis compromise the shelter that olive green uniforms gives his guys. 

Yes. He now has distributed several thousand olive green tzitzis. He has been doing this for over ten years. This is a man with a full-time job and large family, (in fact one of the career soldiers who saw him year after year finally asked a question that was troubling him, but because he may have felt it to be too personal, had never asked. “You come every year. How come your baby never grows”? Luzzie told him “Every year I’ve been here, it’s been, Baruch Hashem, with a new baby.” The soldier’s mouth may have closed by now….

The soldiers face what I never faced, with courage and with the knowledge that the Jews in their hometown need them and that whatever else they are, they are part of the tribe. Even those who are drafted and didn’t particularly want to spend a minimum of two years in the mixture of danger and boredom that is what serving in the army is about, know who they are. Even those who don’t put on Luzzie’s green tzitzis. They are members of the tribe.

So too the victims of terror. They know that emunah is their only answer, and it is one that the Dee family and the Paley family spoke out with eloquence that only pain can generate.  It is the Land that shows you yourself.

Yom Atzmaut is such a paradox. The overwhelming miracle of being here is astounding. Israel is alive, full of hope, Tshuvah, buildings in Beitar and Kiryat Sefer whose lobbies are basically parking lots for strollers and trikes. An estimated 70,000 bachurim are studying in the yeshivas that dot the entire country. 
There are also the victims—the ones whose education took them to want to have a Jewish state that isn’t too Jewish. The heritage of the early secular founders of the State include fear of Torah, and hatred of anything that is too different, anything that marks you as a Jew. 

Today’s progressive leftists are victims of a spiritual holocaust. The difference between them and the victims of a physical holocaust is that they are unaware of the fact that they are spiritually dying. They are your brothers just as much as Rabbi Dee or the Paleys or the thousands of bachurim or your own family. A bright spot on the horizon is that some of them have come to see the bond that holds us together. I am enclosing a speech made by the Minister of Information (doesn’t that sound like something out of Orwell’s 1984?). It was far different than anything I have ever heard from a member of the secular movement...Please read the enclosure.

 
Much love to all of your folks back in the Golah,

Tziporah