Rabbi Winston – Think About This….. Again

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​To Think About

Although we are no strangers to attacks from evil enemies, and we have had to fight for survival four millennia, each new situation is like the first time. This is especially true when it comes after a period of relative peace, and how much more so during a holiday whose theme is simchah, following after our most heartfelt teshuvah and atonement of the entire year.

Making it infinitely more painful is the fact that a lot of Israelis died so quickly, hundreds were instantly wounded, and innocent civilian hostages have been taken as ransom for Arab murderers. The world should storm Gaza and demand they return the hostages, withdrawal from Israel, and make restitutions to the families to whom they caused such tragic losses. 

That won’t happen. The world is too apathetic in general, and specifically when it comes to Jewish lives. It’s up to Israel to defend itself. But that can’t happen, because, unlike the enemy, we value life to the point that we’ll endanger our own to save those of others. It would be too painful for even just one hostage to die, especially in response to Israeli retaliation. 

And we have to worry about the evil empire, Iran, and their surrogate in the Middle East, Hisbollah. We don’t want to give them any additional “inspiration” to join into the fray because that would open up the war on two fronts, quickly taxing the Israel defense system which has already been weakened.

We’d like to believe that we have some kind of genius Ace up our sleeve that can outsmart all of them, but we don’t. Not conventionally, at least. The only Ace we have is God, and we don’t know what He wants with all of this, or where He plans to go with it. He does not always provide with happy endings, at least not in the short run. It’s hard to think positively with a history of pogroms and the Holocaust. 

So we have come out of Zman Simchasaynu and fallen into the depths of despair. We began the holiday with a sense of security and ended it feeling extremely vulnerable. Last week we roamed freely within the borders of Eretz Yisroel and this week we are nervous about walking around our communities. It is harsh, new reality. 
We were caught so off guard, implicating the Intelligence Community. It’s one thing to not have been aware of a singular, small attack. It’s something else to have been blindsided by a massive and organized attack. We weren’t even warned to be on guard just in case. How could such a failure occur to experts in this business? If we survive this, heads will roll. 

That’s the view from below the clouds. What’s the view from above them?

Once upon a time Biblical history and world history were the same. Even gentile leaders, ever murderous dictators knew and acknowledged the reality of the Jewish God. It didn’t necessarily stop them from attacking His people, or even Him. But, at least they believed in Him enough to know that is Who they were really going to war against.

It sounds like a fairy tale. Based upon our experience, gentile leaders do not believe in the God of the Jewish people. Secular Jews today don’t believe in the God of the Jewish people. The assumption is that if there is any validity to the legends, it has to have been because they knew a lot less, not a lot more. 

But it is really because of a split in history. Once upon a time there was only one kind of history, Biblical history. In those days, God didn’t mind letting His Presence being felt, even by gentiles and even by evil Jews. So He employed prophets to talk to both of them, to let them know what God thought about them and their plans, especially when they had to do with the Jewish people. 

Eventually God changed His mind, so-to-speak. At least He changed the way He interacted with man, pulling back from center stage and hiding out behind the curtains of history. And once out of sight God became out of mind, causing modern history to become very different from Biblical history.

It’s not that Torah stopped and secular history continued in its place. It became more like a shadow history, calling the shots from so far away that most people didn’t even suspect it was still alive, let alone in control. It did a good job of camouflaging itself by making the events of the day seem like only the events of the day. 

But that has always only meant to be a temporary mode. All the prophecies of the End of Days sound Biblical, not because they did not know how to write for the future. It’s because they knew, via prophecy, that they would come back again, no matter how modern society and man became. The son may play CEO and run the business while his father is away, but the day always comes when the father returns and resumes his role, and the son goes back to his. 

Blessed are you, God, Who returns His Shechinah to Tzion.

That is the role of the final war of wars, the War of Gog and Magog. It will force modern history to yield to Biblical history and merge with it. And by “Biblical history” we mean overt and direct intervention by God Himself, in such a way that everyone standing will have no choice but to acknowledge His reality once again. 

That’s when modern man will find out that his lack of belief in God was not because he knew more, but because he knew less. That is when we will find out that there is another level of knowing that has been ignored by mankind for millennia now, and it is crucial for being able to perceive and understand the world as man once did. 

Even more so. They did not have the benefit of all the history we have gone through and experienced. They had not become so technologically sophisticated so as to be able to appreciate just how powerful God is, or at least shows to us. When God finally delivers the final redemption, we will be shocked into awe by the scope of what He does and how He does it.

But it is not an overnight process. On the contrary, we have been transitioning to Biblical history now for at least decades, if not centuries. Everything that has occurred and the way it has occurred has been to this end, whether we can see it or not. God’s in charge, and He does not miss a beat when it comes to sewing up the final redemption.

The key to making and surviving the transition is emunah, faith in a God we cannot see and have a difficult time sensing. He’s right in the center of all of it, but the veil over our eyes to see that remains, giving all of history a sense of randomness and feeling of wanton evil. The only way to rise above that is emunah that it is an appearance only, and not the reality.

As God told Iyov, He will eventually pick the world up by its four corners, metaphorically speaking of course, and shake it out to force the evil people of history to fall off. It is not hard to see what God meant, or what it means today: If you have emunah, you will survive what God does to test it. If you don’t, you will fall off the world, not because you will have physically sailed over the edge, but because you will have intellectually and emotionally jumped God’s ship.

This is not the first test, but hopefully it is the last one. God has been testing us all along in different ways. Science has shaken the belief in God and religion of many, and they have been following up for a while now. Now we’re being tested by an impossible situation that is shocking and horrifying, carried out successfully by what appears to be pure evil. 

And it is. But that doesn’t mean that God isn’t in control of every last detail, or making it succeed or fail as He deems necessary. And though this may cause people to question even more, it should really just tell them the truth: God thinks and works differently than we do. The sooner we see that and understand what it means, the easier it will be to have emunah and trust God for the process. 

It is impossible to not notice the numbers of deaths and injured escalating, and it would be morally wrong to. It is impossible to not be concerned about the welfare of the hostages at the hands of such inhumane people, and we have to be. We’re made in the image of God, but we are human after all. 

But all of those roads have to converge at one point in the end: emunah. It won’t be because we see what God is doing and understand why. It won’t be because we could have learned to appreciate why what is going on is a necessary part of the redemption process. Not at all. It will only be because we have decided that we know enough about God to trust Him completely. 

As He told us in the Torah, He showed us everything He did so that we could know that He is our God and there is none other than Him. Not then, not after that, and not in our day as well. Yes, there will come a time when we’ll be able to see that with our own eyes. But until then, we have to hold fast to our strongest weapon of all, emunah, as Biblical as that sounds. In fact, because it sounds so Biblical. 

In the meantime, God should comfort the Jewish people for their losses already, and especially those directly related to those who have been taken or are suffering. Only He can. Who knows the right words…who can say what needs to be said to alleviate suffering from those directly and indirectly affected? Who has the power to share their grief and burden. Only God. The rest of us can only try. 

Ghosting the Sitra Achra

In the meantime, what I am about to prescribe will not be easy, especially for people like me. I have a hard time shutting things out, and Hate (with a capital H) injustice. I Hate evil. I Loathe stupidity (with a capital L), especially my own. I am most relaxed when by myself and cut off from the world, which is very hard to be at times like this. That’s why I want to work on this.

When the snake came and tempted Chava to eat from the forbidden fruit of the Aitz HaDa’as Tov v’Ra, it was not really the snake talking. Kabbalah explains that the Sitra Achra had taken over the snake and spoke through it. It looked like a woman talking to a snake, when in reality it was a woman talking to a bad angel.
But he is good at what he does, very good. He is a master of disguises and impersonations, especially since he works through real people. He makes an even bigger enemy out of our enemies, and we are easily duped into seeing only the human, not the Heavenly being working through them. People can be bad all on their own, but the Sitra Achra helps them to go to the next level. 

The goal is not to physically hurt us. That is the means. The goal is to spiritually hurt us. To take us down, spiritually. The Sitra Achra wants us to stop producing weapons against him that can weaken and, potentially, destroy him. He wants to kidnap holy sparks to increase his power and extend his reign. When we learn Torah and perform mitzvos, we redeem those sparks and keep them from him. That makes the S.A. furious. 

So if he can’t outright stop a Jew from learning Torah or performing mitzvos, he tries instead to limit the time and energy spent on both. And he is very clever about it, somehow knowing what riles us and gets our blood boiling, or simply catches our attention long enough to make us miss an important spiritual opportunity. And boy oh boy, he has had an enviable track record to date. Gihenom is a very crowded place thanks to the Sitra Achra.

So you want to ghost him. Ghosting is when someone who used to be friendly with you suddenly cuts off all communication without explanation. And though we’re never friendly with the Sitra Achra, we usually give such credence to everything he does to us that it is like we have an intimate relationship with him. We want to end that and just leave him hanging.

Now, the truth is, we’re supposed to be trying to do that all of our lives, war or no war. Evidently it is very hard to do unless a person puts everything they are into being a tzaddik. But everyone at some time or another has been able to ghost the Sitra Achra, even if only for a moment. Inspired, the person rose to the occasion and did not let any negativity get in their way of doing the right thing. The going got tough and, despite the S.A.’s efforts, they became tough and got going.

What does it mean to ghost the S.A. here? It means to realize that we are being terrorized by the S.A., vis-a-vis cowardly Arab murderers. He is doing it in a way that screams evil overcoming good, the triumph of injustice, in a way that makes us feel abandoned, lost, hopeless, frustrated. And it is so well disguised that we are only seeing humans perpetrate it, just as Chava thought she was talking only with the snake. 

We have to decide between which thoughts and emotions we can afford to feel right now that will allow us to deal with the situation in a spiritually mature manner. We have to recognize our negative feelings and realize that they do not help the situation but hinder it. 

We’re at war, but first and foremost with the Sitra Achra, a war that doesn’t involve bullets and missiles. It is a war over holy sparks that run this world and either strengthen holiness or evil. Six million Jews were murdered by a madman who, like the original snake, was the perfect vehicle for the Angel of Death. 

You don’t need emunah for when things make sense. You don’t need it for when you feel calm and in control. Emunah almost seems superfluous when we’re confident that the outcome will be in our favor. Emunah is how we deal with the opposite, when things don’t make sense, when we do not feel calm and in control, and we’re not confident about the outcome. 

When you can have it, truly feeling it at times like these, you ghost the Sitra Achra. When you don’t let him interfere with your learning of Torah and your performance of mitzvos, especially when they seem so hard to do and particularly with intention, you grab precious sparks away from the side of evil and weaken it spiritually and, in the end, physically. 

May Hashem Yisborach, the All-Merciful One Who has saved us and sustained us countless times until now, do so once again, revealing Himself to the world and ending the reign of evil forever. May we merit to see this day, when Moshiach Tzidkeinu will usher in the great Messianic Era and the fulfillment of the words of the prophet:

God will be King over the entire land. On that day, God will be One and His Name, One. (Zechariah 14:9)

Quite honestly, after years of saying it was coming, it actually feels, for the first time since being here, that it is.