As mentioned in Rebbetzen Tziporah's latest:
Dear friends,
Today was the day after the ness. There have been miracles since the beginning of time, and (no doubt) there will be many miracles. This one is special. It is part of a mosaic in which miracles and extreme suffering both are very much in the picture.
The word ness literally means a flagpole. A flag is a national emblem. Images can touch you where your mind doesn’t always reach. In the case of a flag, its message is “Your identity includes ideas, goals, history and aspirations that are all part of something bigger than you are”.
One symbol of the Jewish people and its bond with Hashem was the magen David, which was a symbol we used far before the state of Israel made it their sign. While the symbol is used by other cultures, the meaning of the image to us is unique. Maharal tells you that the top triangle starts with a small point that broadens to the right and left and finally finds its base below. The bottom triangle does the same in reverse.
It has a small point that broadens to the right and left ending with a broad base above. When the two triangles are joined, they form a shape that has six external points and a center. What does this have to do with miracles? The six points hint at the 6 ways in which Hashem interacts with us, and are in turn part of your inner life, your spiritual self. The center is “malchus”, meaning kingship.
The flag visually narrates His moving towards us from His unknowable eternity giving us positive and negative mitzvos that become our base and definition, and provide us the means of rising towards Him. An earthly king does whatever needs to be done to sustain his subjects. Similarly, Hashem governs His world through both revelation and concealment, giving you the chance to meet challenges, as we are now, and the gift of seeing the Hand behind the curtain, as we do now.
On your side, knowing that Hashem is your king obligates you to relate to His law with awe and obedience. The “flag” in a certain sense is the declaration that Hashem makes in ways that we see, and ways that we don’t.
The ness, the flagpole, that holds it up and makes His presence real and vivid to us are the miracles He does that say, “I am here, and I am here for you and with you: I, the one who makes the laws, and I can also redefine them to open the curtain so that you see beyond external cause and effect.” Don’t put down the letter. The rest won’t be so highfalutin.
DON’T FORGET THE 13TH OF ELUL. NOT TODAY AND NOT TOMORROW
Yesterday the plan that was initiated many months ago came into fruition. Somewhere in Europe 5,000 beepers were manufactured, and labeled Taiwan. Somehow, and by many anonymous someone’s, they were tampered with. The batteries that power them were adjusted so that they would overheat and explode when triggered. 3:30pm the beepers rang. 4,000 Hezbollah officers (ordinary civilians were not “lucky” enough to own beepers) picked them up to hear the message.
For many it was the last thing that they will ever hear. As I write this letter, I just heard that today a second round of miracles happened, this time involving other communications, with more damage and less certainty about what the next moves will be.
The flag is on the flagpole. It is easy to mistake its message for another one: a message that is full of self-congratulatory rhetoric. If nothing else, Oct. 7 taught us something about how invincible we are not. Hashem granted us the power to do what no one has done before, with skill and success, but the victory is His. We are in the midst of another Purim story, minus Mordechai and Ester to give us the spiritual direction that we need.
The Gra says that the hardest part of the end of exile is that we have no prophets. What we do have is the messages that Rambam, Ramchal and many other great sages have about the era in which we live. There is what Ramchal calls the era of “pekida” –
Hashem revisiting our reality and intervening more openly than ever before (which can be the kind of intervention that can be called either “light”, or Chas veshalom, “darkness”.) It is followed by an era called “zechira” where Hashem recalls his covenant with the avot and brings the days in which the floodgate of light that characterizes the final opens and the joy of what redemption is all about finally begins.
In the meantime, I am in beautiful Yerushalaim where the façade of peace gives the opportunity to just watch, feel, and be thankful. I had an unexpected mini-tour of neighborhoods that I had never explored. All you have to do to do the above, is to first get off the bus far too early to reach the address you were aiming for. I was going to a shiva deep in the heart of Rechavia, and got off on Agripas.
Walking through the real storm worn old part Nachlaot, not the restored glamorous gentrified version of Nachlaot, where the people match the air you breathe and the cobblestones you walk, was an adventure. It took me back in time, and forced the realization that words like “now”, “current”, and “modern” are relative and transient. A couple of thoughts of tshuvah entered and left.
Thoughts of tshuvah (even the ones that don’t lead to real or immediate change) are calming. They tell you that you are still able to feel some of the light, and that you are still in the game. A friend sent a clip of Neria Kaplan. He looks about 25. He was wounded so severely in Gaza, that the medics at first thought that he was finished, and that there was nothing further to do for him. Nonetheless they got him to the hospital where the doctors gave him no chance of survival, but did whatever humans can do to save him. It worked.
The clip showed him putting up a mezuzah in his new home. If you didn’t know his story, you would see absolutely nothing more than a young man hammering in a mezuzah. No visible scars, no limp, nothing that tells you that the flagpole is holding up the flag that tells you that tells you, “Ekyeh”, the Name that Hashem told Moshe to use when he spoke to the Jews in Egypt. "Tell them that I am with them in their suffering, and will be with them in every future time that they suffer”. It was the message of geulah.
Love,
Tziporah
Watch here: https://x.com/YisraelOfficial/status/1835852876968870310 [pics from X article]
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