Rabbi
Doniel Staum, LMSW
Rabbi,
Kehillat New Hempstead
Rebbe/Guidance
Counselor – ASHAR
Principal
– Ohr Naftoli- New Windsor
STAM
TORAH
SHABBOS
CHAZON
PARSHAS DEVORIM
5776
“FALLEN PRIDE”
Aharon
Barnea, a well-known news anchor in Israeli media, related the following story
about a high level Palestinian militant leader named Salah Tamari[1]:
Tamari
was a fierce fighter for the Palestinian cause who was caught after the Israeli
Lebanese invasion in 1982. He was subsequently held captive in Israeli prisons
for almost two years. As he languished in prison he began to lose heart in his
cause. He came to the realization that they would never be successful in
dislodging the Jews from their state. He decided that the Palestinians’ best
option was to cut a deal with the Israelis and try to garner as much land as
they could, and be done with the whole struggle. He shared his views with the
thirty fellow terrorists who were inmates with him in the prison.
Then on
the first night of Pesach he saw one of the prison guards eating a pita bread
sandwich. “Aren’t you Jewish?” he asked the guard. The guard nodded that he
was. Salah looked at him incredulously, “Then why are you eating pita? Don’t
you know you’re not allowed to eat bread on Passover?”
The
guard was momentarily stunned by the question. But he quickly gathered his wits
and replied sharply, “I have no obligation to commemorate events that happened
to my ancestors over three thousand years ago.”
Salah
was absolutely floored. He stayed up all night digesting the magnitude of what
he had just heard. The next morning he summoned his comrades and told them what
had transpired. “If these people feel no connection to the past, if they are
willing to disregard their age-old national traditions, then they have severed
their roots to this land. I retract everything I told you before. We must renew
our mission with vigor and fortitude. We can be victorious over them. We must
fight until we achieve victory. There is no room for compromise. They cannot
stop us.”
Chumash
Devorim, the final book of the Torah, contains Moshe Rabbeinu’s recounting of
the experiences and lessons that the nation had learned along their forty-year
journey through the desert. “It was in the fortieth year, in the eleventh
month, on the first of the month, when Moshe spoke to the Children of Israel,
according to everything that G-d commanded him to them.[2]”
Moshe
described their sojourns from the Sea of the Reeds to Mount Seir Mount Seir
The
Medrash explains that when G-d said, “Turn yourselves צפנה (northward)” it is a hidden
reference to the Torah[4]. Moshe conveyed to the nation that when G-d told
them to turn northward He was alluding to the fact that the nation should turn
towards the Torah.
Rabbi Mordechai Rogov zt’l[5] explains
that the verse and its Midrashic expounding contain a vital lesson regarding
the history and future of the Jewish people. He explains that there have been
many times throughout our history when we have sought to ingratiate ourselves
with the nations of the world so we could fit in with them. We have
symbolically ‘circled Mount
Seir
To our chagrin and amazement however, all of our
machinations were futile. The more we sought to connect ourselves with the
society around us the more our neighbors seemed to resent us. Their envy and
enmity made us loathe in their eyes and they sought to rid themselves of our
presence like we were vermin.
It is to that generation that G-d calls out, as it
were, “Enough of your circling this mountain!” If you really want the nations
to be tolerant of you, or more so, to revere and respect you, there is only one
effective manner, “Turn yourselves צפנה - to the Torah.” That is
where our only hopes for glory and grandeur lie. Either we are the lodestar of
the world or the bane of society. It depends how much we respect ourselves.
In Chumash Vayikra the Torah records G-d’s
instructing Moshe about the unique laws endemic to Kohanim regarding ritual
purity and the added precautions they must adhere to. The verse begins[6], “G-d said
to Moshe: Say to the Kohanim, the sons of Aharon, and say to them: Each of you
shall not contaminate himself to a dead person among his people…”
Rashi notes that the glaring redundancy (‘Say to
the Kohanim… and say to them’) contains a vital lesson that the elders have a responsibility
to teach the youngsters. Moshe was to ‘say’, i.e. instruct the older Kohanim
that they had a responsibility to teach their special laws to the younger
generation[7].
This lesson does not only apply to Kohanim but to
all Jews. It is from this verse that we learn that adults are responsible to
educate and train their children in the proper modality of Torah observance.
The whole concept of Chinuch - educating our children from a young age to
observe Torah laws is derived from the ‘redundancy’ in the aforementioned
verse.
The Kohanim comprise less than 10% of all Jews. Why
is the elementary mandate of chinuch derived specifically from the laws of ritual
purity pertaining to Kohanim? Why isn’t it learned out from laws which are universally
pertinent to all Jews, such as the holidays?
Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg zt’l explained that one of
the most difficult questions a Torah-observant parent must answer to his
children is ‘Why do I have to be different? Why do I have to do it if everyone
else isn’t doing it?’
He offers the following analogy: A young kohain is
heading out to play baseball with his friends one summer afternoon during the
time when the Bais Hamikdash still stood. As he grabs his bat and baseball
glove, his mother asks him where he’s going. When he responds that he’s going
to the park down the block, she shakes her head sadly, “I’m sorry but you can’t
go to that park because to get there you have to pass through the cemetery and
we’re having terumah[8] for supper. He becomes
annoyed, “Mom, it’s not fair! All of my friends are going to that park. Last
night you didn’t let me go to the other park because there are sheratzim[9] there. No one else had those
restrictions. Why do I?” The mother responds, “Because you are not like
everyone else. You have an elevated status as a kohain. So you have to maintain
greater levels than everyone else. You are special!”
That is the attitude every Jew must convey to
their children, and that is the fundamental basis of proper chinuch. We must
convey to our children that the reason why we perform certain rituals and
refrain from doing many things that are the norm in society is because we are
special. We have an elevated status and lofty responsibilities and therefore we
have to act accordingly. Observing the Torah may be difficult at times, but we
must view it as a privilege, and we must impart that feeling to our children[10].
In the Kinnos of Tisha B’av[11] we state “איכה
תפארתי מראשותי השליכו –
O how they have thrown the splendor from my head.” With the destruction of the
Bais Hamikdash, and throughout our prolonged exile, we have lost a great deal
of our inherent grandeur and pride. In our time, perhaps we ourselves have cast
off a great deal of our own pride. Too often Jews are embarrassed by their
differences, as they seek to fit in with the rest of society.
There is no doubt that we have to learn how to
live with the nations of the world courteously and respectfully. We live among
them, maintain business relationships with them, and have dealings with them
continuously. But we must not be apologetic for our differences. We must
remember that we are different because we are special. Our pride lies in our
Torah observance and if we seem peculiar at times we are proud to bear that
banner aloft.
Trying to obscure our differences in order to be
like everyone else is not the solution, but a further deepening of the exile. Anyone
who reads the history of our people in Europe
prior to World War II will realize how frighteningly true that is. Our pride
has been cast aside in exile and our obligation is to reclaim it. We are a
nation that stands alone, even while we live among the nations of the world,
and we must be proud of who we are.
On Tisha B’av we lower ourselves to the floor and
mourn all we have lost. Yet as we shed tears for all of our suffering we gather
solace in the knowledge that we have been made to suffer because we are
special. That is why, after reciting lamentations in a state of intense
mourning for the night and morning of Tisha B’av, at midday we are able to rise
from the floor. We don our talis and tefillin[12] and recite the ‘nachem’
prayer, beseeching G-d to console the mourners of Zion
and Jerusalem
“O how they have thrown the splendor from my
head.”
“Enough
of your circling; turn towards the Torah”
[1] Barnea is the author of a book
titled, “Mine Enemy” about his friendly correspondence with Tamari.
[2] 1:3
[3] 2:1-2
[5] Ateres Mordechai
[6] The opening verse of parshas
Emor (Vayikra 21:1)
[7] Yevamos 114a
[8] Terumah is the special tithed
food given to a kohain. It can only be eaten by Kohanim in a heightened state
of ritual purity
[9] Crawling insects which cause
ritual impurity to one who touches them
[10] Heard from Rabbi Yechiel
Weberman, Camp Dora Golding chinuch va’ad, 5771
[11] Kinnah 9
[12] Which are not worn at shacharis
because of our status in the highest level of mourning – like a relative whose
deceased has not yet been buried r’l
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