What Was Is Not What Will Be

Troubled times have come upon us.

At the close of Simchas Torah, when numbers started flying in the air, our hearts were seized with anxiety. It’s Meron II. No, it’s worse. Fifty dead… seventy dead… a hundred… Ribbono Shel Olam, it’s not possible! Yet the numbers kept climbing. Each day crosses another horrific threshold. And they keep coming.

On Simchas Torah, 5784, our joy turned to mourning. A burden of 1,400 bodies was placed on our collective back. We will forever carry it wherever we go

On Simchas Torah, 5784, our joy turned to mourning. A burden of 1,400 bodies was placed on our collective back. We will forever carry it wherever we go. Our smiles are tinged with suffering, our memories injured and vulnerable. It is so hard to hold just one sorrow, one pain, one child. What can you do with so much bereavement?

The world is heavy on our eyelids. The eyes of slaughtered babies close upon our faces. We are all one human tissue. We ache in organs we didn’t even know existed.

All of a sudden, reality turned upside down on us.

The siren of the garbage truck early in the morning jumps us like an alarm. A brush falling on the floor sounds like an explosion. Our nerves are overstimulated, calling our imaginations to generate melodramas.

We are at a loss for words. Literally. As if we forgot the dictionary and went back to a five-year-old verbal repertoire. We function in survival mode. Israel’s Academy of the Hebrew Language published a statement of mourning the day after our Black Shabbos:

The Hebrew language bows its head this morning

in shame and sorrow,

because it has no words,

And there are no words that can express—

We are out of words – so let’s say simple things today, those we all see with our eyes. We will speak unpolished words, clear of sarcasm, cynicism, language games, and tricky formulations. We will talk innocently, like children. Today, we are allowed to.

We will take dusty words from the top shelves, words reserved for emergencies. We will talk about screens that have been raised and the economy of the wings of history.

Shabbos Simchas Torah, 5784, will be a point of no return.

***

In the booklet “In His Holy Name We Trust,” Rabbi Yitzchak Shlomo Zilberman, zt”l, describes the unfolding events that we continue to experience:

A people that for two thousand years were scattered like dust among the nations suddenly arises like a lion, building a dwelling in the land of his ancestors, leaving all the nations dumbfounded – how did such a wondrous event take place, making the trampled nation into a great kingdom?

Do we not see the hand of God that wrought all this?

Hashem revealed his holy arm to gather his scattered rejected people into the land of his inheritance as he promised at the hands of his servants, the prophets

Is there any other explanation besides this: Hashem revealed his holy arm to gather his scattered rejected people into the land of his inheritance as he promised at the hands of his servants, the prophets?

When the land bears its fruit, it is a sign that heralds the gathering of the exiles; the Gemara states that there is no greater sign of redemption.

And it is our eyes that see that the land bears fruit! And our eyes see that the exiles have indeed been collected! And our eyes see that Jerusalem has been rebuilt in a manner that has not been seen throughout our exiles! As the Gemara teaches, the Son of David will come when Jerusalem is rebuilt.

After the ingathering of the exiles, there is no third exile. The land will not spew us out. The situation of ingathering means that the people of Israel have gathered in their country, and they will no longer return to the lands of their exile.

***

Several months ago, one of the Charedi newspapers launched a “Back to the Shtetl” campaign. Every day, readers were brought back by means of stories and pictures to another town of pre-war Europe – Ludmir, Warsaw, Satmar, Leipzig, Lodz, and so on – each with its customs, culture, personalities, and anecdotes.

Nostalgia. How beautiful. But there’s more to it than that. The underlying declaration of the series was that “we don’t really belong here.” It stated an aspiration, albeit between the lines, to strengthen a unique identity defined by another language and other landscapes. Yes, we have nowhere to go back. They slaughtered us, looted our homes, and destroyed our sanctuaries. But we have not given up on our dream of returning there. The exile has not left us. We are still part of it.

With our dress, culture, and language – especially in the Chassidic world, but across the Charedi board on some level – we preserve the shtetl culture and narrow communalism. Though we speak it by force of necessity, we disdain Hebrew as an invention of Ben Yehuda, a detached modern language with a few biblical words inserted. When we say important things, we insist on using the European dialect we call lashon hakodesh.

Friends, we are not going back there. You can tour Auschwitz, do Rosh Hashanah in Uman, go on ancestry journeys, visit the graves of the righteous, or take advantage of low-cost promotions like decent bourgeois people around the world. But our romance with Europe is over

Friends, we are not going back there. You can tour Auschwitz, do Rosh Hashanah in Uman, go on ancestry journeys, visit the graves of the righteous, or take advantage of low-cost promotions like decent bourgeois people around the world. But our romance with Europe is over. We’re here, in Israel. We don’t have anywhere else to go. This is not because of Balfour or some Zionist scheme. God himself ensured we would leave Europe for our own Jewish state.

First of all, we ought to acknowledge this simple reality. We’re here. This is not an “exile within an exile,” as some would have it. The Holocaust was a strong and shrill closing chord. We’ve been here for a while, yet refuse to acknowledge it for fear of sounding too Zionist, undermining our isolationist strategy, or because it doesn’t match what we declared seventy-five years ago.

But it’s true. And we need to internalize basic truths.

***

“He shall return and gather you from among all the nations – And Hashem, your, God, shall circumcise your heart” (Devarim 30:3, 6). Rabbi Zilberman emphasized the. First, the return, in a state of unpreparedness and uncleanliness. Our hearts would still be uncircumcised. But we will come, and settle, and show up. We will declare our allegiance to God, even as we remain distant. We will belong to this Holy Land.

“It is not for your sake that I act, O House of Israel, but for my Holy Name” (Yechezkel 36:22). We do not need to be worthy. It will happen of its own accord. We will become full players in this field, even if we do not choose it.

Much has overcome us during our short stay upon the Land. Like labor pains that precede the joy of birth. Our existence here is by dint of miracle. The War of Independence, the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, and the Gulf War. And the list goes on. You need to be blind not to see it. We are part of a plan inscribed at the world’s creation. We cannot stop it; there is no exit from the knot of the covenant. “There’s no going back,” Hashem told us at Sinai.

And like labor pains, our task is to keep moving. There is no clear outline; we do not know the route. It comes into being as we move. It could be long or short, direct or convoluted – it largely depends on us.

Redemption is made up of simple ingredients: faith, hope, and unity.

The channel to Hashem passes through the other. Without him, our connection with Hashem is incomplete. We must return to being one people.

Painful contractions force us to move. The blows that strike us force us to move. Leave your dictated notes and familiar path. Change perspective, search for answers, and find an Archimedean point outside of the familiar world

Labor pains stop us from resting. When it hurts, we tend to curl up in bed. But birth is an active event. It doesn’t “happen to us.” You have to move for it to progress. My grandmother gave birth to her youngest son in the middle of war. She was paralyzed by the thunderous shells that fell around her, and the birth did not progress for three whole days (until someone ran to ask for a blessing from one of Jerusalem’s famed kabbalists). Painful contractions force us to move. The blows that strike us force us to move. Leave your dictated notes and familiar path. Change perspective, search for answers, and find an Archimedean point outside of the familiar world. When our immediate reality is too harsh for us, said Kobi Mandel’s mother – her son was killed in battle – we look for answers in higher spaces. We need to grow. We need to be born anew.

“Behold! He stands behind our wall” (Shir Hashirim 2:9).

What needs to be done? We do much. The entire nation is taking action. It is impressive and beautiful.

But beyond the immediate action, we need to be in a new state of being, to enter a new spiritual, mental, and emotional phase. To walk in a new heaven and a new earth. We must not go back to our familiar routine. What was is not what will be. Let us not forget that we are a part of a great process, a great Divine movement. A part of mending the world. Let us never return to our old petty fights and frustrations of old. Let us not take comfort in coalition agreements. Let us not miss our small and narrow lives, the meat pots of exile, the zucchini of 2023/5784.

We shall be a people redeemed. We shall be a great people.

Great days are upon us.