Lech Lecha – About Face

The word “vayehi,” famously, introduces something negative or unfortunate.  Why, then, asks the Mei Marom (the polymath Meshullam Gross), does it introduce the pasuk stating that Avraham “owned sheep, cattle and donkeys” (Beraishis 12:16) – the fact that our forefather had achieved great wealth?

The obvious answer, says Rav Gross, is that, to Avraham, wealth was a burden that could only negatively affect his service to Hashem. In fact, shortly thereafter, the pasuk describes how Avraham was “very laden” with livestock, silver and gold” (ibid 13:2). The word translated “laden” – caveid – literally means “heavy” and implies a burden.

And so, Rav Gross continues, that may explain why Avraham is described in several places (including in our parsha (ibid 12:9) as traveling southward.

Because, as Rabi Yitzchak (Bava Basra, 25b) says, one who wants to become wealthy should be yatzpin, face north, when he prays; but one who wants to become wise should be yadrim, face south.  

Avraham wasn’t a seeker of wealth. On the contrary, he saw it as a burden. He pined for wisdom.

Can one have both? Certainly, and Avraham did.

But, as is clear from Rabi Yitzchak’s contention, one can only pursue one or the other; striving for both is futile. After all, it’s impossible to face both north and south simultaneously.

© 2022 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Parshas Noach – Strongmen

The closest word for “hero” in Hebrew is gibor, often translated as “a strong man.”  And its true definition is provided in the fourth chapter of Pirkei Avos: “Who is a gibor? He who conquers his natural inclination, as it is said: ‘Better is one slow to anger than a strong man, and one who rules over his spirit than a conqueror of a city’ (Mishlei 16:32).”

True strength in Judaism is evident not in action but in restraint, not in outrage but in calm.

In parshas Noach, we meet a very different kind of gibor, a gibor tzayid, a “strongman hunter” (Beraishis 10:9). His name is Nimrod, his goal was power and, as Rashi notes, based on the Targum Yerushalmi and midrashim, what he hunted was human followers, attracting them with braggadocio and bluster. 

Nimrod was the first “hero” to harness power in order to, in Rav Shamson Raphael Hirsch’s words, “trap men for [his] own egoistic purposes.” He sought to “subjugate the less strong and clear-sighted, to keep them under his yoke until he would need them…”

As such, Nimrod exemplifies, continues Rav Hirsch, “the evil of tyranny which [has] continued so perniciously through the history of nations.” 

And which remains as true today as ever.

And Nimrod was a gibor tzayid lif’nei Hashem, a strongman hunter before Hashem. Explains Rav Hirsch: “[Nimrod] misuse[d] the name of God, cloak[ed] his domination under the show of its being pleasing to God… to demand[ing] recognition of his power in the name of God.”

Indeed, today, too, we daily witness the scowls of scoundrels and liars bent on amassing personal power invoking divine “values” as a means of attracting religious followers who mindlessly regard the  speechifying would-be dictators as “heroes.”

May we be spared such gibborei tzayid.  And merit to see – and be – true gibborim, those described in Avos.

© 2022 Rabbi Avi Shafran

A Few of My Favorite Things

To dust off an old joke: The nurse, after fluffing Mr. Goldberg’s pillow, asks him if he’s comfortable. He responds, “Eh, I make a decent living.”

I’ve always found people’s infatuation with money funny.

That’s not to say the stuff isn’t useful, or that a certain amount of it (increasingly more, of late) is required to live even a simple life. But I just can’t fathom why people with billions of dollars in assets spend their time – in many cases, all of their waking hours – trying to amass even more. What exactly can a fellow do with $10 billion that he can’t with a mere $5 billion? After all, one can only occupy one yacht or jet at a time, no?

My wife and I own some valuable assets, but if, chas v’shalom, a burglar rifled through our possessions, he wouldn’t likely find her diamond engagement ring (which she chooses not to wear – nothing personal, she assures me). It’s hidden in too clever a place (not telling). Or my gold chasunah watch (ditto).

And he’d surely overlook the really valuable things in our home. 

Like the piece of paper with the words “Rav Hecksher” written on it in Hebrew. That dates from my year – many years ago – in Yeshivas Kol Torah in Yerushalayim. Around Chanukah, we “chutzniks” were graduated from an “Ivrit Kal” shiur to one of two regular ones. I had come to know Rav Dovid Hecksher, zt”l, a true tzaddik, and desperately wanted to be in his shiur. The determinations were made by lottery, and, well, that paper is the lot I drew. 

The esrog box I use each year is another of my invaluable possessions. No, it isn’t silver. It’s cardboard, but with children’s colorful artwork adorning it. Those children are now grown with families of their own, b”H. But each Sukkos I’m reminded of when their hands were tiny. 

Then there’s the framed faded ticket hanging on our dining room wall. It was for admission to the Twin Towers, to the top of which my wife took three of our children on August 30, 2001. Some reminders are happy; others, grim. 

I also have a wonderful note from a boy who attended a California yeshiva where I was learning back in the late 1970s. He was quite an annoyance and we had a mutually antagonistic relationship. I owned a motorcycle back then – it was a convenient mode of transportation to the laundromat and such – and I spun out one day, fracturing my wrist and cutting my face a bit in the process.

The boy’s note, left on my dormitory desk, reads: “I’m so happy you’re okay.” It was sincere, and the boy and I got along swimmingly thereafter.

There are several personal notes from Rabbi Moshe Sherer, a”h, that I cherish. And, less cherished but valuable to me all the same, a napkin from a White House Chanukah party during Dubya’s presidency.

And scores of wonderful letters from talmidim and talmidos I taught in California and Rhode Island mosdos. And assorted kindergarten projects, now decades old, taped to walls in our home. 

My most recently acquired cherished possession has a “real” value of, at most, five cents.

It is a gift that was presented to me by a panhandler I often pass in lower Manhattan, where he sits on the sidewalk with a can. I have never offered him money – he knows that I know that he’s looking for tourists – but have always greeted him and wished him well. Usually, he spies me before I reach him and calls out loudly “Hi, rabbi!”

But a couple of months ago, he was standing by a table where knicknacks were for sale, and greeted me with a broad smile. “Hey, rabbi, I got a job!” he proudly informed me.

I congratulated him and shook his hand. Moving on, I heard him call out to me and turned around. There he was, having momentarily left his post, offering me a keychain depicting a yellow cab. 

It has a place of honor over my desk.

© 2022 Ami Magazine

Beraishis – Of Sons and Suns

It is said in the name of the Vilna Gaon that the essential meaning of any given Hebrew word lies in the word’s first appearance in the Torah.

A traditional hope declared by those gathered for a bris milah after the circumcision is performed is “Zeh hakatan gadol yih’yeh!” – May this small one become a great [literally, “large”] one!

The words for small and large, katan and gadol respectively, first appear in parshas Beraishis, in the context of the creation of the sun and moon, the most prominent luminaries in our sky.

The midrash, quoted by Rashi (Beraishis 1:16), notes how both luminaries are at first called “large,” but then the sun alone retains that adjective, and the moon is called “small.” Both, the narrative goes, were originally equally powerful, but the moon complained, “Is it possible for two kings to use one crown?” To which Hashem replied, “Go, then, and make yourself small.”

The sun did not enter the conversation, allowing the moon its day in heavenly court. And it ended up retaining its “large” status while the moon was diminished.

A baby is entirely self-centered, demanding its food and comfort and oblivious to the needs of others (as many an exhausted parent can confirm). Perhaps our blessing that the newly circumcised boy will go from “smallness” to “largeness” is a hope that he will progress from being a demanding creature, like the example of the moon in the midrash, to a serene one, like that of the sun.  

The Talmud (Shabbos 88b) describes such people as “those who are insulted and do not insult, who hear their shame and do not respond, who act out of love and are joyful in suffering.” 

And, interestingly, it applies to them the pasuk “And they that love Him are as the sun going forth in its might” (Shoftim, 5:31).

© 2022 Rabbi Avi Shafran

V’zos Habracha – The Import of Moshe’s Tears

Imagine a man who has spent years waiting for his daughter, his only child, to get married, and then, as he surveys the lavish wedding hall on the day of her wedding, is arrested by police and dragged off to jail. What anguish he would feel.

It would be but the faintest shadow of the agony Moshe must have felt when he was shown the land promised to Klal Yisrael, the land to which he led the people for 40 years, and was told by Hashem that he will not enter it, that he is about to die.

And so, when the Midrash, quoted by Rashi, says (in response to the question of how Moshe could record the fact that he died) that Moshe wrote the words bidema, “in tears,” the simple meaning is that he wrote of his death while still alive. (Torah, being beyond time, allowed for that fact). And that his tears were over his having been deprived of entering Eretz Yisrael.

He cried. Like all us humans, imbued with emotions, do. And the “sin” that prevented him from entering the land, his frustrated hitting of a rock instead of speaking to it, also reflected an all-too-human emotion. Moshe was unique among human beings, to be sure. He was anav mikol adam, more humble than any other person. But a person, all the same; he was a mortal human being.

My rebbe, Rav Yaakov Weinberg, zt”l, would often note that other religions’ heroes are described as faultless superhumans. Not so the personages who are extolled by the Torah, even Moshe Rabbeinu, who was, although closer to perfection than anyone, still human. He erred. He cried.

And that uniqueness of the Torah, Rav Weinberg would stress, is a reflection of the fact that, unlike the “holy books” of various religions, it alone is Hashem’s word, not the product of a fabulist human writer.

© 2022 Rabbi Avi Shafran

The Care and Feeding of Empathy

I used to pass the fellow each morning as I walked up Broadway in lower Manhattan on my way to work.  He would stand at the same spot and hold aloft, for the benefit of all passers-by, one of several poster-board signs he had made.  One read “I love you!”  Another: “You are wonderful!”  The words of the others escape me, but the sentiments were similar.

He looked normal and was decently dressed, and he smiled broadly as he offered his expressions of ardor to all of us rushing to our offices. I never knew what had inspired his mission, but something about it bothered me.

Then one day I put my finger on it.  It is ridiculously easy to profess love for all the world, but it is simply not possible.  Gushing good will at everyone is offering it in fact to no one at all.

By definition, love must exist within boundaries, and our caring for those close to us is of a different nature than our empathy for others with whom we don’t share our personal lives.  What is more, only those who make the effort to love their immediate families and friends have any chance of truly caring, on any level, about others.

Likewise, those with the most well-honed sense of concern for their own communities are the ones best suited to experience true empathy for people outside of their communal worlds.

It’s an appropriate thought for this time of Jewish year, as Sukkos gives way, without a second’s pause, to Shemini Atzeres.

Sukkos, interestingly, includes something of a “universalist” element.  In the times of the Beis Hamikdash, the seven days of Sukkos saw a total of seventy parim offered on the mizbeiach, corresponding, says the Gemara, to “the seventy nations of the world.”

The families of people on earth are not written off by our mesorah.  A mere four days before Sukkos’s arrival, on Yom Kippur, we read Sefer Yonah. That navi was sent to warn a distant people to repent, saving them from destruction.  The Sukkos parim, the Gemara informs us, brought divine blessings down upon all the world’s peoples.  Had the ancient Romans known just how greatly they benefited from the merit of karbanos, Chazal teach, they would have placed protective guards around the Beis Hamikdash.

And yet, curiously, Sukkos’s recognition of humanity’s worth is juxtaposed with Shemini Atzeres, which expressed Hashem’s special relationship with Klal Yisroel.

The famous parable:

A king invited his servants to a large feast that lasted a number of days.  On the final day of the festivities, the king told the one most beloved to him, “Prepare a small repast for me so that I can enjoy your exclusive company.”

That is Shemini Atzeres, when Hashem “detains” the people He chose to be an example to the rest of mankind, when, after the seventy parim of the preceding seven days, a single par, corresponding to Klal Yisroel, is brought on the mizbeiach.

We Jews are often assailed for our belief that Hashem chose us from among the nations to proclaim His existence and to call on all humankind to recognize our collective immeasurable debt to Him.

And those who are irritated by that message like to characterize the special bond Jews feel for one another as hubris, even as contempt for others.

The very contrary, however, is the truth.  The special relationship we Jews have with each other and with HaKodosh Boruch Hu, the relationships we acknowledge in particular on Shemini Atzeres, are what provide us the ability to truly care – not with our mere lips or poster boards – about the rest of the world.  They are what allow us to hope – as we declare in Aleinu thrice daily – that, even as we reject the idolatries that have infected the human race over history, one day “all the peoples of the world” will come to join together with us and “pay homage to the glory of Your name.”

© 2022 Ami Magazine

Ha’azinu – The Secret, Unveiled

Although I appreciate most humor, even jokes about Jews, I have always found comedian Alan King’s wry summary of Jewish holidays, “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat!” profoundly unfunny.

Not that we Jews don’t deserve a bit of mockery for our… enthusiasm… regarding things culinary. But the “They tried to kill us” introduction is too painfully true to be even part of a bon mot. Whether the “they” tried to kill us spiritually or physically, from ancient times in Egypt and Babylonia and Persia and Greece and the Roman Empire and the Crusades to more recent history including the Holocaust and Soviet Communism, there have been just so many they’s.

Mark Twain famously observed in 1898 – even before the the USSR and the Holocaust – that “Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of…

“He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished.

“The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

The secret is Hashem, of course, and the merit of our forefathers. And our eternal survival is encapsulated in the parsha, in the words “I will exhaust my arrows” (Devarim 32:23). Which the Midrash, cited by Rashi, expands upon: “My arrows will come to an end but they [Klal Yisrael] will not.”

© 2022 Rabbi Avi Shafran