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Thursday, January 2, 2020
PA rewards teaching that "Palestine" erases all of Israel
Too Jewish, Except in Israel
Too Jewish, Except in Israel
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Israel is the only place in the world where I can never be made to feel that I am too Jewish.
It was December 25 in Tel Aviv and it was business as usual. Government offices, stores and banks were open. And in the days leading up to it there was no frantic shopping, endless parties, or Christmas music. The celebration of Hanukkah was impossible to avoid. Everywhere stores and streets were festooned with dreidels and menorahs, and bakeries overflowed with sufganiyot and latkes. Over the eight days of Hanukkah I was invited to five parties for candle lighting, eating and singing of traditional songs.
As a Canadian born and raised Jewish woman this was decidedly different from what I had experienced all my life. I belonged to the mainstream culture. It felt good.
I am proudly Canadian. I've always been grateful for my good fortune to have been born there, for the freedoms to which I am entitled and for the opportunities to invent and reinvent myself, to be whatever I want to be. My parents came from Poland as teenagers before the war. I grew up nurtured in the rich, vibrant Jewish community of Montreal from which I seldom had reason to emerge. I went to a Hebrew day school, lived in an almost all Jewish neighborhood, and all my friends and my parents’ friends were Jewish. I had a comfortable sense of belonging to that community. However the defining moment of experiencing myself as an outsider of the larger community came when I was 16 years old.
My high school was holding its annual public speaking contest, the winner of which would represent the school in a citywide competition held at McGill University. My teachers encouraged me to participate. It was the year that Adolph Eichmann had been captured in Argentina and brought to Israel to face trial. I decided to make his capture and what it represented in terms of the acknowledgement of evil and the pursuit of justice the subject of my speech.
I began with a quote from Eichmann himself: “I will leap into my grave laughing knowing that I am responsible for the death of five million Jews. This gives me extraordinary satisfaction.” At the end of my speech the auditorium of some 500 students, most of them Jewish, gave me a standing ovation. I did not win the competition. The teachers who were the judges chose as the winner a girl whose subject was hairdos.
One of the judges who was my English teacher felt that I deserved an explanation. She took me aside and told me that although my speech was by far the best, they couldn’t let me represent my school at McGill because my subject was “too Jewish.” I was too young at the time to fully appreciate the outrageousness and the callousness of that comment, or its irony. The message I took away with me was that I was an outsider and the Jewish society to which I belonged was not held in high esteem, and that I had to be keep a low profile about my being Jewish if I wanted to “win” in the world.
After my first year of university I spent a summer on a kibbutz in Israel. It was a life altering, heady experience. Here was I was part of the mainstream even though I wasn’t born there. What mattered was that I was connected to people and to a land with whom I shared a profound identity. What impressed me the most was what I perceived as the normalcy of this society. Jews did everything. They were farmers. They got theirs hands dirty in the soil and drove tractors. They were bus drivers. They were soldiers. They built roads and buildings. They were proud and strong with a clear sense of purpose. They were joyful and unafraid. I saw a different way of being. I wanted to be like these Jews.
I was more than a member of a religious minority; I was also part of a people with an ancient history who now had a homeland.
I returned to Montreal with an expanded grasp of who I was as a Jew. Because of my connection to Israel I felt more secure, more empowered. I was more than a member of a religious minority; I was also part of a people with an ancient history who now had a homeland. I had some vague dream of returning to Israel to live once I finished my studies. Instead I got married, started a career, had children, moved to Vancouver, divorced, started a business - in short, life happened. Though I sent my children to Hebrew school, I could not find a place for myself in the Jewish community of Vancouver. Over the years I became more and more distant from Judaism, though Israel still had a quiet place in my heart.
Brenda Yablon
With the Pacific Ocean at my front door, I had become an avid open water swimmer. I was looking for a place to swim in the winter months. California and Mexico had become tired options. As I was searching the globe it came to me: Israel is on the Mediterranean. I rented an apartment near the sea in Tel Aviv for two months. I could never have known that what began as a whim became the fulfillment of a dream long dormant.
While I did swim in the Mediterranean I also connected with a large extended network of cousins I knew existed but for the most part had never met. I was immediately caught up in the incomparable warm embrace of family. I celebrated Shabbat and holidays with them. They introduced me to the cultural riches of music, theatre, art and food. And of course the ever present political discourse across the whole spectrum of left to right, with passionate debates at every gathering. I listened respectfully, knowing that these people were doing more than just talking. They were speaking from the realities of their experiences fighting in wars, putting their lives at risk, knowing death and danger intimately, and building a country whose continued existence was never a given.
Fortunately and somewhat miraculously, I remembered the Hebrew I learned in school as a child and with daily use, my Hebrew quickly improved. This allowed me a depth of experience not common to the average tourist.
When I came back to Canada I felt somewhat at loose ends. I realized I was having an identity crisis. Who was I? I was still me, but in black and white. I’d left my colored, brighter, more vibrant self in Israel.
The following year I went back for three months. And four months the year after that. A friend who visited me in Israel from Vancouver remarked that I appeared happier, more open, more authentic. I gave that a lot of thought.
It was becoming clearer to me that I wanted to formalize my relationship to Israel by becoming an Israeli citizen. But I couldn’t give up Canada, my native country which I love and to which I also feel rooted. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. Since both Canada and Israel allow dual citizenship, I didn’t have to choose. I became an Israeli citizen four years ago and I divide my year between the two countries I love most in the world. And I get to swim in open water all year round.
The more hostile the world becomes, the more I feel the need for Israel.
The more time I spend in Israel, the richer my experience. This past September I was in Israel for the first time for Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Though I consider myself to be a secular Jew, I wanted to immerse myself in the local custom, as it were. As I walked down my street heading towards the synagogue, I could not believe my eyes. People were streaming out of their apartments, converging on Dizengoff, the main street of Tel Aviv. There were thousands, many dressed in white, the traditional color for Yom Kippur, to symbolize purity. They were all headed to various synagogues. There was not a car in sight. There was a hush over this moving mass of humanity. I imagined that it must have looked something like this during the time of the Temple. And here I was a part of it in 2019, in Tel Aviv.
In the time since I've become an Israeli citizen, the world has become a more inhospitable place for Jews. Anti-Semitism and open attacks on Jews have become commonplace. Attempts to deny the legitimacy of Israel as a sovereign state have become policy of both the left and the right, even if it means rewriting history, the Bible, and ignoring archaeology.
The more hostile the world becomes, the more I feel the need for Israel. It is the only place in the world where I can never be made to feel that I am too Jewish.
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75 Torah Scrolls Dedicated to Fallen Soldiers
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The joy of Simchat Torah: every letter counts.
Last summer, a ceremony was held at the Kotel in which 75 Torah scrolls were dedicated in memory of the 75 soldiers killed in Operation Protective Edge. There were thousands of people at the dedication, including the families of the soldiers, President Rivlin, Rabbi David Lau, Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef, Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, chief of staff Gadi Eisencott and Shin Bet chief Yoram Cohen.
Most of the Torah scrolls had been hidden in a basement in Romania during the Holocaust and with the help of a huge contribution from Jews all over the world, were then brought to Israel. After the dedication ceremony, the Torah scrolls were given to synagogues across the country, and one Torah remained at the Western Wall.
“Our sons who were killed… remain as eternal letters. These scrolls are our identity; they are a symbol of continuing life.” President Rivlin
During the ceremony, the distinguished guests and families of the soldiers wrote the last letters in the scrolls. Before he wrote one of the letters in the Torah scroll, President Rivlin said, “I am writing to honor the sanctity of the Torah scroll. The Jewish people chose the Torah to commemorate the death of our loved ones. These scrolls constitute our true identity. The Torah of the Jewish people has marched alongside us in high and low times, good and bad. The Torah accompanied us in our wanderings in exile and in our redemption. From it we draw strength and faith. Our sons who were killed on the altar of the homeland remain as eternal letters. These scrolls are our identity; they are a symbol of continuing life.”
Policeman carried the Torah scrolls, one after the other, in a seemingly endless line in the Kotel plaza. Dedicating these Torahs to the fallen soldiers did more than honor their memories; it gave each of them an infinite connection to life. Judaism teaches us that every Jewish soul is a letter in the Torah. Just as one missing letter in the Torah renders it incomplete, so too each and every one of us has a unique contribution that only we can give.
When someone dies, we mourn not only his physical presence but the tremendous loss of all of his gifts that the world needs. A sefer Torah embodies the beauty of each of their individual souls joining with the souls of the Jewish nation to create eternal meaning, letter by letter. Because every letter counts. Every single one of us has a letter to write, a meaning to create and share with the unique gifts that we are each given.
The Joy of Simchat Torah
The inauguration of a Torah scroll is compared to the joy of a wedding because it celebrates the Jewish people’s connection with God and with each other. On Simchat Torah that joy is exponential because we are celebrating every Torah scroll that has ever been written. We are honoring every Jew and every letter that has contributed to the growth and beauty of our nation. We are connecting to a joy that merges each of our individual connections to Torah to the connection that we have as a nation.
It’s a joy that we can’t feel when we are solely pursuing our own individual goals. I think of those 75 Torah scrolls that somehow survived the inferno of the Holocaust, and the words of the brilliant psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Dr. Viktor Frankl come to mind:
“By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world, rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic ‘the self -transcendence of human existence.’
“It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone other than oneself, be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself, by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love, the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side effect of self-transcendence.”
Max Steinberg, one of the soldiers killed during Operation Protective Edge whose memory was honored with one of the 75 Torah scrolls, embodied this self-transcendence. Max was an American immigrant and a sharpshooter in the Golani Brigad who was killed in the Gaza strip along with 13 other Israeli soldiers. Max originally moved from Woodland Hills, LA to Israel in 2012. He was a “Hayal Boded”a Lone Soldier, the term used for soldiers who moved to Israel without any family. His mother, Evie Steinberg, said that his last words to her during a 4am phone call before he died were: “Mom, I’m not scared at all. I’m scared for you. I’m fine. I’m going back in.”
Even though Max was called a lone soldier, his funeral was attended by thousands of Jews all over Israel. He gave his life for the Jewish people, and the Jewish people came out in droves not only to honor Max’s memory but to show that no Jew is ever really standing alone.
There should never be a lone soldier in our nation. There should never be a lone Jew. We each need each other’s letters. On Simchat Torah, we celebrate the joy of Jewish unity. We celebrate the joy of bringing each of our letters together. And we celebrate the infinite connection that we will always have with those who have come before us and those are yet to bring their letters into this world. Holding the Torah gives us a precious chance to transcend ourselves and become part of the eternal dance of the Jewish people.
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Torah Is Food for the Soul: Celebrating the Completion of Learning the Talmud
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We defeat the anti-Semites by embracing Torah stronger and dedicating ourselves to share it with our brothers and sisters.
When Rav Meir Shapiro zt”l, the founder of the Daf Yomi, the page-of-Talmud-a-day program, was seven years old, he found his mother crying and he asked her why. She explained that she was terribly sad because his Torah teacher was scheduled to come that day but didn’t show up. The young boy didn’t understand why that moved her to tears. She explained, “You don’t understand Meir’l because you are too young, but my son, I want you to always remember, if you miss a day of learning, it cannot be replaced, it cannot be made up.”
Rav Meir Shapiro’s mother understood something so fundamental, so basic and so core to our people: Torah is not information, it is not a set of facts, laws, or history. Torah learning is not just a way of life, it is what provides life, sustains life and nourishes life. Without it we simply cannot live.
Rav Meir Shapiro’s mother’s tears left an indelible impression and when the opportunity presented itself, he introduced a system and initiative which would ensure we would never miss a day of learning in our lives. It is estimated that today there are more than 300,000 people around the world who learn the Daf Yomi daily. Rav Meir Shapiro and his wife didn’t have biological children, but make no mistake, each page of Talmud learned is his continuity and legacy, each of the members of the daf his progeny.
Much of the credit for the Daf Yomi, for the countless people who learn it daily, for the tens of millions of pages of Talmud learned in the last seven and a half years, goes to his mother. She, and Jewish women since then, have inspired, supported, promoted and sacrificed to ensure that a day of learning is never missed. They, too, are heroes of the daf who deserve recognition and appreciation this morning.
In the golden age of the Jewish people, Torah informed and inspired us, and in some of our darkest periods and bleakest moments, Torah learning is what gave us not only courage, faith and hope, but it gave us life.
The Tanya writes: Torah is the nourishment for the soul who learns it sincerely. Mitzvot are garments, they enable us to make contact with the Divine by doing them, but Torah is the spiritual food we ingest. We digest it and it becomes absorbed by us, part of us, informing us, inspiring us and enabling us to not only touch the Divine but be of one mind with Him, integrated as one. When we learn Torah we are feeding our soul, hydrating our spirt.
Today, we are going to recite the Hadran, the prayer recited upon completing a tractate of Talmud, from a very special Gemara. The Nazis had stolen, looted, and burned all the Torah books belonging to German Jews. Not one complete set of Talmud could be found in Western Europe. Rabbi Samuel Snieg and Rabbi Samuel Rose, both survivors of Dachau, had an idea to print an entire full-size set of Talmud in Germany. They printed 50 sets of what became known as “The Survivors’ Talmud” on the exact printing machines the Nazis had used to produce their propaganda during the war. The survivors in the DP camps were starving for food, but many were also desperate to feed their souls, eager to resume learning the Daf Yomi.
Today, almost 75 years later, as we once again face a rise of those who want to harm us, heinous attacks by those who want to eliminate us, we will celebrate the completion of Shas with a statement of defiance, of triumph over our enemies. With this siyum, completion, we once again declare "The Jewish People are eternal." We will read the Hadran from a volume of the Survivors’ Talmud, a testament to the immortality of our people and to the central role of Torah in sustaining us.
Shortly, we will hold that volume and proudly declare "we will return to you," we will return to learning the Torah. No matter what, no matter when, "we will return to you." Some will try to cause us to forget the Torah, but we will be back. Others will burn you and destroy you, but we will be back. Yet others, even today, will try to destroy Torah in Shuls in Har Nof, Pittsburgh, Poway, or Monsey, but we will keep coming back, because nothing can keep us away. This is our mission as Jews, this is core to who we are and remains an essential part of our mandate.
Torah is for every single one of us. None of us can afford to be too busy, too distracted, have too much insecurity or too little interest to learn Torah. It needs us and we need it and nobody understood that better than the extraordinary person whom we dedicate this siyum to today. When our dear friend, Rabbi Dr. Brian Galbut, was diagnosed with a devastating brain tumor, he knew that as important as any medicine, treatment or therapy was for his health and wellbeing, it was Torah learning and the learning of others in his merit, that would give him life.
Brian cherished the Daf Yomi, even if it meant breaking his teeth over a difficult topic. Learning a page of Talmud was only a part of his rigorous learning schedule that included exploring topics that interested him and preparing high-level classes that he delivered. The wear and tear of his books, the notes in their margins and the underlines on its pages all testify to his diligence and commitment to learning Torah, all while earning a reputation as an outstanding physician and being one of the most hands-on fathers I ever saw.
When he got sick, the Daf in particular took on special significance for Brian, not only for what it meant for himself but as the perfect project to recruit others to join in his merit. When people wanted to visit while he was recovering from surgery, he suggested learning the Daf together. He got his uncles, brothers-in-law and cousins to learn it with him and for him. He called friends and acquaintances and asked them to take it on for him. As his illness progressed, understanding the Daf became harder and harder but you wouldn’t know it. He smiled and laughed, even while he struggled. He was never fatigued, never defeated. He kept plugging away until he literally, physically couldn’t learn the Daf anymore, and even then, it continued to play in his ears.
In anticipation of this siyum in his memory, several people shared with me the experience of being recruited by Brian to learn the Daf. I will just share what one person wrote:
I will never forget the call. It was a Friday afternoon in July. I was driving home from work. When I first saw the name on the caller ID my jaw practically dropped: “Brian Galbut.” This was two weeks after Brian had been diagnosed and undergone brain surgery. It shocked me to see that he was calling me now. I picked up the phone and said hello. After answering my “How are you doing” with his trademark “Baruch Hashem, feeling great, everything’s great,” he told me he wanted a favor. “You’re smart, you’re capable, you can learn…. I was wondering if you could start learning Daf Yomi in my merit?” I didn’t hesitate to agree.
Those few minutes literally changed my life. I started Daf Yomi the next day. And that learning, but most of all the source behind it – Brian putting himself out there to personally ask me to do it – sparked something in me… Until then, I could check off every box as someone “observant” — but I wasn’t connected in a serious way to learning or davening or in my connection with Hashem. Seeing how Brian immediately reacted to his illness, calling people like me, trying to get us to commit to learning, inspired me to re-evaluate my life and consider what I could do to be more like Brian, someone I had always admired as a model of a true servant of God…
There is literally no area of my life that has not improved because Brian picked up the phone and called me one July day and solicited the initial commitment. Among other things, my Torah learning and davening are better, qualitatively and quantitatively, than they have ever been. We weren’t close friends and yet not a day goes by that I do not think about Brian and what he did for me with one short phone call. I cherish his memory and I will continue to learn Torah in his memory every day.
Brian Galbut knew that if he could get others to learn Torah in his merit, it would not only extend his life, but it would give them eternal life.
Many here are marking the completion of the Talmud, an enormous accomplishment. I wish you all a huge mazel tov and bless you that Hashem should continue to grant you energy, good health and the wherewithal to continue learning. But those who finished the Talmud are only half the reason we are celebrating. We are also here to celebrate those who are about to embark on this extraordinary journey, whether of learning Daf Yomi, or anything else. If you are moved by this event and by this time to imbibe the sweetness of Torah, this celebration is for you. If you are determined to go from today and incorporate Torah study into your life in a real and consistent way, the joy we feel with you today knows no limits.
Make a plan today. Join the movement of those who realize that Torah is our lifeline and take upon yourself a commitment for Torah learning. It could be a page a day or a page a week, it could be Mishna or Tanach, it could be listening to a class or having a study partner but everyone, absolutely everyone here, men, women and children must nourish our souls by feeding them Torah.
Anti-Semites are once again trying to destroy us. Of course, we must fight them in the halls of Congress, in the court of public opinion, with greater measures of safety and with security. But, we ultimately fight their nefarious plan when we double down on our Jewish identity, when we recommit to our Jewish mission and when we promise to keep Torah the centerpiece of our lives. We defeat them not only when we embrace Torah stronger ourselves, but when we dedicate ourselves to share it with our brothers and sisters who have never been introduced to Torah before. This large gathering is extraordinary, but for each person here, there are literally 100 Jews living in our area who are spiritually malnourished, dehydrated and on the brink of spiritual death.
Take something upon yourself right now, right here. May yourself a promise. Do it for the Jewish people, do it elevate the soul of Brian, Boruch Tzvi ben Reuven Natan, most of all do it for yourself.
Adapted from Raqbbi Goldberg's remarks at the South Florida Siyum Hashas in memory of Brian Galbut – Baruch Tzvi ben Reuven Nosson – held on January 1, 2020
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