This Shabbat:

Friday Candle Lighting: 4:55 pm
Shabbat Ends: 5:44 pm

Upcoming events:

Kids Palm Springs Snow Day

Teens Big Bear Retreat

Torah Message:

Cracking the Code

“They will heed your (Moshe’s) voice…” (3:18)

Nations spend megabucks on keeping their communications secret. But a code, however sophisticated, can always be cracked.

In 1939 it was generally believed at the British Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park that the Nazi’s “Enigma” code could not be broken. Only the head of England’s German Naval Section, Frank Birch, and the mathematician Alan Turing believed otherwise. Using an embryonic computer and a lot of hard work, GC&CS managed to break “Enigma”. This resulted in a dramatic turn-around in the Atlantic War. Enigma intercepts helped the British to plot the positions of U-boat patrol lines, and adjust the routes of the Allied convoys to avoid them. Losses of merchant-ships dropped by more than two-thirds in July 1941.

“They will heed your voice…”

G-d assured Moshe that the elders would heed Moshe’s call because they had received a tradition from Yaakov and Yosef that the eventual redeemer would use the expression, “I have surely remembered.” (Rashi) The question remains: What if someone else “broke the code” and purported to be the true redeemer? What would stop him from misleading the Jewish People with disastrous results?

“It happened sometime later, in the days of the wheat harvest, that Samson remembered his wife…” (Shoftim 16:1) The word “remembered” here is “yifkod”, an expression of love and yearning — and it’s exactly the same word used by Yaakov and Yosef.

There was another dimension to Yaakov and Yosef’s code — and that indeed made it truly unbreakable: The Jewish People knew that not only would the true redeemer use the correct word – pokad – but he would ignite in their hearts a burning love and yearning for the G-d of Yisrael and the Land of Israel.

And that’s not something you can crack.

  • Source: The Kotzker Rebbe