rabbisakhai

The holiday of Purim is about throwing away your mask.

There is an ancient custom for us to wear masks on Purim. Queen Esther masked her Jewishness. Her husband, King Achashverosh, did not know that she was Jewish. But at the crucial moment, when the Jewish People were threatened by Haman’s genocide, she removed her mask and counted herself as a Jew. By doing this, she saved the Jews of Persia and everywhere from annihilation. By being proud of her Jewishness, she saved her nation.

Do not think that our enemies will be persuaded that we are good by listing the vast contributions that Jews have made to civilization. The hatred of the anti-Semite is illogical, and something that defies logic cannot be reasoned with. The Jew-hater hates us because we are “the filthy rich and the filthy poor, the bastions of the bourgeoisie and rootless cosmopolitans, the communist and the capitalist. The only thing that the Jew-haters of the world can agree upon is their hate.

We will never ingratiate ourselves among the nations by aping them. Never was the cause of assimilation stronger than at the turn of the nineteenth century in Germany. The more the Jew pushes to be like everyone else, the more everyone else will turn around and remind us that we are different — sometimes with murderous results.

Do not expect the love of the Nations of the world – but we will earn their respect by being what we are supposed to be. The Midrash says that when Hashem was giving us the Torah, everything stopped. Everything was silent. The nations of the world, fearing another giant flood, sent for Bilaam, their prophet, to ask him what was happening. Bilaam replied with the words of Psalm 29, that Hashem was not bringing a flood or destruction, but “Hashem was giving “Oz” — the Torah — to His People. To which the Nations replied, “May Hashem bless His people with peace.”

When we, as proud Jews, throw away our masks and sanctify the name of the Torah, the whole world will proclaim, “May Hashem bless His people with peace.”

People are sensitive. I know… I’m one of them. Having been educated in the Empire-Building English Public (i.e. Private) School system, where “big boys don’t cry,” I can tell you that however stiff your upper lip may be, inside we are all softies.

In this week’s weekly Torah portion, the Torah tells us that a thief who slaughters or sells a stolen ox has to pay five times the value to its owner. However, if he does the same with a sheep, he only has to pay four times, because he has already paid part of his penalty with the embarrassment and humiliation he felt during the theft by carrying the sheep across his shoulders. One would not place sheep-stealers among mankind’s most sensitive beings, yet the Torah evaluates a sheep-stealer’s embarrassment as calculable in hard cash.

The Talmud (Yevamot 44b) permits or even mandates birth control in the case of a widow who is breast-feeding her deceased husband’s child and then re-marries. We are concerned that should she become pregnant and her milk sour, the current husband might be unwilling to pay for milk and eggs to feed the baby. Then she will have to go to Beit Din to claim child support from the beneficiaries of the dead husband. She may be too embarrassed to do this, and there is danger that the baby may not receive adequate nutrition and die.

Is there any greater love than a mother for her baby? And yet we are still concerned that embarrassment and humiliation may vie with motherly love.

It is certainly much easier to be sensitive to ourselves than to others. But at some level, even those who seem the least sensitive feel embarrassment and hurt. Everyone deserves to be “handled with care.”

The Bridge to Change

“G-d did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although it was nearer…” (13:17)

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that the majority of the scientists who built the American atom bomb were Jewish. Among others: Leo Szilard, Niels Bohr, Aage Bohr, Lise Meitner, Rudolf Peierls, Otto Frisch, Walter Zinn, Edward Teller and J. Robert Oppenheimer. It’s interesting that more than one or two of the atom spies for the Soviet Union were also Jewish. Even though Klaus Fuchs was the son of a Lutheran pastor and John Cairncross, one of the “Cambridge Five” wasn’t a Jew, Morris and Lona Cohen, Theodore Hall, George Korval, Saville Sax, Oscar Seborer, Morton Sobell, Irving Lerner, Arthur Adams, David Greenglas, Harry Gold and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were all Jewish.

Sometimes we are faced with a choice that makes us a traitor no matter what we decide. This type of decision will make us either a traitor to our country or a traitor to our principles. Before Stalin murdered his millions, many looked towards Russia as a Utopia. To the mind of a Jew, much was right about Communism. Typically, Jews have been at the front of every social revolution in history. The idea of a social contract, the idea of equality under the law, of society’s responsibility to care for the poor and sick, the downtrodden and the dispossessed, are some of the Torah’s most outstanding gifts to mankind — and to Socialist thought. In addition, these spies also saw the exclusive American possession of atomic weapons as a threat to world peace in the post-World War II world.

Typically, the Jewish atom spies received no financial reward except for their expenses. (Mind you, several received the Red Star and a lifetime pass to travel on Moscow’s public transport — not too much use in Brooklyn…)

Pharaoh said, “Come let us deal cleverly with it (the People of Israel), lest it become numerous, and it may be that if a war will occur, it too may join our enemies and wage war against us and go up from the land.” (1:10) Pharaoh sensed that the Jews march to a different drum — the drum of conscience, even when the drum may lead to treachery.

True, there have been few whose conscience has lead to such tragic mistakes. But, how many incomparably more is the number of those who have used that gift of conscience, a gift from Above, to serve their country, society and humanity with total loyalty and fidelity!

Nuclear Fusion

One of the fascinating facets of the A-bomb story is that the vast majority of the players were Jews. Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity paved the way for investigation into nuclear fission. In 1939 he urged President Roosevelt to build an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany did so. Leo Szilard (1898-1964), born in Budapest, helped Italian Enrico Fermi (married to a Jew) conduct the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. Niels Bohr (1885-1962) was the first to apply quantum theory to explain nuclear structure. Born in Denmark to a Christian father and Jewish mother, Bohr won a Nobel Prize in 1922, and narrowly escaped Denmark in 1943, pursued by the Nazis. He worked on the Manhattan Project with his son Aage. Lise Meitner (1878-1968) was born in Vienna and became a pioneer of research into nuclear fission. She analyzed her results with her nephew, Otto Frisch. Walter Zinn and Fermi directed the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942 at the University of Chicago. Hungarian-born Edward Teller led the US team that developed the first hydrogen bomb. And the list goes on.

But maybe the most fascinating of the all those who built the atom bomb was J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), the US-born theoretical physicist who was chosen to direct the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in 1942. It was his team that, on July 16, 1945 exploded the world’s first atomic bomb. Three months later he resigned as project director and opposed development of the H-bomb. Oppenheimer was accused of being a Communist, he was vilified in public, and, although exonerated, the experience broke him. Oppenheimer came from a wealthy, assimilated New York Jewish family. He was an aesthete, an intellectual and a philosopher. His colleague I. I. Rabi once wrote about him:

“He reminded me very much of a boyhood friend about whom someone said that he couldn’t make up his mind whether to be president of the B’nai B’rith or the Knights of Columbus. Perhaps he really wanted to be both, simultaneously. Oppenheimer wanted every experience. In that sense, he never focused. My own feeling is that if he had studied the Talmud and Hebrew, rather than Sanskrit, he would have been a much greater physicist.” (From “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb” by Richard Rhodes)

Commenting on this week’s Haftara, Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch bewails the continuing strife between the “Ephraim” Jew and the “Yehuda” Jew. The “Ephraim” Jew, “by his systematic disavowal of the Divine Torah, seeks salvation in political greatness and tries to find a substitute for the lack of protection from G-d by vain efforts to obtain alliance with the nations, among whom it hopes to ‘blossom out in brotherhood’ (Hoshea 23:15) by complete assimilation. But, for giving up all Jewishness, he only experiences contempt and repulsion.”

On the other hand, “Yehuda, who in principle certainly acknowledges Hashem as its G-d… is still far off from unreserved trust in G-d.” Rabbi Hirsch criticizes the “Yehuda” Jew for failing to apply the same standards in his relation with his fellow man as he does with regard to his kashrut.

“And you, son of man, take to yourself one piece of wood and write upon it, ‘For Yehuda and the Children of Israel his associates,’ and take another piece of wood and write upon it, ‘For Yosef, the stem of Ephraim and the whole House of Israel, his associates.’ And bring them near… and they will become united to one union in your hand.”

The two chips of wood representing the two tribes will eventually be united, not in a watered-down compromise but in a genuine elevation “in an everlasting faithfulness towards G-d.”

When we look at our divided nation, how we long for that “nuclear fusion” that will bathe the whole world in Hashem’s light!