Tzav – March 26, 2016
S.T.A.R.’s upcoming exciting events:
This Shabbat:
- Friday Candle Lighting: 6:51 pm
- Shabbat Ends: 7:40 pm
Torah Message:
Lions of the Soul
“…he (the kohen) will separate the ash” (6:1)
July 1956. Saturday afternoon. A taxi leisurely turns off Dizengoff Street into a side turning. A close-up on the taxi driver’s face. He is wearing a blue baseball cap.
Driver: They went to their deaths like sheep. They asked their rabbis: “Rabbis, should we run away to Israel or should we stay here in Europe? And you know what all those great rabbis said (puts on fake Yiddish accent)?“Don’t leave! Don’t go to Israel! In Israel your souls will be in mortal peril. Jews there drive down Dizengoff on a Shabbes afternoon! You’re better off here in Lodj.”
The driver chuckles, pleased with his own joke. He thinks for a second.
“So I ran away in 1937. I came here. I got a job as a taxi driver. I used to be religious but I gave it up here. Those poor fools are now ashes and I’m alive and driving down Dizengoff on Shabbes.
The picture freezes on the laugh of the driver.
Dissolve. We hear Shostakovitch’s String Quartet no. 8. A large hearse is seen leaving a graveyard. Cut to a freshly filled-in grave in the mid-distance. Hanging on the grave marker is a blue baseball cap. The camera tracks backward. All around it are grave-stones. The camera keeps tracking back through what seems to be like hundreds and hundreds of identical gravestones. They are all identical. Suddenly, the camera stops and slowly tracks in, lingering on one of thousands of identical stones. At the top of the gravestone there is a carving — six pieces of barbed wire arranged in a Star of David. The camera moves downward. We read the inscription: “For one of the Six Million — a place in the earth for someone whose ashes are blown on the four winds.”
Vayikra Parshat Zachor – March 18, 2016
S.T.A.R.’s upcoming exciting events:
This Shabbat:
- Friday Candle Lighting: 6:46 pm
- Shabbat Ends: 7:35 pm
Torah Message:
Happenstance
“And He called…” (1:1)
If you look in a Sefer Torah you’ll notice that the first word of the Book of Vayikra is written with a small letter aleph.
The word Vayikra means “And He called…” The Ba’al HaTurim (Rabbi Yaakov ben Asher 1270 – 1340) explains that Moshe, the humblest of men, was reluctant to write that G-d had called to him. Rather, he wanted to write Vayikar — without thealeph at the end of the word — which means “And He happened…”, as if G-d had just “happened upon him,” for Moshe felt it sounded unbecoming that G-d should go “out of His Way” to speak to him. In the event, when G-d told Moshe to write thealeph at the end of the word, Moshe said he would write it smaller than the other letters — hence the small aleph in our sifrei Torah until today.
What’s unusual about Moshe’s reaction is the thought that anything could be considered happenstance in relation to G-d, Who is the Cause of Causes. What could it possibly mean that G-d just “happened” upon Moshe?
The story of Purim reveals much about happenstance. The Name of G-d appears nowhere in the Megillah; the story itself seems to be one happenstance after another. It seems just happenstance that Esther should find herself Queen of Persia and thus in a position to save her people from annihilation; just happenstance that Mordechai should overhear a plot against the life of Achashverosh, and just happenstance that his loyalty to the king should go unrewarded until the fateful night that Achashverosh cannot sleep and calls for the scroll of the records of the kinG-dom to be read before him, precipitating the series of events that leads to the saving of the Jewish People.
Haman was from the nation of Amalek. Amalek is the agency of atheism in the world — that existence is just happenstance. The gematria of Amalek is the same assafek, which means “doubt”. The Talmud asks where you can find an allusion to Haman in the Torah; it replies that when G-d asked Adam if he had eaten from the forbidden tree, G-d said, “Ha-min ha-etz…” “Did (you) from the tree…?” The word “Ha-min” can be read as “Haman”. The word “Ha-min” is an interrogative pronoun; Haman’s very name suggests question, existential doubt.
Atheism doubts the existence of G-d — but is sure about the existence of self. True humility doubts the possibility of my existence as something distinct from He Who is Existence. Moshe’s response to G-d calling him was that — the feeling that he had no more independent validity than a chance meeting, a happenstance.
Yitro – January 29th, 2016
S.T.A.R.’s upcoming exciting events:
This Shabbat:
- Friday Candle Lighting: 5:03 pm
- Shabbat Ends: 6:01 pm
Torah Message:
The Limits of Desire
“In the third month of the Exodus of the Children of Yisrael from the land of Egypt…” (19:1)
The greatest desire of G-d for His People — Yisrael —was revealed in the giving of His “marriage pledge”, His holy Torah.
If so, why didn’t G-d give us the Torah immediately after we left Egypt? Why did we have to wait three months to consummate this Divine union?
You can’t say it was a function of distance, that it took three months to get to Sinai, because even for Eliezer, the servant of Avraham, G-d supernaturally truncated his journey, and without a doubt He would have certainly done this also for His People.