Shaarei Shamayim

Today is Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of Remembrance and we are bid to remember that bad—even evil things—can happen. We’ve had a strong reminder of this with the economy lately. Recently I came across an anonymous piece describing 10 ways to tell that the economy is so bad:

1. I got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.
   2. These days a picture is now worth only 200 words.
   3. CEO’s are now playing miniature golf.
   4. If the bank returns your check marked “Insufficient Funds,” call them and ask if they meant you or them.
   5. A truckload of Americans was caught sneaking into Mexico.
   6. Dick Cheney took his stockbroker hunting.
   7. Motel 6 won’t leave the light on anymore.
   8. Exxon-Mobil just laid off 25 Congressmen.
   9. Congress says they are looking into this Bernard Madoff scandal. Oh, Great! The guy who made $50 Billion disappear is being investigated by the people who made $1.5 Trillion disappear!
   10. And finally…I was so depressed last night thinking about the economy, wars, jobs, my savings, Social Security, retirement funds, etc...I called the Suicide Lifeline. I got a call center in Pakistan, and when I told them I was suicidal, they got all excited, and asked if I could drive a truck.
    
   So we don’t need a special Shabbos to remind us about how bad the economy is. So what do we need to be reminded of?

Were you watching the Winter Olympics this week? Did you see that Israeli couple ice-dancing with the male partner’s tzitzis hanging out? Too bad they didn’t get a medal. There was one Israeli skier that everyone in Israel thought might get a medal. He had broken world records in trial runs, but he didn’t make it to Vancouver. You see he went to the qualifiers in Europe last month and, for most of his runs, was far ahead of the field—finishing in less than 2 minutes, a full 10 seconds ahead of everyone else. When his final run came, all he needed was a mediocre run of 2½ minutes to make it to Vancouver. He got off to a good start, but his coaches at the bottom waited and waited. 2 minutes passed; then 3. Finally after 6 minutes he crossed the finish line. When he was asked what happened, he angrily responded: “Who put a mezuzah on every one of those gates?!” It must have been an anti-Semite!”

Shabbat Zachor comes to remind us that Amalek—the ultimate anti-Semite, the perpetual enemy of the Jew—will always raise his ugly head and that we need to be forever vigilant. He can appear as Haman in the Purim story, or as Hitler, or as Yassir Arafat or as the new Persian villain, Ahmadinejad.

It seems that Israel was vigilant as it was announced last week that another descendant of Amalek was eliminated. Dubai is now accusing Israel’s Mossad spy agency of assassinating Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a chief Hamas operative who helped plan and finance Hamas’ terrorist activities. It’s become an international incident. As usual, Israel neither affirms nor denies such claims. Either way, it’s equally effective.

The new Archbishop of NY, Timothy Dolan, in a message to the NY Board of Rabbis reported that 2 weeks ago he traveled to Haiti on a plane chartered by Catholic Relief Services. A Muslim group donated the antibiotics which were on the flight with him. When the plane landed, a Baptist group unloaded the antibiotics which the Catholics gave to the Israeli medical team.

As I read this report, I thought, this is what we need to remember. This is the kind of spirit we need to bring to this world. We can triumph over Amalek! But sadly, many are pointing a finger at Israel for the assassination in Dubai. Professor Gerald Steinberg in a column in The Wall Street Journal writes: Cases involving Muslim terrorists supported by Iran, would never be pursued by the prosecutor of The International Criminal Court, or raised in the framework of a United Nations. Al-Mabhouh [was a terrorist and] violated the human rights of untold Israeli civilians, but the U.N.’s Human Rights Council—which is dominated by such moral stalwarts as Libya, Algeria and Iran—has no interest in Israeli complaints.

When nations will treat antiterrorism as collaboratively as the faith groups treated antibiotics, this will be a healthier world for all. Perhaps for our world, what Archbishop Dolan witnessed in Haiti was a modern miracle.

But what about obvious miracles? Wouldn’t you love to see something that ranks with the splitting of the Red Sea or the 10 plagues? Where are all of God’s miracles today?

There is a holiday on the Jewish calendar whose main point is to resolve this very problem. And that’s why the rabbis of the Talmud maintained that even though every other festival will eventually fall by the wayside in the messianic era, one holiday will be observed forever. Its message is so powerful that we can never dare to forget it.

It’s not Passover or Yom Kippur. Surprisingly, the sole festival granted immortality in Jewish tradition is the seemingly minor day of Purim. Let me explain with a personal story and then one from my teacher Rabbi Benjamin Blech.

In November 2005 I got a call from a friend, Rabbi Reuven Travis, who asked me if I know anyone who can transfer music from a cassette tape onto a CD. I told him that—as a matter of fact—I had just put that kind of hardware into my computer to make a CD, “The 10 Utterances” (which is on display in our lobby and which you can buy—proceeds to the shule). Anyway, Rabbi Travis explained that he knew a family whose mother was very ill and suffering from Alzheimer’s and one thing she responded well to was listening to her father’s tapes. It seems that her father was a well-known cantor and had made a series of tapes before he passed. The family didn’t have a tape deck and so that asked if it could be transferred onto CD’s. I wasn’t sure how to do it, but I agreed to try, and I did.

When I met my wife Cheryl last year, after a couple of months she told me the story of her mother who suffered from Alzheimer’s and the kindness of someone she didn’t know who made CD’s from cassettes of her grandfather’s singing for her. I was in shock and turned to her and said, “That someone, who you didn’t know, was me!!!” Perhaps I was being tested to see if I was worthy of Cheryl. But the fact that I got an opportunity to do a real chesed for her mother before she passed was simply a miracle from Gd.  

In an article on the aish.com web site called “Modern Miracles,” Rabbi Benjamin Blech tells the story of how 30 years ago in the middle of a class at Yeshiva University he was suddenly called out due to “a life-and-death emergency.” One of his students was threatening to commit suicide in his dormitory room and desperately needed some counseling.

He writes:
I rushed over and found the young man wailing and moaning. “This is the worst day of my life!” he screamed, “I don’t want to go on living anymore.” Slowly the story poured out of him. His girlfriend had just broken up with him and he was inconsolable. “You don’t understand, Rabbi. I’ll never ever find anyone like her. I’ll never meet someone as perfect as she is. I can’t go on, I just want to die.”

I stayed with my student all day, as well as the following night. I tried to reassure him that his life was not over. By morning I finally got him to promise me not to give up on his future. He agreed that suicide is a sin and that he’d struggle to go on, even though it pained him to lose what he was certain was his only possibility for happiness.

20 years later he was teaching in the very same classroom when this former student knocked on the door. He then explained: “You know that day when I wanted to commit suicide and I told you it was the worst day of my life? In retrospect I now realize that day was really the luckiest day of my life. The girl I thought I couldn’t live without—she’s been involved in drugs and a series of scandals that even hit the newspapers. My life would have been a horror had we stayed together. I came back to thank you Rabbi, because today I am married to a woman who is truly the best in the world and we have 4 amazing children who give me joy every single day. I guess what you taught us is true. There are times in life when we mistake blessings for tragedies.”

A year later he was a scholar in residence at a synagogue in Los Angeles. On Shabbos he spoke about Moses wanting to see Gd and Gd telling him that He will place him in the cleft of a rock and “you will not see My face, only my back.” He said that the message was: With our finite intelligence we can’t understand events as they unfold; it is only retroactively that [one can]…grasp Gd’s infinite wisdom. He quoted Kierkegaard who expressed the same idea when he said, “The greatest tragedy of life is that it must be lived forward and can only be understood backwards.” And then, the story of the suicidal student suddenly popped into his head and he told it as an illustration.

The next day, one of the congregants told him that his speech had unwittingly saved a life. It seems that in the congregation that Shabbos was a young man scheduled to fly out to New York after Shabbos for his wedding. No sooner was the Shabbos over when he received the phone call that shattered his dreams. His fiancée at the last moment decided she couldn’t go through with it.

The almost-to-be-groom later described to his friends what happened next: For a moment I felt suicidal…But one thought kept repeating itself in my mind. Why was it that on that very morning I heard a sermon describing an almost similar event? I had not intended to go to that particular synagogue.
Blech writes: It was a last-minute decision that brought him to a place where, almost as a Divine message, he could hear words that in the aftermath of his own tragedy might offer him some solace.
Little did he know that my inserting that particular illustration was also totally unplanned. A higher source put into my mind and my mouth—a gift from Gd to allow someone to survive incredible pain just a few hours later.

And this story, too, has a happy ending. This past July as Blech and his wife Elaine were boarding an El Al flight to Israel, someone shouted, “Aren’t you Rabbi Blech?” It was the same man. With tears in his eyes he introduced himself, his wife and 3 children saying: I’m just like that student in the story you told us that unforgettable Shabbat. Today I’m the happiest man in the world. I can honestly say that the curse of that Saturday night has turned out to be my greatest blessing.

There’s a word in the Book of Esther central to the story of Purim that captures this idea so well: V’nahafoch, “it was turned around.” Everything that seemed like a misfortune at 1st, was in retrospect, turned around and recognized as a Divine miracle. Because there are miracles, unlike those in the Bible, that come camouflaged as seeming coincidences, as natural events, as incidents that “just happened,” but that in reality are the products of heavenly intervention.

The very name Purim means “lottery.” A lottery is a game of pure luck; the winner determined entirely by chance. Faith however allows us to understand that in a world governed by an All-seeing All-powerful Gd there cannot be room for blind chance. A lottery is far more than luck; it is allowing the Director of the universe to decide the outcome while hiding in the background.

Purim is the holiday of what seems like coincidence. It reminds us of the famous saying of Albert Einstein (The World As I See it): “Coincidence is Gd’s way of remaining anonymous.” Purim has many miracles in its story—but not the kind of miracles that override the rules of nature like the splitting of the Red Sea. It’s rather like the miracles that happen so much more frequently in our own lives—all the time—the miracles that we so often discount because Gd chooses not to shout but to whisper. It’s His still small voice that we have to attune ourselves to hear as He turns tragedies into blessings. And that is why the festival of Purim, with its message of miracles camouflaged as coincidence, will outlast every other holiday on the Jewish calendar.

This Purim holiday, may we be blessed to be able to see the miracles of our lives and rejoice together with Gd in gratitude. Amen!

Rabbi Mark Hillel Kunis
2/27/10

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