​Dear friends,

No one can say that they don’t know.

The last year has been hard on all of us, but the last few weeks have been far more painful. We have been forced to see that Covid isn’t a threat to specific groups, the elderly, the vulnerable and those with pre-existing conditions., Even if it were, would that justify allowing an emotional mechitza to separate you from them? hardly. It’s about newborn babies, mothers of tiny infants and of large families. Boys of 17. Young men with what we would assume is an entire life before them. No group is safe. Hashem has told the angel of destruction not to differentiate between the righteous and the wicked. Even the great scholars and the most generous and compassionate people have not always been spared. 

The scientific community has ceaselessly worked, doing whatever they can to preserve life and to make it possible to tame the beast. Hashem has granted them success in producing a vaccine that will, BEH, silence its roar. IN the meantime, more remains unknown and as yet undiscovered. The story is not over; not for the thousands of people presently afflicted , those on life support, those on respirators and ventilators, those who will never be quite the same, and those who don’t know what tomorrow will bring. Will their husband/wife/baby/mother/father/ child/beloved friend or chavrusa/rabbi or rebbetzin still be alive?

It’s time to recognize that the only One to whom we can turn is Hashem.

Rabbi Dovid Lau, the Ashkenazi chief Rabbi has organized a tefillah in Kever Rachel. It will begin at 4pm today, and whoever can take the time to daven with him then, or at whatever time works out for you, will be part of Am Yisrael’s collective voice. The main thing is to daven, and to open your heart to Hashem, who awaits our tefillot

May we only hear good news, and soon see the geulah shleimah,
​
Tziporah Gottlieb

Dear friends,
The lockdown in Israel is still on, and may continue for a third week. The number of people with Covid is still getting higher by the day, and the tragic deaths are becoming more and more frequent.  The funerals are as always grim, sober, and most of all heartbreaking. 

If you were to let yourself step back, and see the situation as it is, what would you say?

It’s hard to know. The one thing that you know is that this isn’t the first or last time that events were impossible to interpret as they happened. At times, they are easy (or at least possible) to interpret in the course of time. At times, they are not. This leaves you with the question of what Hashem wants from us, when we don’t really know or understand what is happening.

One way to answer the question is to think more deeply about ourselves, and our responses in a world that by its nature, is both good and bad. What does good really mean? What does bad really mean?

To my mind, good is synonymous with clarity, light, revelation, while bad would be synonymous with chaos, darkness, and concealment. This mixture isn’t easy to separate into segments. In the Torah, where we find the story of Adam eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the challenge involved eating. Once you eat something, it is part of you. Similarly, the chaos and the order, the light and the darkness, the clarity and the concealment are all there not only in the world, but also in you! How do you separate the components? How do you manage to rid yourself of evil, and retain what is good in yourself?
The effect of learning Torah and doing mitzvos is to strengthen the part of you that is drawn towards light. At the same time, you have to strengthen your emunah, your basic faith in Hashem’s presence, so that you teach yourself to find Him in simple daily life.  The opposite is to let your body dedicate itself to the act of constant taking without informing your soul as to what it wants, how it will get it, and what the price really is. Being a chronic taker will turn you into a person whose repertoire includes most of the base desires. Did you ever steal anything? How about when you were a kid? If you did, you “invested” in chaos. You didn’t know it at the time. At that point, the core motivation was impulsivity and pleasure. The same would hold for an illicit relationship and similar moments of darkness when the spiritual side is silent. 

Is this you?

Don’t worry! You aren’t a finished product. You all know the basic steps that let you return to what you were before these indulgences became part of your “normal”. Let’s say you don’t really think you have the strength for all three parts of T'shuvah"? Don’t give up. Even if you just feel regret, and never really completely wean yourself off the behavior because it’s too hard for you (translate: You are weak), the fact that at least your guilt and regret are honest, is enough to move you beyond the place you are now, and to let you have some clarity.

Suppose your issue isn’t’ desire, impulsivity etc. Suppose you have assimilated skepticism about Hashem’s involvement in your life, about the truth of the Torah or about whether or not keeping the mitzvos really changes anything. If this is you, you are potentially in a much more painful and difficult place. The reason is that you think you are right, which means that you may have managed to redefine darkness to mean light. At this point it’s harder to do Teshuvah. How can you feel regret and feel right at the same time? The answer here is to step back and remember who you are. You come from a people who have experienced Hashem in every step of their journey. The stories in the Torah are not myths. They happened. You can‘t tell thousands of people that they have all simultaneously suffered the same massive delusion. No one can convince a generation to accept something that happened in the immediate past as a true event that they actually experienced through the eyes of those who all told the same story. You may feel that the Torah is true. Emunah goes deeper than history. It’s part of your inner sense of not being alone, of looking at the most basic parts of you, the desire to love and be loved, and the universal awareness of meaning that takes you back to Teshuvah.

That’s what this week’s Parshah is about. 

The Jews in Egypt were very blocked. The nature of their lives as slaves was dark, empty and painful in ways that we can’t easily imagine today. When they came close to crossing the line that would make them redeemable, the part of them that knew the truth was rediscovered.
They cried out to Hashem. 

It wasn’t their Plan A. That was to wait things out until Pharaoh died, and then assume that the enslavement would end under the new regime. It didn’t’
Then the emunah that they had latent within them, as part of their spiritual DNA came forth.
Maybe it’s time that we tried this method.

Today’s Parshah tells you about the last plagues. Hosts of locusts stopped at Egypt’s political borders. That showed the broken, hollow, hoping against hope, Jews, that forces other than natural ones are involved. Nature doesn’t know what political borders are. The locusts did. IT was an eye–opener.  Hail showed them that fire and water can coexist. They can unite to serve one Master. Just like darkness and chaos can be redefined as challenge, and light can be redefined as inspiration, and together they can lead you to Hashem. In the next plague, there were Jews who experienced the light that Hashem made accessible to them, and other Jews who identified so strongly with the darkness of Egypt that they wanted more than anything to stay where they were.
​And to do
Nothing
At all
Just to stay where things are 
Familiar
And not alive.
 
Hashem guided them, and is giving us. You have choices to make.
Love Tziporah

​Dear friends,
 
I just received a letter that I had never expected. 
A number of years ago, I got a letter from Chaim Dovid Goldstein, who had read one of my articles in Hamodia, and had a few questions. In and of itself, this is very unusual. By and large if there are questions they get filed away under H for ‘hmmm’, and are forgotten. Occasionally the person with the question will ask her rabbi or rebbitzen, and more rarely actually send me a letter.
 
What made this letter unique is that it came from Federal Prison. Periodically, he wrote letters to me about my column  The questions were always on target, often accompanied with a dash of wit and always with a full cup of good humor. In the course of the years, I got to know about his transformation. He read chumash, mishnah, and articles on hashkafa. Jewish volunteers from the area would visit him as well as the handful of other Jewish prisoners. He began to keep kosher very seriously. What that meant was never having hot food, since even kosher food that was brought couldn't be warmed up in the general oven. It also meant adopting a very different schedule than the rest of the prisoners. He would get up early to learn and to daven, and go to sleep as soon as possible to avoid the dissolute lifestyle and language that was so much part of the culture of the prison.
 
I know him as the man he is now; an idealistic baal tshuvah who serves Hashem with significant mesiras nefesh. And of course I hope that this is the way Hashem judges all of us. None of us are completely clean, and Hashem is merciful enough to look beyond our incredibly numerous failures. 
 
We have been through hard times. The Covid has imprisoned all of us to one degree or another. I hope that you have been well and are managing under the circumstances. The political turmoil has also done its bit to pull the rug out from under our feet.  May we soon all be free, and may it happen with the miracles that we saw in Mitzrayim or more!
 
Miracles happen all of the time. Wait a minute. If they happen all of the time, why call them miracles? Why not just describe what you see. You are surrounded by miracles that you may have never noticed. 
 
Did you ever hear the harsh silence of the forest? I would  at times escape to Brooklyn's Botanical Gardens during my High School days. I didn't know enough to see the author of the silence and the beauty. I was in Bais Yaakov, but to shallow to make the lessons that every Parshah and every prophet spoke out with such elegance have much to do with real life. I didn't use the word "miracle' in my self-talk. I used the vocabulary of Waldon Pond which we learned in our rather forgetable English class. It was only much later that I knew that a miracle isn't supernatural necessarily, or even unusual. It’s anything that leads you to Hashem.
 
Ramban tells you that a miracle is something dramatic enough to catch your attention and make you recognize that G-d is not only the direct cause of the world's existence, but is also involved in its moment by moment continuance. Not only that, but that He is fully aware of the choices you make, and the way they cause you in a certain sense to rebrand yourself and the world as a whole. Think about what being in Egypt during the year before the exodus would have been like.
 
Blood (and don’t forget, the act of changing water to blood not only is changing the appearance and taste of the liquid, but its entire chemical structure), Frogs (and don't forget that the Hebrew word for frog, tzfradea has its root in the word tzfar, which means siren. The incessant croaking was their proclamation of Hashem's ability to change the rules of the game, by changing the instinctual responses of animals.) The frogs came indoors, away from their outdoor wet habitat into the ovens and beds of the Egyptians. Lice emerged from the earth so that they were literally stepping on swarms of the repulsive creatures. The Egyptians didn't open their minds; to them the event was tragic, not miraculously. The Reason that this was the case is that t a miracle must by definition lead you back to Hashem, and they didn't have the fortitude to let themselves go so far beyond their assumptions about life. 
 
What does this have to do with you?
You don't have your water turn to blood, or your bed full of frogs, or your ankles oozing with lice bites. What all of these plagues tell you is that you matter. You are seen. Hashem responds to you. You are the reason that the cosmos exist.
 
You can partner with Hashem by being part of the story, not just a spectator. Notice what goes on around you. See His hidden hand. When you do this, the gigantic miracles that your ancestors saw in Egypt become part of your life.  You come to realize that you are seeing what they saw, but in far more subtle form.  Thinking in these terms can make you realize something.
 
You are in His image
You can notice HIs involvement
You can mirror His involvement and caring, by more like HIm. That means, (gulp) being more involved and more caring.
 
You can replace words like "impossible" "terminal" "all over" "too late" and "hopeless" with new words. "Unlikely, but then again,  who really knows?" "The One who cared enough to get me to Israel, keep me alive, and find me people who care, is still with me now. 
 
Think about the big miracles as you obsrve the small miracles of daily life.
 
Chaim Dovid Goldstein didn't know or care about "impossible" hopeless" or "too late". You can make the same kind of choice. Let his example stay somewhere in back of your mind, so you can pull it out when you over overwhelmed. You can learn to think in these terms even if you are in quarantine. Even if  you have Covid. Even if you have had enough
 
Love,
Tziporah.

Dear friends,

What do you really want? It’s not a simple question. If you take, for example, someone who loves her friends and family and get her to ask herself whether living for the feeling of closeness is what it is all about, sometimes the answer is, “I don’t know”. This is sometimes the result of her asking herself another, far more basic question: “Do I really live in a way in which I am totally dependent on other people for my sense of purpose? There are people who live for the satisfaction that their work gives them. “It feels good to express your potential and doing it successfully is marvelous. You still may find that the answer may be a question. He may ask himself, “Do I really live for the feeling of achievement?”  

Today’s parshah begins by telling us that Yaakov lived. Of course, he had the almost unimaginable joy of bringing up a family that could be the foundation of a great nation, one in which each one is a tzadik in his own way. He was reunited with Yosef, who exemplified the ideals that he lived for. He had every reason to feel profound satisfaction with his life. The Torah presents him with words that seem to have nothing to do with really living. “And Yaakov lived in the Land of Egypt”. There are two ways to hear this statement. One fits right into the way you would generally think. Yosef was in Egypt. After so many years of anguish at last, they are reunited. Not only are they reunited, but he discovers that Yosef is still Yosef, that none of his exposure to the worst of the worst at the most vulnerable age, and after base betrayal by his own brothers changed him. What could make Yaakov feel really alive more than that?

The Sfas Emmes questions this assumption. Yaakov knew that when he went down to Egypt that he was beginning a story that didn’t have an easy narrative. He knew about the prophecy that there would be enslavement, suffering and estrangement. He was a man of truth, and a man whose vision went beyond his personal life. How alive could he feel when he knew that he was leading his family into tragedy? He answers that if you are a person of faith, you can feel a sense of purpose and vivacity (what a word for being alive!) even in Egypt. Being alive for a human isn’t all that different than for a tree. If you are connected to your roots in the earth you can stay alive. If you aren’t dead it is just a matter of time. Hashem is the root of all life; the reason that you feel so much joy from love and success is that they both mirror Hashem’s middos, which are embedded in your soul. The more you have connection to this inner reality, the less the outside world will change your inner peace.

Every so often things happen that make you aware of how involved Hashem is in the life of ordinary people even in today’s world. Rav Melech Biderman is a bright light. He is like the rebbe’s of old (although he is not a rebbe) who made their life’s work bringing a sense of Hashem’s presence to people who are not up there on top of the invisible roster of Greats. He told the following two stories that I want to share with you.
​
A man named Rav Druck lives in Ramat Shlomo is a wonderful baal chessed and a real scholar. His elderly father lives in Netanya, and has great pleasure in inviting his children and grandchildren (and great grandchildren) over for a yearly Chanukah party. Last year was no exception. Rav Druck also has a daughter who lives in Neve Yaakov. She is a single parent of several young children, and her life by the nature of things isn’t all roses. On the way to Netanya, Rav Druck’s daughter and son in law had an idea. They would drop in by her sister, who found it too hard to travel to Netanya with her little kids, and liven things up. They followed up and came with treats, music and sang and played with the kids. When Rav Druck’s daughter looked at her watch and saw that it was getting late, she told her husband, “We have to leave now. The direct bus to Netanya leaves at 6:15”. As soon as they heard this, the kids began to cry. They didn’t want their world to revert to the quiet evenings that they were used to. Her husband realized that they were far more needed in Neve Yaakov than they would be in the crowded and jovial scene in Netanya. “Let’s stay here tonight. It’s a bigger mitzvah”. The bus that they missed was in a terrible accident, (one that made all of the papers here in Israel). They have no pretense of knowing why the accident happened, or why other people had to suffer whatever they suffered. The only thing they know is that when they did what they were sure (to the best of their ability to know) what was closest to Hashem’s will, He did the equivalent of saying “yes”.

When I heard Rav Biderman tell the story, at first I was very surprised that he used real names rather than hiding behind names that were made up, or anonymity. I listened again, and the second time I heard the story (it was recorded) I understood. His message was, “this is real. It happened. Not thousands of years ago. Now. To people you may have walked by. To people who are just like you”. 

Story 2 is saved for next week. Stay tuned.

For those of you in Eretz Yisrael, enjoy the semi lockup. Let it take you where you need to be.

Love,
Tziporah