Dear friends,

Before long you will be sending and receiving mishloach manos. Mishloach manos are unique in the world of gift giving. Usually you give a gift for one of two possible reasons. One is that you know someone who is in real need, and you want to help them out in a loving and dignified way. An example of that would be sending your cousin with twelve children, a tiny apartment, and a limited income, an entire Purim meal, gourmet and catered.  Wouldn’t that feel wonderful for both of you if it was given with a smile and an open heart? The other kind of giving relates to love, not need. Mishloach Manos can be given to someone who is receiving doesn’t need anything that money can buy. No one has enough love. You may not need anything that your theoretical cousin can give you materially, but that doesn’t mean she has nothing to give!  Imagine you cousin sending you a recording of her children singing Shabbos zmiros, or the entire book of Tehillim just for you. Mishloach manos is gift giving for its own sake. You don’t have to give your mishloach manos to the needy, nor do you have to give it to someone who you love. Any Jew is a potential recipient.
That leaves you with a question. How do you feel about “any Jew”, and what do you do with your feelings? Why give gifts that are not needed, and why not reserve your gifts to people who you really love? Are you really expected to want to give gifts to any Jew?  If not, shouldn’t there be restrictions on who you give Mishloach manos?

The Torah makes demands on you on every level. You are expected to be responsible for your actions. “You are accountable for your damage that you do with your body” even if you are asleep! You are accountable for your speech. The popularity of the Choftez Chaim’s books on communication comes from the fact that we all recognize how powerful words are, and how responsible we must be for where they take you and where they take your listener. You are also responsible for your emotions. You are forbidden to hate your brother in your heart. You are obligated to love Hashem, and to feel awe of Him in your heart. You are also obligated to love your fellow Jew. The question that you may find yourself asking is how can you possibly feel accountability for your feelings? Isn’t love or hate just spontaneous responses to what you experience? Isn’t it natural to love those who love you and hate those you don’t?

The fact is that something is “natural” doesn’t mean that it is either right, nor that it is beyond human control. How do you love someone for whom you don’t find yourself spontaneously feeling the kind of affection and connection that you know you would like to feel? You know what the Torah demands, but it just doesn’t happen? There are many approaches to this issue, but one of the most central ones is that you have to be able to deal with the issue in question both by making internal changes and external changes.
Maharal tells us in his essay on loving your neighbor how to make the internal changes. You begin by recognizing the difference between the kind of love that you feel instinctively, and the kind that comes as the result of longing to be more whole. Instinctively being with someone who is like you is easier and more natural. Having something in common is step one in developing a relationship. When the message you hear is “I am like you”, your instinctive answer is “I relate to you”.  This year’s Gerber Baby is a Downs syndrome sweetie pie. As soon as you see the smile, he has your heart. Yes. He is like you. Like your kids. You can relate. This doesn’t always work with “any Jew”.  Some Jews are less (or more!) intelligent than you, some have backgrounds that are radically different than yours, and some have faults that are dissimilar to the ones that  you have come to accept in yourself. Loving this kind of person is a stretch. There is another way to love. It is by asking yourself not “what do I have in common with this person”, but instead, “What can I learn from this person that I don’t know already? What has he seen that I haven’t?  What can knowing him do to make me more whole?” Once this attitude is alive and well within you, you are ready to move on to the next step, developing love towards “any Jew”. You now want to know him.

The next step is bonding with your fellow by giving to him. If the inner work has, for some reason, not been done, giving alone, doesn’t always do the job. Waiters don’t always love their customers.
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Enter the great world of Mishloach Manos. You give someone a gift. It is not because you are aware of their neediness. It is not because you know them and feel natural affection and connection. It’s because you recognize that every Jew has something to teach you, something that can make you more whole. You are willing to do something that will make relationship happen. You are stretching your hand for a reason. You want to bond. This is one of the reasons that you are not considered to have fulfilled the mitzvah of Mishloach Manos if you send it anonymously. No mutual bonding can possibly take place through anonymity.

I have just returned from Rav Shmuel Auerbach zatzal ‘s funeral. There were tens of thousands of attendees.  The Rosh Yeshivah of Maalos HaTorah was known for his humility, dedication to Torah, dedication to his students, and commitment to the Jewish people. He also held views that were not identical to those held by many other erudite, dedicated, brilliant rabbis. Today the differences were not erased; they are real. But there was so much else there, that today the real question, “What can I learn from him” led to an outpouring of love and respect.

Ester and Mordechai’s love for their people went beyond the borders of commonality. They believed in the sacred nature of every one of us. May we be worthy of following their path.Oh yes! Enjoy your mishloach manos!
Love,
Tziporah

Dear Friends,

Picture Batei Ungarin, one of the scenic courtyards of Meah Shearim. The people who live there don’t have driers. Their clotheslines cross the entire expanse of vast public square. This leads to a subtle and unending contest that no one talks about. Whose laundry is whiter? The rules are rigid. No yellow or greyish laundry is allowed. Needless to say, bleach, synthetic whiteners and various home- made concoctions are popular items. One day Ruchele says to Chaim over their morning coffee, “Chaim, I think that the neighbor’s must be having financial trouble. Her laundry is, you know, greyish. Maybe they can’t afford decent detergent. Maybe their washing machine isn’t what it once was. Maybe you should speak to someone in Kupat HaIr (the communal charity fund) about helping them out” “I’m not a yenta. I will not discuss someone else’s laundry with the rabbis of Kupat HaIr. Forget it”, he replied in a tone that left little room for debate. Nonetheless, Ruchele mentioned it the next day. The third day she had a “chiddush”. “Chaim look! They must have a new machine, or bought much better detergent. Their laundry is sparkling! “Ruchele, I realized that today is your birthday, so I made a surprise for you. I washed the windows”….The story is, of course, just a flight of fancy.

The person who told it is worth knowing. Rebbitzen Aidel Miller is a genuine dyed-in-the-wool Yerushalmis of the old school. and a great-granddaughter of Rav Yaakov Yosef Herman of “All for the Boss” fame. She came to Bnos Avigail on Rosh Chodesh Adar to give us some experiential insight into simchah. The hour or so that she was with us began and ended with laughter, but what made the deepest and most enduring imprint was that she really knows what simchah is about. It’s about trust in Hashem, positivity, judging favorably, taking responsibility for your life rather than escaping or blaming. Most of all it’s about real emunah, and the optimism that is its natural child. I know her for quite a number of years. Her grandmother, Frieda, was one of the “Herman girls”; some of you may have met or heard of two others, Ruchama Shain and Rebbitzen Bessie Sheinberg. They both were legends in their time. Ruchama Shain for her unforgettable books, all of which brought you to a meeting with the place inside you that loves light, and Rebbitzen Sheinberg who had a bad case of compulsive maternalism  towards any English speaking individual twenty years her junior.  All of “the girls” had learned the art of having “clean windows”.

I can hear some of you thinking “One more thing to feel depressed about. It’s not enough that I’m still not married (or if you are, that it’s still not perfect, or if it is, that you still are not financially as secure as you want to be, or if you are that you worry about your kids or your health…). Now I have to feel guilty about not being full of simchah?

Reb Ahron HaGadol of Karlin once wrote, “Depression isn’t a sin, but the greatest sin doesn’t create the ‘timtum ha leiv’ ( a spiritually blocked heart) that it generates”
The real question is how to you open your heart to feeling some simchah?

The first thing is to be focused on your many successes. There is a story in Seder HaDoros in about a man who had fallen just about as low as a person can fall. One day Rabbi Akiva saw him riding a donkey and saw that his face was shining like the sun at midday, and that he had a brilliant aura of light above his head. Rabi Akiva asked his students, “Do you see anything above this man’s head? “ When they said “No”, Rabbi Akiva said, “Bring him to me, quickly”. Rabbi Akiva told the man, “My son, an aura of light is above your head. I see that you will merit Olam Haba. What deed did you do?
There was no great deed.
That man had not done teshuvah
He said,” I held back from doing a grave sin”. That was enough.

Think about the times that we live in, the temptations that you face every day, the light you shed just by being a person whose inherent desire to make your life worth something is manifest in everything that you do and everything that you are. Of course you have numerous human failures. They make your choices even more significant.

I took a group of women from Project Chizuk to Chevron this week. We went to a spring that is about a five minute walk down a marked path from the tombs of Ruth and Yishai.  I had been there before, but this time Reb Simchah Hochberg (who is known as Mr. Chevron for his dedication to the city of the Avos) was with us. He explained that this is the only spring in the entire area. There is no other water source.  Avraham’s tent couldn’t’ have been far from where we stood. Any one of the ancient olive trees (one olive tree has a trunk that is wide enough to  hold a small house in its vast interior) could have been the one that he pointed out when he asked his guests to  recline until he prepared their meal. I couldn’t help thinking of what nachas Avraham would have from you. You also do what you can, use what you have.
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Hashem believes in you far more than you believe in yourselves. The Torah is eternal. In this past week’s parshah, He told us to build Him a sanctuary so that “I will live in you”, He says - not in it, but in you. In his essays on the Parshah, Rav Dovid Soloveichic shlita, the Rosh Yeshiva of Brisk, mentions that what we do here and now is the sanctuary to which the text is referring to. There is a spiritual parallel to the Bais HaMikdash that we humans built. It is called the “Heavenly Bais HaMikdash” and the sages tell us that the two parallel each other. The Rosh Yeshiva tells us that the earthly Temple is what the Torah is focused upon. It says, “Hashem looked into the Torah and created the world”. The heavenly Temple mirrors the one that we build, not the opposite. That means, for you, that everything you do is far more significant than you can possibly know. You are too busy building the Bais HaMikdash to realize the significance of your actions.

If you only realized what spiritual power keeping Shabbos alone in Northern California (because you didn’t make plans to go away earlier in the week) is, or if you only knew  the spiritual force of dressing with tznius in Manhattan is, you would dance your way through life!

​Have a fantabulous Adar!
Tziporah

Dear friends,
Purim is in the air. Rosh Chodesh today! That means there are still two weeks till Purim, but the anticipation of something good, and joyous and unique is already here.

One of the most delightful things about Purim is that the Megillah provides us with such marvelous superheroes.

I sometimes think about what would have happened if I was Mordechai. He made so many unpopular moves. He forbade the Jews to celebrate their own defeat when Achashveirosh threw the party to end all parties when the prophecies about our return to Israel after a 70 year hiatus didn’t seem to come true. The food was as kosher as you would want it to be, since anyone could order their own menu. And no, the people as a whole did not obey Mordechai’s decree. This wasn’t his last unpopular move. Later when Haman demanded that everyone who sees his procession bow to him, Mordechai stood alone erect and defiant.

I don’t think that I would have bowed to Haman if I was in Shushan.  He had turned himself into a demigod, and when he commanded that people bow it was more than a reflection off his one dimensional view of life. It was a command to worship him as an idol, and to eliminate any belief in a competitor, such as G-d Himself.  I could, however, easily picture myself staying home to avoid the confrontation. I would be safe. I could take shelter in the most dangerous of all clichés’ “I didn’t do anything wrong” when I also didn’t do anything right.

The spirit of Mordechai is still with us.

I saw a fascinating documentary last night. One of our Old Girls, Sara Hemley, married a man who is a nascent film-maker, and they invited me to their home see his latest production. It was a documentary about what it was to live as a Jew in Cuba under Fidel Castro.

The Jewish community of Cuba began with Spanish Jews who emigrated there in order to escape the inquisition. When the Ottoman Empire fell, large numbers of Turkish Jews, mostly from Istanbul found their home on the island. Sara’s husband Shlomo’s mother is a descendant of an Istanbuli Jewish woman, one of two sisters who knew they had to leave Turkey. One  sister headed to the States, the other chose Cuba. Later, Ashkenazi Jews also saw Cuba as a City of Refuge from Hitler’s terror, and the population grew till there were 24,000 Jews living there in the thirties, mostly in Havana. Then things changed. In 1959 Fidel Castro overthrew Fulgencio Batista, the American supported dictator of Cuba. 94% of the Jews left Cuba. The 1,500 or so who remained found themselves in one of the most nightmarish communist regimes in the world. Religion was outlawed, the synagogues confiscated, and all of the melodrama that you might associate with communist Russia was the stuff of day to day life in Cuba. 

​The minor acts of true heroism are what sustained the Jewish community. The main speaker in the film was a woman who is in her late thirties. “My mother lit one candle Friday nights. I didn’t know why she did it, and if I would have asked, I am sure of one thing. I would not have been given an answer. Children talk too much. When communism crumbled in the 90’s, and the USSR became the FSU, things in Cuba got worse.  Castro became one of the last icons of Marx’s creed, and without Russian aid, the economy crumbled. Basic food items were rationed, and the bleak reality of the communist  “worker’s paradise” became a nightmare. It was at that point that miraculously Cuba was “discovered” by the Argentinian Jewish community. They sent food packages, visited, and became a beacon of hope for the remaining Jews of Cuba. It was also at this point that our heroine managed to escape first to France, and ultimately to Israel where she lives today, in Raananah. She is married, has children who will grow up as Jews because her mother lit a single candle on Friday nights. It was a risk. Her mother could easily have done the equivalent of being a passive victim with plenty of other people to blame for her being the last Jew in her line.  

All of this happened to hundreds of Jews just a half hour’s flight from Miami, without my ever hearing a word about their plight.

The rest of the story was predictable. Communism lost its hold on the island. An Argentinean rabbi came to fill the spiritual vacuum, and Jewish life is in the processes of rebirth. The reason that I am telling you this story is that you make choices that are sometimes not so easy to notice. The choice isn’t always between right and wrong. Sometimes it’s between bowing or staying home, lighting the candle or just having dinner, doing or just fitting in. Be strong! Be a little Mordechai….

Have a great Adar, and take in the simchah of being part of a people who make choices and always have!
Love,
Tziporah
  

Dear friends,
I read a fascinating halachic Q and A.  An American man began moving some of his business interests to Israel. His plan was to make aliya a real possibility. He began by buying a property with a small building on it in an area that was just opening up. It would be the perfect place to eventually use as a warehouse when he was ready to bring over his business to Israel. Since he was still not ready to move, he rented it out as a storage unit. Then the drama began.

His tenant was using the unit to store a variety of items that he had managed to bring into the country without paying the proper import tax. When he realized that the authorities were on to him, he disappeared. The police discovered that the unit used by the man they were after was owned by our hero… He was in Israel at the time, and they brought him in for questioning. They recognized that he wasn’t directly involved, but they wanted his cooperation. At this point, he consulted with a Rav, who felt that the question was too big for him, and took it to the world famous halachic authority, Rav Eliyashiv ztl. The reason that there was a question at all is that the civil law would treat his tenant much much more severely than the halachah would allow. They would go far beyond repayment, fining etc. and would give him a severe prison sentence. The Rav told him that he may not finger his tenant, which of course would mean that he would have to the expense of hiring a really good lawyer to prove that he had no involvement with the entire matter. He decided that whatever it took, he would stay loyal to halachah, even though his legal costs would be a really steep loss for him financially.

Many people understand the importance and relevance of halachah in ritual matters (I would, for instance not even consider taking a job that required working on Shabbos no matter what the salary, and this is probably true for you as well). When it comes to seeing the relevance of halachah in civil law, far too many people are blocked. Take a step back, and revisit Mount Sinai.   

I can’t even begin to imagine what being at Mount Sinai must have been like. The bone shaking realization of truth that each Jew felt has no parallel in anything that happened in my life. I had drama in my life-births and deaths. They were limited to my own mini-world. What happened at Mount Sinai was more than that.  For a moment, your private reality melded into something bigger than you can ever be on your own.
This week’s parshah, Mishpatim, deals with this-world. The laws of damages, property, relationships are the stuff that real life is made of.  While some of laws may not be applicable to your life (say those concerning an indentured servant), others are the bread and butter of human controversy. The introductory words of the Parshah open you up to understanding these kinds of laws from an entirely different angle. It says, “AND these are the laws”. There is a reason that I capitalized the word AND (unlike my typos that you have grown to know and love…). Rashi tells us that it is to reattach this chapter to the previous ones. “Just as the law in the previous chapter (which narrates the Ten Commandments) was given at Sinai, the laws (of civil law) were given at Sinai”. When you read this the first time, you may find yourself raising an eyebrow. Where else would they originate, Jersey City?

Not Jersey City. Many people tragically relate laws such as being somehow less religiously relevant. They lack Sinaic drama.  In his classic Ohr Gedalyahu, Rav Gedalya Shorr ztl, takes you with him on his journey to finding spiritual meaning in dealing with the real world.  The Torah’s laws can be divided into different groups. Some of the laws (like the kosher laws for instance) are laws that you would never have figured out in a million years. You have to have enough faith in the One who created humans and determined that we would have to eat (and to prepare the food we use) can teach us how to do this without being spiritually compromised. There are other laws that seem to be an extension of human sensitivity. They make perfect sense. In fact, in virtually every society people have devised laws to maintain basic justice. What the Torah is telling you is that these laws, the laws of justice, are a continuum of what we heard as Sinai. They go beyond the range of the justice systems that humans can create.

Let’s go back to last week’s parshah for a minute to see how this works. G-d told us that He took us out of the mind boggling horror of slavery in Egypt. When we heard those words, what we wanted more than anything else was to dedicate our lives to serving Hashem. The way you do this demands that you serve Him, and not serve yourself. Your five senses give you information about reality. Your mind then interprets what they tell it. Your mind however is limited both by your life experience, your nature, and the inherent limitations of being human.  Concretely that means recognizing that the same way that the ritual laws come from a higher source than your own mind, so does Hashem’s definition of justice.
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He is the One who gives you what you have, and obligates you to use it justly. He is also the One who decided what your friend has and needs for the fulfillment of his life’s purpose. He is the One who allows governments to come to power, and limits the degree to which they can renegotiate His justice. When you learn the highly technical laws that this week’s parshah narrates, you aren’t just learning law. You are learning Hashem’s mind, His plan, and where you fit in. This is what changes you from being an interested seeker of spiritual meaning, to a devoted servant of Hashem. May we all be worthy of this change of perspective, and feel the love and awe that living with devotion brings.
 
Love,
Tziporah