Dear Friends,

Years ago, I taught Parshah. One of my dreads was that a girl would enter the classroom with one of her parents just as I was explaining the narrative of the sacrifice of the red heifer. How could I possibly explain a ritual that is rooted in G-d's wisdom, and not our intellectual perception of His wisdom? Then something happened that changed my perspective. I went on one of Jeff Seidel's tours of the Moslem Quarter. The actual reason that I went , was that one of my sons was studying at Rav ZIlberman's yeshiva in that area, and I wanted to see it (at least partially to relieve my mixture of curiosity and anxiety). He was at an age (15) where you just don't take your mother to see your yeshiva. In fact, at that age you are supposed to act as though you somehow arrived on the planet via spontaneous generation. Parents are embarrassing. Since I didn't want him to die of humiliation, going on the tour seemed like a great idea. I saw the yeshiva and many other Jewish sites. Unfortunately, from a kiruv perspective, the tour was a flop. The only participants that Jeff had that day was several non-Jews and me. When it ended, one of the non-Jews asked if the next stop was the Temple Mount. Jeff said "no". The tourist asked why. Jeff replied, "Because you need a red heifer". I waited with baited breath to hear the skeptical retort that didn't come. There were also no questions; it was though the answer was the most normal thing in the world. Of course, you have to offer a red heifer! It was only then that I grasped that no one had any idea of what he was talking about ("Frank, what's a heifer?) However, no one was brave enough to ask. I asked Mr. Siedel if this ever happened before. "All the time" was his response.

We don't always understand everything, and the truth is that this is part of the plan.

Even the commandments that seem to fit into your paradigm of logic, such as "don't murder", are in the end are sourced in Divine wisdom and not really within your grasp. After all, it isn't easy to pin down what exactly makes human life sacred. One of the most beautiful and profound moments in my life was when I visited Avigail Rechnitz (and although in honestly the SEM Rabbi Kass and I will be opening G-d, willing in September is named after Avigail the prophetess, I think of the other Avigail surprisingly frequently considering that I only met her twice). She was gravely ill, and throughout our conversation, her main concern was the spiritual imprint she would leave on her family. She never made mention of her own suffering, or of the unfinished business she left behind). She understood the sacred nature of every moment. If she were asked what exactly makes life valuable, she no doubt would have used religious vocabulary because not only was she religious, but also because no other vocabulary really works when you talk about the value of human life. Once you accept that G-d created a world of infinite wonder, and that even nature, which can be observed and which has definable patterns, is ultimately far beyond human grasp, you can relate to His decrees.

The sacrifice of the red heifer (which is a fancy word for cow) is related to the laws concerning ritual impurity. The most severe level of impurity is death, since it causes a complete separation between the soul and the body. The soul, which is the source of every possible aspect of life that lasts forever and has eternal meaning goes on to the next station of its journey leaving the body behind like a discarded garment. The famous mystic work Reishis Chochma tells you that even this has purpose-the fate of the body and its disintegration makes you humble. Nothing destroys your inner balance more than prideful self-absorption; and for that reason being humbled is a profound atonement. From this angle, death "works" both for the soul and for the body by bringing about tikkun (rectification)

Once you know this, you might think that you become grim and pessimistic. No! It makes you look at your day differently. You can find your "red cow" every day when you try to use the myriad mini deaths you suffer to humble yourself. Someone cut ahead of you on line. Your mom treifed the kitchen again. Two busses passed by and they were only half-full. Worst of all, you go shopping and realize that you are I deep denial about what your size really is…You can come to grips with the fact that you aren't meant to rule the world, or you can fight a losing battle to maintain your sovereignty….

Keeping Shabbos changes everything. When you keep Shabbos mindfully, giving up your sovereignty is not so hard. The good food, ambience and time out gives you inner peace and a certain sort of tranquility if you let it. When you do, letting go of your need to rule the world is easier on not only Shabbos, but also all throughout the week.

As ever,

Tziporah

PS the proper spelling of Maya's name is Clausen. Not as written last week.  

Dear Friends,

I am writing this letter from Turkish Air's Gate 23 heading to Istanbul from Johannesburg's fascinating airports. There's something about the anonymity and high energy that attracts me to the almost interchangeable airports that I usually encounter.. “Jo’burg” is different than any airport that I have ever seen. No bookstores, pricey kitsch souveniers, women's clothes or fast food. Zebra skins presumably for rugs (what else would you do with a large formless zebra skin?), carved wooden elephants and hippos, and colorful swathes of material in bright geometric patterns, jewelry stores showing diamonds brighter than any I have ever seen before. No Starbucks.

South Africa is carved out of the Africa you hardly see unless you want to once you are in the large cities. Capetown was my first stop. It looks like a southern European city, with colorful pastel painted houses alongside elegant mansions. On the way from the airport, Africa lifted its head with the long streets populated by Blacks living in tin roofed shanties. The changes that I anticipated seeing since my last visit about 20 years ago are real but slow by my standards. They somehow fit into the timeless rhythm of Africa. The organizers of the Sinai Indaba arranged a trip to Table Mountain for the speakers. We took the airlift up, and suddenly were way above all of the questions that Africa evokes. You face the Atlantic, with its twenty-foot winter waves now reduced to a distant vision of white foam. You can go further and see the Indian Ocean, its depth and tranquility in total contrast with Atlantic high drama. The people of Capetown are delightfully well intended, slow in changing (perhaps influenced by the environment, perhaps not), but by and large very strong in their faith and identity. Unless you are under 30. The plague of apathy that once was confined to the States has spread. The decline in overt racism makes it possible to be anonymous in South Africa. In the old days, when everyone was categorized, since you were neither Black, Afrikaans nor English, you belonged to The Jews. Today you can belong to nothing beyond your career and your family.

Jo’burg is different. Faster paced. Walls for the most part surround the houses. Inside you see an entirely different vista than you see from the outside. This is the norm that you are completely accustomed to in a very short time. The community is much larger than Capetown and much more cosmopolitan. This means that your aren't competing with the beach and the sun when you try to bring some Torah with you, which makes life easier.

The occasion that brought me to SA is called the Sinai Indaba. The word Indaba is an African phrase for a powwow. About 2000 people came to the Capetown Indaba, and over 6,000 to the one held in Jo'burg. I never saw anything even remotely like it in my life. The range of participants was from barely identified with the Tribe, to the most orthodox members of the Family. This is organized by Rabbi Warren Goldstein, who has one of the most brilliant minds for initiating and organizing this sort of thing. Some of you may have heard of the giant Shabbos he organized a few years ago with tens of thousands of participants. I expected him to be a high power CEO. He isn't. He is one of the most humble men I have ever met.

The main message of the entire event was "Be yourself" which means that you can't negate the part of you that is Jewish, nor can you negate your own individual capacity. Of all of the speakers who were there, the one who (at least in my opinion) expressed this best was Rav Yitzchak Dovid Grossman. He told us that the six-day war took him to the recognition that G-d did miracles that demand response. He went to the Kotel and said, "I want to thank you Hashem, I want to give you what every father wants, love to His children. I will leave Yerushalayim and go to where Your children need me". When he spoke about his journey to Migdal HaEmek and the incredible things he did there one thing stuck out. He sees the neshamah, the spiritual soul in everyone he comes across. There is nothing patronizing about his style of outreach. He truly loves each person for themselves, and does whatever he can to make them see themselves with the same purity that he sees them.

So much for now!

I am happy to be heading back, and bring best regards from the Neve girls/women in SA to all of you.

All the best,

As ever, Tziporah

 Dear Friends,

Many of you knew Maya Klausner. She attended Neve on and off for years. She was the tall dark haired girl who sat in the back of the class, whose family lives in Mivasseret. She suffered from various illnesses that held her back from many of the goals that the rest of us have, but never held her back from wanting to grow spiritually and develop her middos. In spite of the considerable difficulty that life presented to her, her "default" was a smile. There was something very pure and real about her. She was never in the spotlight, and to her, that was just fine. Her sense of self didn't flow from other people, it came from the inside.

Although health issues always plagued her, the last half a year was far worse. She was in and out of Hadassah (far more in than out).  I saw her  at times when her illness left her exhausted and she could not really speak. Maya still did whatever possible to make me feel welcome, sort of like a host whose guest showed up at three in the morning. For some reason I spoke to her mom last week even though I had been out of touch for a long time, and she told me that the doctors were optimistic, and were planning to release her within the week. As things turned out, she was released from the tikkun that this world provided instead. When I was trying to figure out how she managed to navigate her path with such profound grace, one word came up again and again.

Humility

No one was more humble than Maya. Humility is not low self-esteem. It is feeling that your life itself is a gift from Hashem; you feel beloved and recognize that you can never give back all that He has given you. The opposite is going through life with the feeling that you deserve more and better, that you are too big for your life, and that He owes you. That attitude leaves you feeling hated rather than loved. It also leaves you on your own, since you clearly don't feel that you can trust G-d. So the subconscious choice ends up with your selecting to feel small in comparison to G-d, and beloved by Him, or big and hated. In this past week's Parshah, Shelach, you can see a very disturbing image of how things look when this process is corrupted.

The spies were the best and the brightest, handpicked by Moshe for the task that they faced. They failed. How did this happen? Ramban tells us that they did not believe that they had either the strength or the merit to do what had to be done to enter the Land. If all you see is natural cause and effect, they were right! They didn't believe that G-d could defeat the enemies that they would have to face because they saw a limited picture of reality. They were afraid because they relied on themselves rather than on G-d, who had told them that this was the time to go ahead. Right after the spies demoralized almost the entire people, a second group of people did, what they no doubt believed was a tikkun for the spy's failure to believe in their ability to conquer the Land. They would go for it! They fear no one. The problem is that G-d was somehow included in the "no one", and the fact that they were told that G-d wasn't with them, and didn't want them to force their entry, they went for it anyway. They too excluded G_d from the picture.

We are still left with the question; how did people of their caliber fail so miserably. The Zohar tells us about "heichal hatemuros", a spiritual state in which nothing seems to be the way it "should be" from our perspective. Yishmael is the son of a servant, but he rules; Yitzchak is the son of the mistress of the home, but he is denied his heritage again and again in the ongoing history of their interactions. Eisov, the ancestor of people who created the Western culture that we live in today, starting with Rome, was supposed to take a secondary role. Yaakov struggling and oppressed, and again, when you look at our history in Europe. In one of Rebbe Nachman's stories, he tells us of a servant who exchanged the royal prince for a slave child born at the same time. The slave is never really able to accept his role as a noble, and the prince is never at home as a slave….

The "exchange", isn't one that was perpetrated by an evil midwife. When Adam and Chava sinned in the Garden of Eden, they were driven out. In order to prevent their re-entrance G_d put a "revolving sword" at the gate. This means that in order for us to re-enter, we have to develop a level of trust in Hashem that is actualized by our facing every changing and seemingly irrational challenges. Just when you think, "Got it!" the sword turns and you face another uninterpretable challenge.

If you are humble, you say, I cannot deal with this. Only trusting in Hashem will get me though. If you do not believe that He could be there for you (like the spies) you fail because of fear. If you think, you can exclude him you fail because of misguided courage. The two spies who didn't fall for the illusions created by the "revolving sword" were Yehoshua and Kalev. Both of them turned to  people who lived lives of truth to help them through the jungle. Yehoshua turned to Moshe, who is described as the most humble of any man on the face of the earth. Kalvev, who didn't have a relationship with Moshe that was as close to him as Yehoshua's was, left the other spies to pray at the tomb of the patriarchs in Chevron to draw down their merits and to gain inspiration.   

Maya was a huge success. Her life was one of quiet peace, purity, and inner happiness. In Tehillim when it says, "the meek shall inherit the Land", this is what it looks like. Stay small! Find yourself people who can show  you how!

as ever
Tziporah

Dear Friends,
The summer session has just begun. It's cool in the early morning, hot in the afternoon and chilly at night. That means that virtually anyone who wants to complain, can find the right time of day declare the weather unbearable. This means that the new girls can always find an ice-breaker when they sit together in the cafeteria for the first time. Complaining in unison generates a feeling of belonging and commonality. There are entire movements that thrive on the good feelings that shared hatred and communal negativity foster. Where would the U.N. be without Israel?

My purpose isn't to go political on you. That would only lead (at best) to  still more overeating. No. It is to take you back to this past week's Parshah, Behaaloscha. It begins with Aharon being told his service in preparing the menorah was even greater form of service than offering the sacrifices that princes of each tribe offered as was narrated in last Parshah. The menorah was a physical embodiment of the collective light of the souls of the Jewish people. As Ramban points out, this light will last forever. The miracle of Chanukah (which of course involved lighting the menorah) demonstrates something about the eternal nature of this sort of light.   The perfect way to inspire someone reach their potential is to give them what they need to retain their sense of enlightenment without needing you. Your ideal is enlightenment, not co-dependence.  Aharon had to see that each light would stay lit.This means that you and the person you are trying to touch both have to value anava (humility) more than you value dominance.

Towards the end of the Parshah you have the rather cryptic story of Eldad and Meidad. It took place after the Jews complained. They demanded to have food that was anything but the mann that fell from heaven. Their complaining had taken on its own energy; they couldn't complain about the taste of the mann, since it tasted however you wanted it to taste. They couldn't complain about how far they had to go to get it, or how original you had to be to prepare it. They complained about it being a Divine gift, unlike the food that they "earned" in Egypt. They wanted to feel more important, and resisted the humility ad reliance on G-d that was one of the main lessons that the mann taught. At this point, Moshe told G-d that the task of taking care of the Jews was beyond him. G-d then told him to locate the seventy elders who were the men the Egyptians had put in charge of the work-brigades during the enslavement. Instead of doing what the Egyptians demanded, which was to use every inhuman trick in the book to make their fellow Jews work still harder, they took the blows of their supervisors when the men under them didn't meet the impossible quotas that they had been assigned.

There was one problem. There were twelve tribes. If you want each tribe to have the same number of elders representing them and caring for them, you get either 60 (12x5) which is too few, or 72 (12x6) which is too many. No tribe would willingly reduce the number to 5, which created a problem. Eldad and Meidad, who were elders, decided that even though they had shared the same agonizing choices as the others, and had the same right to reach the prophetic state that the others would reach if they were to share in Moshe's role of leading and of transmitting Torah. Alsheich quotes the Talmud which tells us that (and how) their humility benefited them. They realized that only 70 men would be chosen. The excluded themselves from the selection and stayed outside. They said, "We know ourselves. Let's separate ourselves and let them stay". The chosen elders experienced a profound prophetic experience while they were in the appointed tent. Eldad and Meidad were outside, in the general area and had an experience that was just as deep. This was unheard of until now; up to this point, prophecy came to them through Moshe and only Moshe during their stay in the desert. Eldad and Meidad's humility opened the door to reaching a prophetic level no one else had reached. They saw that Moshe would not lead the Jews into Israel, and the result (Malbim explains) would be that the wholeness that G-d had in mind when He created the world would not yet occur. It would have to wait until much later. They prophesized about the wars of Gog and Magog that the prophets who lived hundreds of years later narrate. Before Moshiach comes, there will be great world powers. One will view himself as the "roof" (gag in Hebrew is roof) that holds the world together. In modern language, we would call it an umbrella organization or movement that is all inclusive. There will be opposition. Magog(the roof-maker) will want the right to be the ultimate determinant in the direction the world takes, as well. What characterizes them both, is their almost unlimited arrogance. Neither one has room for any path but his own, or any complaint about any aspect of his vision. The contrast between their humility, and the light that it opens you to see, is the exact opposite of the nations who are too blinded by their own ambitions to see anything but themselves. There is no inner menorah to give them light.

Humility means seeing Hashem as great, and yourself as small. It means not pursuing recognition, dominance, or honors.  Its hallmark is not complaining about what life is but seeing its beauty and feeling humbled before its Author.

And now, my dear dear friends, comes what I really wanted to share with you in this letter. Time has passed since the terrorist attack in the Bnei Torah shul in Har Nof in Cheshvon. My grandson's Bar Mitzvah took place last Tuesday. He is the child who escaped the scene of the massacre by crawling under the tables and feet and running home to tell my daughter that Arabs are in the shul and are killing people with their hatchets and guns. It was, as you can imagine a very special celebration of life and of Hashem's generosity. One of the guests was Risa Rotman, whose husband, Chaim Yechiel ben Malka is still unconscious as a result of the violence that he suffered. She pointed out that every one of the seven families that were involved directly have reason to give thanks, and to move beyond seeing only darkness. She married off a son, Rebbitzen Twerski, who lost her husband Rav Moshe, son is engaged. Brianna Goldberg of the Neve office whose husband R. Avraham was killed, had a great-grandson, a privilege that only a generation ago was very rare. Adina Mualmi's daughter is getting engaged tomorrow night, and another daughter who was childless for many years had twins. Her husband, Eitan ben Sara still needs tefillah for a full recovery, but has vastly improved. Chaya Levine's, who is now the assistant director of Neve, had lost her husband as well. Her daughter got married this year. Yaakova Kupinski moved into a beautiful spacious new home. We are worthy of the miracle of being at Mordechai's bar-mitzvah, watching him give a siyum and hearing his father, my dear son in law give a moving dvar Torah when only a half a year ago we didn't know if he would survive. If anyone other than Risa would have pointed this out, I would have been offended. It would sound to my rather un-humble ear cloying and patronizing. Coming from the one who has certainly suffered, it sounds different. It sounds like humility of the purest and most genuine kind.

Her menorah is lit
And stays bright
When you don't see
The One
Who is holding the flame.

as ever,
Tziporah