A Time To Cry

Chemical analysis of human tears seems to bear out something we all innately feel: emotional pain and physical pain occupy different universes. The tears our eyes produce when they are irritated or when the bodies we carry through life are hurting have different components from those that trickle down our cheeks when it is our souls that ache.

Only humans produce the latter sort. As Shlomo Hamelech wrote in Koheles: “The one who increases in knowledge increases in pain.”

Only one commandment in the Torah involves crying, though it is not readily recognized as such. For the crying is done by proxy, through the shofar, on Rosh Hashana.

The shofar call is, of course, above all, a call to teshuva, a sort of alarm clock of the conscience, as the Rambam describes it. But Chazal characterized it as a literal cry. While the tekiah is a call to attention, the truah, the central component of the Rosh Hashana shofar-sounds, they said, is either a wailing sound or a series of moans; we incorporate both opinions in our practice today. What, though, is the shofar crying about?

Rosh Hashana, to be sure, is the Yom Hadin, and so we are rightfully uneasy at the implications of that fact. But might there be something deeper to the shofar’s wailing and moaning than simple fear? A haunting Talmudic passage may hold a hint.

In massechta Berachos, we are told of several instances of great Tannaim who became seriously, painfully ill; one was Rabbi Elazar. Rabbi Yochanan, renowned not only for his scholarship but for his ethereal handsomeness, came to visit and found his ill colleague lying in a dark room. He pulled up his sleeve, the Gemara recounts, and light spilled from his beautiful skin into the room. He saw Rabbi Elazar crying and asked him why.

If it was for the Torah he hadn’t been able to study – Rabbi Yochanan reassured the bedridden sage – that is no reason to cry; Hakodosh Boruch Hu judges people not by how much they accomplished but rather by whether they made their best effort. And if it was because of the elusiveness of material success, “not every man merits to sit at two tables” – Rabbi Elazar may not have attained wealth in this world but surely had amassed much reward in the World to Come.

And, continued Rabbi Yochanan, if you are crying because of the death of your children, I have suffered more; ten of my own have perished.

Finally, Rabbi Elazar spoke up. “I am crying,” he said, indicating Rabbi Yochanan’s shining arm, “because this beauty is destined for the dust.”

“For that?” responded Rabbi Yochanan. “For that, indeed, it is fitting to cry.” And the two scholars cried together.

No one with warm blood running through his veins could read that account without a shudder born of the realization of what brought those sages to weep.

We all try to crowd our lives with enough diversions to minimize opportunities for reflecting on our mortality. But serious people cannot forever avoid the thought, and righteous ones make no effort to do so at all.

The late, revered Rosh HaYeshiva of Yeshiva Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin, Rabbi Yitzchok Hutner, zt”l, perceived in the act of blowing the shofar a hint to the earliest event commemorated by Rosh Hashana: the creation of man. Shofar-blowing, he observed, involves a force of breath, recalling the animation of Adam Harishon– “And He blew into his nostrils the spirit of life, and man became a living soul.”

The Zohar describes Adam’s physical state before his sin as “shining” with a special splendor – referred to as his “shufra,” or beauty.

It is the precise word Rabbi Elazar used to describe Rabbi Yochanan’s skin. Could it also be… the root of the word “shofar”?

Might the shofar, in other words, be crying out its own name, in memory of the perfection with which our ultimate ancestor was created – squandered by sin, destined for death?

“Shufra!” it may be calling from earth to heaven. “Beauty! The beauty that is a human being, that was once the perfect human being! Now subject to decay!”

For such, indeed, it is fitting to cry. And through our shofaros, we cry together.

Our crying, though, is not an expression of hopelessness. On the contrary, the very recognition of what sin has wrought is, according to our mesorah, the first step toward regaining it, the first step on the road of teshuva. When our regret of our individual loads of sin are total and sincere, we are taught, then we will have utilized our pain for ultimate gain. Even death itself, as Yeshayahu Hanovi foretold, “will be swallowed forever, and Hashem will wipe tears from every face…”

And that same novi describes that day, when death is erased and history ended. “On that day,” he foresees, “there will be sounded a great tekiah.”

[R. The essay above is adapted from a longer version I wrote for The Jewish Observer in 1989. It is dedicated to the memory of my dear mother and teacher, Rebbetzin Pu’ah bas Rav Noach HaCohein Kahn, a”h, whose incredible righteousness and shufra still shine brightly in the hearts of all who knew her.]

The Silence of the Dogs

A curious Midrash holds an idea worth bringing to the Seder

“Midrash,” although redefined of late by some to mean a fanciful, personal take on a Biblical account, in truth refers to a body of ancient traditions that for generations was transmitted only orally but later put into writing.

One such tradition focuses on the verse recounting how the dogs in Egypt did not utter a sound as they watched the Jewish people leave the land (Exodus, 11:7). The Talmud contends that, in keeping with the concept that “G-d does not withhold reward from any creature,” dogs are the animals to whom certain non-kosher meat should be cast. The Midrash, however, notes another, more conceptual “reward” for the canine silence: The dung of dogs will be used to cure animal skins that will become tefillin, mezuzot and Torah scrolls.

It is certainly intriguing that the lowly refuse of a lowly creature – and dogs are viewed by many Middle-Eastern societies as particularly base – should play a part in the preparation of the most sublime and holy of objects. And that, it seems, is what the Midrash wishes us to ponder – along with the puzzling idea that silence is somehow key to that ability to sublimate the earthy and physical into the rarified and hallowed. The particular silence at issue may be canine, but its lesson is for us.

Providing even more support for that thought is a statement in the Mishna (the earliest part of the Talmud). “I have found nothing better for the body,” Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel remarks in Pirkei Avot (1:17), “than silence.” The phrase “for the body” (which can also be rendered “the physical”) seems jarring. Unless it, too, hints at precisely what the Midrash seems to be saying – that in silence, somehow, lies the secret of how the physical can be transformed into the exalted.

But what provides for such transformation would seem to be speech. Judaism teaches that the specialness of the human being – the hope for creating holiness here on earth – lies in our aptitude for language, our ability to clothe subtle and complex ideas in meaningful words. That is why in Genesis, when life is breathed by G-d into the first man, the infusion is, in the words of the Targum Onkelos, a “speaking spirit.” The highest expression of human speech, our tradition teaches, lies in our ability to recognize our Creator, and give voice to our gratitude (hakarat hatov). The first vegetation, the Talmud informs us, would not sprout until Adam appeared to “recognize the blessing of the rain.” Hakarat hatov is why many Jews punctuate their recounting of happy recollections or tidings with the phrase “baruch Hashem,” or “blessed is G-d” – and it is pivotal to elevating the mundane. So it would seem that speech, not silence, is the path to holiness.

Unless, though, silence is the most salient demonstration of the consequence of words.

After all, aren’t the things we are careful not to waste the things we value most?. We don’t hoard plastic shopping bags or old newspapers; but few – even few billionaires – would ever use a Renoir to wrap fish.

Words – along with our ability to use them meaningfully – are the most valuable things any of us possesses. To be sure, one can (and most of us do) squander them, just as one can employ a Rembrandt as a doormat. But someone who truly recognizes words’ worth will use them only sparingly. The adage notwithstanding, talk isn’t cheap; it is, quite the contrary, a priceless resource, the means, used properly, of coaxing holiness from the physical world.

And so silence – choosing to not speak when there is nothing worthwhile to say – is perhaps the deepest sign of reverence for the potential holiness that is speech.

Which brings us back to Passover. As noted, the highest expression of human speech is the articulation, like Adam’s, of the idea of hakarat hatov – literally, “recognition of the good” – with which we have been blessed. The Kabbalistic texts refer to our ancestors’ sojourn in Egypt as “the Speech-Exile,” implying that in some sense the enslaved Jews had yet to gain full access to the power that provides human beings the potential of holiness.

With the Exodus, though, that exile ended and, at the far side of the sea that split to allow them but not their pursuers passage, our ancestors responded with an extraordinary vocal expression: the epic poem known in Jewish texts as “The Song” (Exodus, 15:1-18 ). Written in a unique graphic formation in the Torah scroll, it is a paean to G-d for the goodness He bestowed on those who marched out of Egypt – who went from what the Talmudic rabbis characterized as the penultimate level of baseness to, fifty days later, the heights of holiness at Mt.Sinai.

And so it should not be surprising that, whereas Jews are cautioned to use words only with great care and parsimony, on the Seder night we are not only enjoined to speak at length and into the wee hours about the kindness G-d granted our people, but are informed by the rabbis of the Talmud, that “the more one recounts, the more praiseworthy it is.”

Ice and Fire: A Different Sort of Holocaust Story

It wasn’t the most exciting or terrifying tale of the war years I had ever heard, or the saddest or the most shocking. But somehow it was the most moving one.

The man who recounted it had spent the war years, his teenage years, in the chilling vastness of the Siberian taiga. He and his Polish yeshiva colleagues were guests of the Soviet authorities for their reluctance to assume Russian citizenship after they fled their country at the start of the Nazi onslaught.

He had already spoken of unimaginable, surreal episodes, fleeing his Polish shtetl with the German advance in 1939, of watching as his uncle was caught trying to escape a roundup of Jews and shot on the spot, of being packed with his Jewish townsfolk into a shul which was then set afire, of their miraculous deliverance, of the long treks, of the wandering refugees’ dedication to the Torah’s commandments. And then he told the story.

We were loaded onto rail cattle-wagons, nine of us, taken to Novosibirsk, and from there transported by barge to Parabek, where we were assigned to a kolchoz, or collective farm.

I remember that our first winter was our hardest, as we did not have the proper clothing for the severe climate

Most of us had to fell trees in the forest. I was the youngest and was assigned to a farm a few miles from our kolchoz. The nights were terribly cold, the temperature often dropping to forty degrees below zero, through I had a small stove by which I kept a little warm. The chief of the kolchoz would make surprise checks on me to see if I had fallen asleep, and I would recite Psalms to stay awake.

One night I couldn’t shake the chills and I realized that I had a high fever. I managed to hitch my horse and sled together and set off for the kolchoz. Not far from the farm, though, I fell from the sled into the deep snow and the horse continued on without me. I tried to shout to the animal to stop, to no avail. I remember crying and saying Psalms for I knew that remaining where I was, or trying to walk to the kolchoz, would mean certain death from exposure. I forced myself to get up and, with what little strength I had left, began running after the horse and sled.

Suddenly, the horse halted. I ran even faster, reached the sled and collapsed on it.

Looking up at the starry sky, I prayed with all my diminishing might to G-d to enable me to reach the relative safety of the kolchoz. He answered me and I reached my Siberian home, though I was shaking uncontrollably from my fever; no number of blankets could warm me. The next day, in a daze, I was transported to Parabek, where there was a hospital.

My first two days in the hospital are a blur, but on the third my fever broke and I started to feel a little better. Then suddenly, as I lay in my bed, I saw a fellow yeshiva boy from the kolchoz, Herschel Tishivitzer, before me, half frozen and staring, incredulous, at me. His feet were wrapped in layers and layers of rags – the best one could manage to try to cope with the Arctic cold, without proper boots. I couldn’t believe my eyes – Herschel had actually walked the frigid miles from the kolchoz!

“Herschel,” I cried, “what are you doing here?

I’ll never forget his answer.

“Yesterday,” he said, “someone came from Parabek, and told us ‘Simcha umar,’ that Simcha had died. And so I volunteered to bury you.”

The narrator paused to collect himself, and the reflected on his memory:

The dedication to another Jew, the dedication… Had the rumor been true there was no way he could have helped me. He had immediately made the perilous journey – just to see to my funeral! The dedication to another Jew …such an example!…

As a shiver subsided and the story sank in, I wondered: Would I have even considered such a journey, felt such a responsibility to a fellow Jew? In such a place, at such a time? Or would I have justified inaction with the ample justification available? Would I have been able to maintain even my humanity in the face of so doubtful a future, not to mention my faith in G-d, my very Jewishness…?

A wholly unremarkable story in a way, I realize. None of the violence, the tragedy, the horrors, the evil of so many tales of the war years. Just a short conversation, really. Yet I found so valuable a lesson in the story of Herschel Tishivitzer’s selflesness, unhesitating concern for little Simcha Ruzhaner, as the narrator had been called in those days: what it means to be part of a holy people.

The narrator concluded his story, describing how Hershel Tishivitzer, thank G-d, had eventually made his way to America and settled in New York under his family name, Nudel. And how he, the narrator himself, had ended up in Baltimore, where he married the virtuous daughter of a respected Jewish scholar, Rabbi Noach Kahn. And how he himself had became a rabbi (changing many lives for the better, I know, though he didn’t say so) and how he and his rebbetzin had raised their children in their Jewish religious heritage, children who were continuing to frustrate the enemies of the Jewish people by raising strong Jewish families of their own.

And I wondered – actually, I still do – if the slice of Simcha Ruzhaner’s life had so affected me only because of its radiant, blindingly beautiful message – or if perhaps some part was played by the fact that he too, had taken on a shortened form of his family name, Shafranowitz, and had named his second child Avrohom Yitzchok, although everyone calls me Avi.

Haman, Ahmadinejad and Us

There’s more than passing irony in the fact that the most infamous anti-Semite of antiquity, the hater whose downfall Jews celebrate on Purim, was a prominent official of an empire centered in modern-day Iran.

Like the Persian royal advisor Haman, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reeks with his own considerable animus for Jews, having not only endorsed the destruction of the Jewish State but called into question the murder of six million Jews not 70 years ago. And just as his evil antecedent is today recalled with mockery and laughter, so too is Mr. Ahmadinejad providing future rejoicers rich comedic material – like his recent blaming of the terrorist bombing by Sunni Muslims of a Shiite Muslim shrine on “a group of Zionists” who nevertheless “failed in the face of Islam’s logic and justice.”

Similarly creative anti-Semitic rants are no farther away than the nearest Arab newspaper.

At the end of January, for instance, the Middle East Media Research Institute informs us, a Syrian government daily suggested that Israel created the avian flu virus in order to damage “genes carried only by Arabs.” That the virus first appeared in East Asia was carefully fit into the theory: the germ was planted far from where Arabs live in order to mislead the world about its true origin. Clever, those Jews.

And February saw newspapers in Mogilev, Belarus calling on citizens to boycott a new kosher bakery since, as the city’s leading paper put it: “It is a well-known fact that Jewish bread is made kosher by using sacrificial blood.”

Haman, more than 2000 years ago, was more subtle, preferring snide insinuations to outlandish conspiracy theories. And he focused on Jewish cohesiveness and dedication to Jewish law.

For instance, says the Talmud, he informed the king of the sinister fact that Jews marry their own. And, having discovered the rabbinical forbiddance of drinking wine that had been touched by a non-Jew (because of the possibility that he may have silently dedicated it to an idol), Haman told the Persian king: “If a fly should fall into their cup, they will discard the insect and drink the wine, but if your majesty should so much as touch the cup, they will cast it to the ground.”

Even today, although most contemporary Jew-haters claim to have only respect for Judaism – objecting only to things like Jewish “influence” (read: intelligence) or the Jewish state’s “mistreatment of Arabs” (read: acts of self-defense against terrorists) – common motifs in even the current arsenal of Jew-hatred include Jewish religious practices and religious Jews. A glance at the Arab media’s cesspool of anti-Semitic (but Mohammed-free!) caricatures suffices to show that it disproportionately inspires images of black-hatted, black-cloaked and bespectacled men carrying oversized volumes of Talmud.

That fact, like the example of Haman, should serve to remind us how ugly is the derision of Jewish practices and ideals. It’s something even we Jews may not always sufficiently realize.

Take a recent article in an Israeli newspaper. It reported how a mobile communications company has seen fit to offer a cellphone without Internet access, in order to capture a larger share of the haredi, or “ultra-Orthodox” market (which, out of concern for clear Jewish standards of propriety, prefers its phones to be just phones). The article’s tagline reads in part: “Company succumbs to haredi pressure.” Pushy, those haredim.

In a similarly ungenerous vein, a “progressive” advocacy organization in Israel not long ago issued a press release describing (with words like “scream,” “yell,” and “sneer”) a scene on an Israeli bus, where a haredi passenger (the subject of the verbs) objects angrily to a woman who dared to sit toward the front of the vehicle. Comparing the scene – which, it turns out, is an entirely imaginary one – to Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s, the release characterizes as “an affront to the basic principles of a democratic society” what in reality is a bus company program providing gender-separated buses in haredi neighborhoods. Many haredi men and women prefer such travel arrangements and, since they had been patronizing private bus companies that provide it, Israel’s national bus company decided to compete for the haredi ridership.

At just about the same time, an Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics survey revealed that, among the country’s Jewish volunteers, 36% were haredim; 27%, non-haredi religious; 14% traditional; and 13% secular. Nevertheless, Israel’s Orthodox are routinely, and almost exclusively, depicted negatively.

Their shunning of much of contemporary society’s materialistic desiderata, their dedication to full-time Torah-study (especially as it results in deferments from military service) and their insularity are regularly portrayed as backwardness, ingratitude and arrogance. Yet no one disparages the Dalai Lama for his asceticism; conscientious objectors and some artists also receive draft deferments; and the ubiquity of crudeness in popular culture leaves religious Jews little choice but to remain, to the degree they can, within their more rarified world.

On Purim (this year, March 14), Jews are exhorted to seek to strengthen what binds them. As a demonstration of unity and good will, they traditionally send packages of food items to one another.

Now there’s a Jewish tradition it would be hard for anyone (except perhaps Haman) to disparage. And what a powerful opportunity it presents for disowning intra-Jewish negativity.

Those of us who are haredim should consider sending such mishloach manot to Jews who are not; and vice versa.

Not only will that help bring us all closer, it will help us merit that Mr. Ahmadinejad and company more quickly meet the fate of Haman and his.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

Evolution of a Thought

Beneath the surface of the societal debate about whether the theory of evolution should be the only approach to biology in the American public school lies the real issue of contention: whether human beings are essentially different from the other occupants of the biosphere.

There are certainly enough unanswered questions about evolution and unknown details about the Biblical account of creation to permit the two to at least coexist, if not fully resolve themselves, in a single human mind. What truly animates those opposed to the way science is currently taught to most American schoolchildren is the notion – tirelessly promoted by adherents of the Church of Secularism – that humans are in essence mere apes, if singularly intelligent ones.

Science, of course, can never prove otherwise, limited as it is to the realm of the physical. And our bodies do, after all, function in a manner similar to those of gorillas and chimpanzees. But a purely “natural selection” approach to biology inexorably leads to the “animalization” of the human being, to the view that our sense of ourselves as special, as responsible creatures, is but an illusion and a folly.

And yet, all people who possess the conviction that it is wrong to steal, or to murder, or to mate with close relatives, or to cheat on one’s spouse (or on one’s taxes); all who see virtue in generosity, civility, altruism or kindness; all, for that matter, who choose to wear clothes, believe – against the dictates of Darwinism – that the human realm is qualitatively different from the animal (or, in secular-speak, the rest of the animal).

Either we humans are just another evolutionary development, leaving words like “right,” “wrong,” good” and “bad” without any real meaning, or we are answerable, as most of us feel deeply we are, to Something Higher.

The latter, of course, is the bedrock-principle of Judaism. And while there may be no way for the physical sciences to prove that humans are essentially different from all else, there are nevertheless some objective indications, subtle but powerful, that support the contention.

Language, of course, is one. G-d’s infusion of spirit into the first human being, the Torah informs us, made him “a living soul.” But Jewish tradition renders that phrase “a speaking soul.” Communication, to be sure, exists among many life forms, but the conveying of abstract concepts – including the aforementioned “right,” “wrong,” “good” and “bad” – is something quintessentially human.

That we men and women generally care for our elders is another species-anomaly. Natural selection is myopically future-fixated. Progeny are what count in the evolutionary imperative; the elderly have already served their evolutionary purpose. And so animals care for their young, not their old. Most humans, though, feel an obligation to look not only ahead but behind.

And then there is a thought that had been percolating in my mind for a several days, growing slowly – evolving, if you will – until it emerged, fully-developed, only recently, at the end of a tiring hike, when, lying on a large flat rock, I caught my breath, watched an ant and remembered a Psalm.

My wife and I had spent a few days in the northeastern Catskill Mountains, and that morning had climbed up the steep rocky path leading from a winding country road to Kaaterskill Falls, a hidden and stunning double waterfall.

The trek was exhilarating but exhausting (at least to me; my wife waited patiently each time I paused to rest). When we reached the falls, nestled in a lush, verdant forest, we marveled at the beauty of the two cascading torrents, and at the loud yet soothing music provided by the rushing masses of water.

And there, on the rock, next to me, was the ant, meandering most likely in search of a meal (we had already eaten that morning). As I watched the insect, the Psalm – the 104^th – came tiptoeing into my head. It is traditionally recited at the end of morning services on Rosh Chodesh, the first day of a new Jewish month; indeed, my thought had germinated when I had recited it the previous Rosh Chodesh, eleven days earlier.

It is a paean to the variety, interrelatedness, beauty and grandeur of nature. It speaks of the clouds and the wind, mountains and valleys, the food provided every creature according to its needs, nesting birds and sheltered rabbits. “How great are Your works, oh G-d!” the Psalmist interjects amid his observations, “All of them crafted with wisdom.”

“I will sing to G-d while I live,” he concludes. “May my words be sweet to Him… Let my soul bless G-d – praised be He.”

King David’s rush of appreciation and praise, born of nature’s magnificence, seemed an appropriate accompaniment to both the falls in their glory and the ant in his search. Pondering that, I felt the thought congeal. The tiny creature and we lumbering interlopers on his turf had much in common; he needed his nourishment, just as we would soon be hunting lunch down ourselves. Yet there was stark evidence that morning of an essential difference between the ant and us. Between the ant and the Psalmist.

It was yet another, and significant, aspect of human uniqueness, another aptitude unknown in the animal world, and not easily related to any evolutionary advantage.

The bug, I realized, like all the other bugs – and bears and snakes – in the woods, was utterly oblivious to the beauty around him.

Fighting Iron With Irony

On a beautiful clear night in 1924 at Landsberg am Lech, where he was imprisoned by the Bavarian government, Adolf Hitler remarked to Rudolf Hess: “You know… it’s only the moon I hate. For it is something dead and terrible and inhuman… It is as if there still lives in the moon a part of the terror it once sent down to earth… I hate it!”

A chill accompanied my first encounter with that quote. Because the Jewish religious tradition sees the ever-rejuvenating, shining disk of the moon as a symbol of the Jewish people. Indeed, the very first commandment we Jews were given as a people, while still awaiting the Exodus in Egypt, was to identify ourselves through our calendar with the moon. The moon Hitler feared.

There is much other oddness about Hitler with connections to ancient Jewish tradition, things like his fondness for ravens, in Jewish lore associated with cruelty; he went so far as to issue special orders protecting the birds. And like his fascination with the art of Franz von Stuck (the artist who had the “greatest impact” on his life, he once said), whose major themes are snakes and sinister women. In the Jewish mystical tradition, snakes evoke evil and its embodiment, Amalek; and there are hints of an antithetical relationship between the irredeemable wickedness of Amalek and women.

And then there is the matter of the most loathsome of Hitler’s henchmen, Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Sturmer, the premier journal of Jew-baiting.

At its peak in 1938, print runs of Streicher’s vile tabloid ran as high as 2,000,000. A typical offering included a close-up of the face of a deformed Jew above the legend “The Scum of Humanity: This Jew says that he is a member of God’s chosen people.” Another displayed a cartoon of a vampire bat with a grotesquely exaggerated nose and a Jewish star on its chest. In yet another, a Jewish butcher was depicted snidely dropping a rat into his meat grinder and, elsewhere in the issue, the punctured necks of handsome German youths were shown bleeding into a bowl held by a Jew more gargoyle than human.

In 1935, speaking to a closed meeting of a Nazi student organization, Streicher, displaying an unarguably Amalekian approach, declared:

“All our struggles are in vain if the battle against the Jews is not fought to the finish. It is not enough to get the Jews out of Germany. No, they must be destroyed throughout the entire world so that humanity will be free of them.

The suspicion that in Streicher’s blind, baseless, and absolute hatred of the Jews lay the legacy of Amalek makes the story of his capture and death nothing short of chilling.

Purim is the only Jewish holiday that celebrates the defeat of an Amalekite, Haman. Even a passing familiarity with the Purim story is sufficient to know that the downfall of its villain is saturated with what seem to be chance ironies; he turns up at the wrong place at the wrong time, and all that he so carefully plans eventually comes to backfire on him in an almost comical way – a theme The Book of Esther characterizes with the words v’nahafoch hu, “ and it was turned upside down!”

Such “chance” happenings are the very hallmark, of Amalek’s defeat – a fact reflected in the “casting of lots” from which Purim takes its name. Chance, Esther teaches us, is an illusion; God is in charge. Amalek may fight with iron but he is defeated with irony.

As was Streicher. In the days after Germany’s final defeat, an American major, Henry Plitt, received a tip about a high-ranking Nazi living in an Austrian town. He accosted a short, bearded artist, who he though might be SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, and asked him his name.

“Joseph Sailer,” came the reply from the man, who was painting a canvas on an easel.

Plitt later recounted: “I don’t know why I said [it, but] I said, ‘And what about Julius Streicher?’”

“Ya, der bin ich,” the man with the paintbrush responded. “Yes, that is me.”

When Major Plitt brought his serendipitous catch to Berchtesgaden, he later recounted, a reporter told him that he had “killed the greatest story of the war.” When he asked how, the reporter responded “Can you imagine if a guy named Cohen or Goldberg or Levy had captured this arch-anti-Semite, what a great story it would be?”

Major Plitt recalled telling the reporter “I’m Jewish” and how “that’s when the microphones came into my face and the cameras started clicking.

Another happy irony in Streicher’s life involved the fate of his considerable estate. As reported in Stars and Stripes in late 1945, his considerable possessions were converted to cash and used to create an agricultural training school for Jews intending to settle in Palestine. Just as Haman’s riches, as recorded in the Book of Esther, were bestowed upon his nemesis Mordechai.

There is a good deal more of interest in the life of Julius Streicher to associate him with Jewish traditions about Amalek. But one of the most shocking narratives about him is the one concerning his death. Streicher was of one of the Nazis tried, convicted, and hanged at Nuremberg in 1946.

During the trial, Streicher remained disgustingly true to form. When the prosecution showed a film of the concentration camps as they had been found by the Allies, a spotlight was left on the defendants’ box for security reasons. Many present preferred to watch the defendants’ reactions rather than the mounds of bodies, matchstick limbs and common graves. Few of the defendants could bear to watch the film for long. Goering seemed calm at first, but eventually began to nervously wipe his sweaty palms. Schacht turned away; Ribbentrop buried his face in his hands. Keitel wiped his reddened eyes with a handkerchief. Only Streicher leaned forward throughout, looking anxiously at the film and excitedly nodding his head.

While no proof was found that Streicher had ever killed a Jew by his own hand, the tribunal nevertheless decided that his clear-cut incitement of others to the task constituted the act of a war criminal; and so he was sentenced, along with ten other defendants, to hang

And hang he did. But not before taking the opportunity to share a few final words with the journalists present at the gallows. “Heil Hitler. Now I go to God,” he announced. And then, just before the trap sprang open, he blurted out most clearly: “Purim Feast 1946!” – an odd thing to say in any event, but especially so on an October morning.

The “Amalek-irony” of the Nuremberg executions doesn’t end there, either. The Book of Esther recounts how Haman’s ten sons were hanged in Shushan. An eleventh child, a daughter, committed suicide earlier, according to an account in the Talmud. At Nuremberg, while eleven men were condemned to execution by hanging, only ten were actually hanged. The eleventh, the foppish, effeminate Goering, died in his cell only hours before the execution; he had crushed a hidden cyanide capsule between his teeth.

Something even more striking was noted by the late Belzer Rebbe. In scrolls of the Book of Esther, the names of the ten sons of Haman are unusually prominent; they are written in two parallel columns, a highly unusual configuration. Odder still is the fact that three letters in the list, following an unexplained halachic tradition, are written very small, and one very large. The large letter is the Hebrew character for the number six (Hebrew letters all have numeric values); the small letters, added together, yield the number 707. If the large letter is taken to refer to the millennium and 707 to the year in the millennium, something fascinating emerges. According to Jewish reckoning, the present year is 5762. The year 5707 – the 707^th year in the sixth millennium – was the year we know as 1946, when ten sworn enemies of the Jewish people were hanged in Nuremberg, just as ten others had been in Shushan more than two thousand years earlier.

The Book of Esther, (9:13), moreover, refers to the hanging of Haman’s sons in the future tense, after the event had been recounted, presaging, it might seem, some hanging yet to happen.

To believing Jews, the Holocaust was the tip of an unimaginable iceberg of evil, stretching far and deep into the past even as one of its ugly tips punctured the relative peace of the modern world.

And so, as we prepare to celebrate Purim and the downfall of the Amalekite Haman, especially these days, when Jew-hatred has once again made itself manifest in the world, we would do well to ponder that the evil he represents may have been defeated at times throughout history but it has not yet been vanquished.

© 2005 AM ECHAD RESOURCES

[Rabbi Avi Shafran serves as public affairs director for Agudath Israel of America]

The Anti-Olympic Flame

All the pomp and glitter that attended the Athens Olympics this past summer, all the celebrated athletes and venerated ideals, obscured the true dark heart of the Games.

For although the modern Olympics are presented as a paragon of good-natured competition and a vehicle for global unity, their roots, stretching back to the ancient Greek Olympics, are gnarled and ugly.

In their original incarnation, the Games were fiercely xenophobic; only Greek-speakers needed apply. And their competitions could be beastly and bloody; the original Olympians were single-mindedly focused on victory, even at the cost of limb or life. That should not surprise anyone familiar with ancient Greek culture; in Hellas, death was an acceptable, even noble, outcome of competitive displays of physical prowess. The ancient Greeks did not subscribe to our contemporary notions of moral good or bad; those were bequeathals to the world from the Jews, whose beliefs puzzled the Greeks, and whose own rejection of Hellenism, as it happens, is at the core of what the Jewish holiday Chanukah commemorates.

What is surprising, and depressing, is that the modern Games, for all their life-affirming pageantry and paeans about the “spirit of friendship,” possess a moral shabbiness all their own.

True, they may no longer feature events like the pankration, a form of extreme fighting that regularly saw competitors maimed or killed. And the primitive desire to utterly crush one’s opponent that animated ancient Greek competitors is at least somewhat sublimated these days. But the egotism and amorality are still apparent; as is the antipathy for Jews.

Some still alive remember the summer Games of 1936 in Berlin, which Adolph Hitler exploited to help promote the Third Reich’s image.

Many more recall the murder of 11 Israelis by Arab terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics – and how International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage boldly declared, after a one-day suspension of the competition, that “the Games must go on!”

This year, as it happened, there was a memorial service for those 11 slaughtered Israelis, at the Israeli ambassador’s residence. Addressing the small gathering, the widow of one of the murdered athletes asked why, considering that the “whole Olympic family” had been attacked by the terrorists in 1972, the participants were gathered in a private home and not at an IOC-sponsored memorial in the presence of all the Olympians.

The answer was not supplied, but it is likely not unrelated to the fact that when Olympic federation representatives gathered in Kuala Lumpur two years earlier to prepare for the Athens Games, 199 flags were flown, including the one adopted by the Palestinians, but Israel’s was not among them.

Relevant, too, was the unpleasantness of Arash Miresmaeili, the Iranian judo wrestler who had been scheduled this year to compete with an Israeli but who, it seems, stuffed himself with food during the days before the bout so he would be disqualified for his weight class. Quoted in an Iranian newspaper as having “refused” to compete with an Israeli, he was awarded $115,000 by Iran for “sacrificing” a gold medal. The IOC, for its part, pretended that the entire episode was just the unfortunate saga of an athlete who neglected to count his calories.

There is no dearth of Israel-hatred these days in the world, nor of what most of it really is: Jew-hatred. But the particular Jew-focused animus that has accompanied the Olympics in modern times might serve as well as a reminder of something more fundamental: how diametric the essence of the Games is to the Jewish faith.

The Greeks’ highest ideal was physical accomplishment; the Jews’, moral. In contrast to the Olympic motto of “citius, altius, fortius” – “swifter, higher, stronger” – the Jewish credo was a simple, hopeful “holier.”

The Hellenist worldview placed the human being on the highest pedestal. Nature was perfect and the human body and mind were its highest expressions. What “gods” were paid homage in Hellas were but actors in a sort of celestial soap-opera. The idea of an ultimate Creator, and that He expects self-control from His free-willed creations, was seen by the Greeks as just so much Jewish pollution.

In the second century before the Common Era, the Seleucid Empire sought to impose Greek belief on its subjects, including the Jews in Judea, who were ordered to abandon practices that seemed particularly antagonistic to Greek belief. According to Jewish historical accounts, circumcision, with its none-too-subtle message of man’s imperfection, and the Sabbath, whose rest from work flew in the face of nature’s ceaseless toil, were specific targets; as was the Jewish ideal of modesty, which the Greeks saw as the expression of unnatural shame over the human body.

Some Jews willingly accepted the new culture, and eventually became absorbed into it. Others, though, through whom Judaism persevered, resisted and eventually rebelled, establishing their independence from the Seleucids. Chanukah celebrates their refusal to abandon the Jewish ancestral faith.

In Jewish tradition, the Greek era is called a time of “darkness,” a reference to its unenlightened worldview. The candles lit on Chanukah are meant to symbolize how, in the words of the Talmudic rabbis, “a small bit of light can push away a large amount of darkness.” And indeed, over the millennia that ensued after the first Chanukah, the Jewish vision of right, wrong and human responsibility has persevered over the once-ubiquitous Greek culture, which, at least in its original form, today resides only in museums and college courses.

The darkness that has yet to be banished, though, is the hatred for Jews that accompanied contempt for Jewish ideals. May that animus too, despite its current popularity, soon go the way of the pankration and Greek gods, forever exorcized by the small but powerful lights of Chanukah menorahs everywhere.

My Auschwitz Spoon Chanukah

R’ Yisroel Yitzchok Cohen is my beloved father-in-law. He is a Polish-born survivor of three concentration camps, and y lives in Toronto. His book,”Destined to Survive,” from which the below is adapted, is published by ArtScroll/Mesorah – mesorah.com

One of the items I smuggled out of Auschwitz, when the Nazis moved me into “Camp Number Eight” – a quarantine camp, for those suspected of carrying typhus – was my spoon. It wasn’t much, but it was mine – and it would come to play an important role in my Jewish life and in those of some of the 500 or so other prisoners there.

There were no labor details in this new camp, but we inmates were ordered to help in its construction, which was still underway. Having had some experience in the Lodz ghetto as a mechanic, I helped the electrical technician install the camp’s lighting.

With my new access to tools, I brought my spoon to work and filed down its handle, making it into a sharp knife. Now I could use it both to eat my soup and to cut my bread. This was useful because we would often receive one chunk of bread to divide among two or three people, and without a knife it was difficult to apportion the bread fairly. Now I was regularly called upon to use my spoon-knife to help avoid disputes and maintain relative peace among the prisoners.

When winter came, though, my spoon became involved in an additional mitzvah. By then, we had been transferred to “Camp Number Four” in Kaufering, a camp more similar to Auschwitz in its daily ordeals. Despite the horrendous hardships we suffered daily, however, we tried whenever possible to remember to do a mitzvah and to maintain a self-image as G-d-fearing Jews, despite all the dangers that involved.

Having always kept mental track of the calendar, I knew when Chanukah had arrived. During a few minutes’ rest break, a group of inmates and I began to reminisce about how, back home before the war, our fathers would light their menorahs with such fervor and joy. We remembered how we could never seem to get our fill of watching the flames sparkling like stars, how we basked in their warm, special glow, how they seemed to imbue us with a special sanctity.

And then we got to thinking about the origins of Chanukah, about the war of the Hasmoneans against their Seleucid Greek tormentors, who were intent on erasing Judaism from Jewish hearts. We recalled the great heroism of the Jews at the time who risked their lives in order to keep the Sabbath, practice circumcision and study Torah. And we remembered how G-d helped them resist and rout their enemy, enabling Jews to freely observe the Torah and mitzvos once again.

And then we looked around ourselves. Here we were, in a camp where our lives were constantly in danger, where we were considered sub-human and where it was virtually impossible to observe the most basic practices of Judaism. How happy we would be, we mused, if only we could light Chanukah candles.

While we talked and dreamed, we were all suddenly struck, as if at once, by the same resolution: We simply must discover a way of doing the seasonal mitzvah. One fellow offered a small bit of margarine he had saved from his daily ration. That could serve as our oil. And wicks? We began to unravel threads from our uniforms…

What, though, could be our menorah? I took out my spoon, and within moments, we were lighting the Chanukah “candle”, reciting the blessings of “Lehadlik ner”, She’oso nissim” and “Shehecheyonu”. We all stood around entranced, transfixed, each immersed in his own thoughts…of Chanukahs gone by…of latkes, of dreidels, of Chanukah gelt we had received as children.

And our unusual Chanukah menorah kindled in us a glimmer of hope. As we recited the blessing about the miracles G-d had performed for our forefathers “in those days”, but also “at this time”, we well understood that the only thing that could save us would be a miracle. A “nes gadol” – “great miracle” – like the one hinted at on the dreidle’s acrostic.

Even non-religious Jews stood near us watching the flame of the Chanukah candle. I am certain that none of us who survived will ever be able to forget that luminous moment in the darkness of our concentration camp lives.

The celebrated Viennese psychiatrist Dr. Viktor Frankl, who was himself, incidentally, an inmate of Kaufering, asserted in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning” that, to survive the concentration camps, a person had to have something larger to live for. Those with goals had a better chance to remain alive. We religious Jews in the camps were certainly good examples of that phenomenon, living for our Sabbaths, our Jewish holidays and our daily recognition that there is an Almighty, whether or not we could ever fathom His ways. And I often felt that our convictions helped us cling to life when others sank to the depths of despair.

And today, I am overwhelmed at times with gratitude to G-d for my personal miracle, my survival, especially when I am surrounded by the children and grandchildren He has granted me, all of whom are committed to the observance and study of the Torah. And the gratitude comes rushing in as well every winter, when I light my menorah – a real one today – and, as always I do, I remember my Auschwitz spoon Chanukah.

Pesach Sheni, 1945

[I.I. Cohen is a Polish-born survivor of three concentration camps living in Toronto, and my beloved father-in-law. The below is adapted from his book “Destined to Survive” ArtScroll/Mesorah)]

On Wednesday, April 25, 1945, the SS guards in Kaufering’s watchtowers suddenly disappeared.

The block supervisors in our camp – a satellite of Dachau – stopped beating and cursing; they knew that the explosives that had grown louder each day signaled the death throes of the Third Reich. Those of us whose legs could still carry them broke into the camp kitchen and hauled away potatoes, flour, cabbage and pieces of bread. A day earlier we would have been shot on sight for lesser sins, but now, several days since we had been given any food, our hunger overpowered our fright. We stuffed both our bellies and our pockets.

Suddenly the silence was broken by the familiar murderous voices of our German captors.

“Everyone in a row! Roll call!” In a flash, the thugs were once again running about with clubs and revolvers in hand, mercilessly chasing and dragging everyone out of the barracks. , Having already experienced several years together in the ghetto, our small group of young Gerer Chasidim from Lodz tried to stick together. We discussed the situation. It was quite clear that the Allied forces were close by. Rumor had it that the SS command had ordered camp commanders to exterminate all inmates, so that no living testimony would be available to the Allied armies. We found it hard to believe in such a diabolical scheme, but six years under Nazi rule had taught us that bleak prophecies had a tendency to materialize.

We debated our alternatives. Should we follow orders and evacuate the camp, or risk trying to stay behind and await the Allies? We decided to stay and, one by one, stole into the dysentery block, where only the hopelessly ill lay. We hoped that the guards would choose not to enter the contaminated area.

But our hopes were dashed soon enough when our block door crashed open and an SS officer, his machine gun crackling, shouted “Everyone out! The camp is to be blown up!” Silence. We didn’t stir, the Nazi left and night fell.

Suddenly the air shook with the wailing of sirens. The Allies were bombing the German defenses! We prayed that the thunderous explosions would go on forever, and eventually fell asleep to the beautiful sound of the bombs.

The next morning we awoke to an ominous silence, broken only by the moans of the dying. We arose cautiously and went outside the block. There was desolation everywhere, and a gaping hole in the barbed wire. Had it been torn open by the fleeing Germans? Were we free?

We went to the other barracks, and shared our discover with their frightened inhabitants – mostly “musselmen”, or emaciated “skeletons”. Soon enough we heard the unmistakable rumble of an approaching convoy. We sat and waited, our fear leavened with excitement.

The fear proved more prescient, and soon enough melted into acute disappointment, when the all too familiar SS uniforms came once again into view. The Nazis had returned, bringing an entire detachment of prisoners from other camps with them to help them finish their work. Amid the fiendish din of screams and obscenities, we hurriedly hid in one of the blocks, covered ourselves with straw and rags and lay still, our hearts pounding with terror. Soon we heard footsteps in the block and I felt a hand on my head. We had been discovered, by non-Jewish inmates of other labor and POW camps.

We pleaded with them to ignore us, and offered them our potatoes but just as the invaders had agreed, an SS officer came stomping in, swinging his club, which he then efficiently and heartlessly used on our heads. A boot on the behind, and we were on our way to the trucks, accompanied by the commandos and the SS.

We were picked up by our arms and legs and thrown onto a wagon piled with barely human-looking bodies; the moaning of the sick was replaced by the silence of the dead. By a stroke of luck, though, while the guards were busy with another wagon, my friend Yossel Carmel and I managed to roll out of the truck and found refuge in a nearby latrine. Though our hearts had long since turned to stone, our stomachs were convulsing.

Eventually the wagons left, and we crept back into the very block we had occupied earlier. I tore down the light hanging from the ceiling, and we posed, not unconvincingly, as corpses. Every so often the door would open, and we would hear a shout of “Everyone out!” but we just lay perfectly still. Darkness fell, motors rumbled, and then there was quiet.

Friday, April 27, 1945, brought a cold morning. White clouds chased each other across the bright blue sky as a frigid wind blew through the barracks, chilling our bones. Periodically, the earth trembled with an explosion; we sat quietly, each engrossed in his own thoughts. Suddenly, we heard motorcycles rumbling and dogs barking. Our hearts fell. Once again, the Germans were back.

We soon heard footsteps in the block, and then a frenzied voice, “Swine! You are waiting for the Americans? Come with me!” There followed a commotion, the sound of running, the shattering of glass, and then, a burst of machine gun fire. I peeked and saw that those who had been hiding near the window had tried to escape. Yossel and I had not been detected but were paralyzed with fright. Footsteps approached and then we heard the rustling of straw. When we felt tapping on the piles in which we were hiding, our terrified souls almost departed us.

We held our breath in fear as the footsteps moved away. Peeking through a hole in the straw that covered me, I felt smoke burning my eyes. Frantically, we ripped off the straw and rags and saw flames all around us. Hand in hand, Yossel and I fumbled toward the door, suffocating from the smoke, our heads spinning. In a moment that seemed an eternity, we found ourselves outside. Just a few yards from us stood the German murderers, fortunately, with their backs to us.

The entire camp was ablaze. We threw ourselves on the first pile of corpses that we saw and lay still; we no doubt resembled our camouflage. Around us we heard heavy footsteps, screams and the moaning of the fatally wounded. And what we saw was blood, fire, and clouds of smoke – hell on earth, complete with demons.

When silence finally fell again, I mumbled to Yossel that we ought to say vidui, the confession of sins a Jew makes periodically but especially when facing death. He chided me to remember what I had told him when we arrived in Auschwitz, our first concentration camp. The Sages of the Talmud, he reminded me, had admonished that “Even if the sword is braced on your neck, never despair of Divine mercy.” Yossel recalled, too, the Sages’ admonition that in times of danger Jews should renew their commitment to their faith.

We crawled to a nearby pit, shivering with cold. Through my smoke-filled eyes and fear-ridden senses, I thought I saw SS guards everywhere, with weapons poised. Yossel, however, finally managed to convince me that there was no one in sight; for an hour or more we lay in that pit. Every few minutes bombs whistled overhead, followed by fearsome explosions nearby. The earth shook, but each blast pumped new hope into our hearts. Slowly, we crept out of the pit and made our way to the only building still standing – the camp kitchen. There we found a few more frightened souls.

Together we discovered a sack of flour, mixed it with water, started the ovens and baked flat breads. I noted the irony; it was Pesach Sheini – the biblical “Second Passover” a month after the first – and we were baking matzohs.

Suddenly, the door flew open and a Jewish inmate came running in breathlessly, crying out: “Yidden! Fellow Jews! The Americans are here!” We were free!

We wanted to cry, sing, dance, but our petrified hearts would not let us. I wanted to rush outside, but my strength seemed to have left me.

When I finally did manage to move outside, I saw a long convoy of tanks and jeeps roaring through the camp. A handful of American soldiers approached the barracks. One of them, an officer, looked around him, tears streaming down his face. Only then did I fully grasp the extent of the horror around us. The barracks were nearly completely incinerated. In front of each block lay a pile of blackened, smoldering skeletons.

And we, the living, were a group of ghouls, walking corpses. Along with the American soldiers, we wept.

Among the supplies the Americans had brought with them was a bottle of wine. An inmate picked it up and announced: “For years I have not recited the Kiddush. Today, I feel that I must.” He then recited the words of the blessing on wine aloud.

And then he recited the “Shehecheyanu”, the blessing of gratitude to God for having “kept us alive until this time.”

Holy Matrimony

Well known to every yeshiva child of even tender age are the four terms used in parshas Vo’eira to describe the redemption of our ancestors from Mitzrayim, and associated with the Seder’s four cups of wine. Two other words, however, are used repeatedly by the Torah to refer to Yetzias Mitzrayim. While they may come less readily to mind, they share something odd in common: both are terms for describing a marriage’s dissolution.

The Gemara’s term for divorce is geirushin, and its root is a word used repeatedly in Shmos (as in 6:1, 10:11, 11:1 and 12:39) to describe what Par’oh will be compelled to do to the Jewish people – “divorce” them from the land. And the Torah’s own word for divorce, shilu’ach – as in vishilchoh mibaiso (Devorim 24:3) – is also used, numerous times in Shmos (examples include 4:23, 5:2, 7:27, 8:25, 9:2, 10:4 and 13:17) to refer to the escape from Mitzrayim.

In fact, the word yetziah, one of the four well-known redemption words and the word employed in the standard phrase for the exodus, Yetzias Mitzrayim, also evokes divorce, as in the phrase “viyatz’a… vihay’sa li’ish acher (Devorim, 24).

The Original Chuppah

More striking still is that the apparent “divorce” of Klal Yisroel from Egypt is followed by a metaphorical marriage. For that is the pointed imagery of the event that followed Yetzias Mitzrayim by 50 days: ma’amad Har Sinai.

Not only does Rashi relate the Torah’s first description of a betrothal – Rivka’s – to ma’amad Har Sinai (Beraishis 24:22), associating the two bracelets given her by Eliezer on Yitzchok’s behalf as symbols of the two luchos, and their ten geras’ weight to the aseres hadibros. And not only does the novi Hoshea (2:21) describe Mattan Torah in terms of betrothal (v’airastich li…, familiar to men as the p’sukim customarily recited when wrapping tefillin on our fingers – and to women from studying Novi). But our own chasunos themselves hearken back to Har Sinai: The chuppah, say the seforim hakedoshim, recalls the mountain, which Chazal describe as being held over our ancestors’ heads; the candles traditionally borne by the parents of the chosson and kallah are to remind us of the lightning at the revelation; the breaking of the glass, of the breaking of the luchos.

In fact, the birchas eirusin itself, the essential blessing that accompanies a marriage, seems as well to refer almost explicitly to the revelation at Har Sinai. It can, at least on one level, be read to be saying “Blessed are You, Hashem, … Who betrothed His nation Yisroel through chuppah and kiddushin” – “al yidei” meaning precisely what it always does (“through the means of”) and “mekadesh” meaning “betroth” rather than “made holy”).

So what seems to emerge here is the idea that the Jewish people was somehow “divorced” from Egypt, to which, presumably, it had been “married,” a reflection of our descent there to the 49^th level of spiritual squalor. And that, after our “divorce,” we went on to “marry” the Creator Himself, kivayochol.

On further reflection, the metaphor is, , truly remarkable, because of the sole reference to divorce in the Torah.

You Can Never Go Home Again

It is in Devarim, 24, 2, and mentions divorce only in the context of the prohibition for a [female] divorcee, subsequently remarried, to return to her first husband.

The only other “prohibition of return” in the Torah, of course, is a national one, incumbent on all Jews – the prohibition to return to Mitzrayim (Shmos 14:13, Devorim, 17:16).

Decrees and Deserts

More striking still is the light shed thereby on the Gemara on the first daf of massechta Sotah. Considering the marriage-symbolism of Mitzrayim and Mattan Torah in that well-known passage reveals a deeper layer than may be at first glance apparent.

The Gemara poses a contradiction. One citation has marriage-matches determined by divine decree, at the conception of each partner; another makes matches dependent on the choices made by each individual – with each person receiving his partner “lifi ma’asov,” according to his merits.

The Gemara’s resolution is that the divine decree is what determined “first marriages” and the merit-based dynamic refers to “second marriages.”

The implications regarding individuals are unclear, to say the least. But the import of the Gemara’s answer on the level of Klal Yisroel – at least in light of the Mitzrayim/Har Sinai marriage metaphor – afford a startling possibility.

Because Klal Yisroel’s first “marriage”, to Egypt, was indeed divinely decreed. It was foretold to Avrohom Avinu at the Bris Bein Habesorim (Bereishis 15:13): “For strangers will your children be in a land not theirs, and [its people] will work and afflict them for four hundred years.”

And Klal Yisroel’s “second marriage,” its true and final one, was the result of the choice our ancestors made by refusing to change their clothing, language and names even when still in the grasp of Egyptian society and culture. When they took that merit to its fruition, by saying “Na’aseh vinishma,” they received their priceless wedding ring under the mountain-chuppah of Sinai.