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BEHAALOTCHA 5784
Fighting Fire With Fire
Rabbi Andrew Shaw Chief Executive, Mizrachi UK
Spotify, YouTube Music and other Music streaming apps are wonderful inventions.
To be able to hear any song at any time is, for someone who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, remarkable.
One of the features of these music apps, is that of the mix or playlist They just play various songs that you have either listened to sometime in the past or songs that are similar to those that you like.
I had one of these mixes running in YouTube Music this morning, and Billy Joel, one of my favourite artists, was playing. The song was his 1989 hit, ‘We didn’t start the re.’
It is a great song, cataloguing the political events of the era from the year of his birth1949 - to the then present day, 1989.
The premise of the song is contained in the chorus: We didn't start the re,
It was always burning, since the world's been turning,
We didn't start the re,
No, we didn't light it, but we tried to ght it.
The re here, is in essence, a negative thing, and our job is to ght against it and put the res out on an existential level.
I felt that yesterday when I was in Berlin.
I was there meeting with various people about the Simchat Torah Project as we reach more and more communities across the world.
Berlin is scarred with so many con agrations of the past. Most notably during the Shoah. It was the capital of the Reich, as well as the centre for the planning of the "Final Solution," at the Wannsee Conference, in southwest Berlin, in January 1942
During Kristallnacht in 1938, most of Berlin's synagogues were burned down and Jewish-owned stores and homes were looted and vandalised.
One of those shuls was the Kahal Adass Jisroel community, now expertly led by Rabbi Dovid Roberts, formerly of Edgware. The shul survived Kristallnacht and over the last few years has been renovated to precisely replicate its pre-war appearance
It is a thriving community, with a vibrant school, a rabbinic training academy and much more
While walking around the kehillah and meeting various people, I re ected on the past destruction in a different way, linked, not surprisingly to this week’s parsha!
By the end of Parshat Beha’alotcha, it is disastrous. However, it begins positively enough with the command for Aron to light the menorah.
‘The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to Aron and say to him: "When you light the lamps, the seven lamps shall cast their light toward the face of the menorah." Aron did so; he lit the lamps toward the face of the menorah, as the Lord had commanded Moses ’ Bamidbar 8:1-3
Rashi famously tells us:
‘When you light: Why is the portion dealing with the menorah juxtaposed to the portion dealing with the chieftains? For when Aron saw the dedication [offerings] of the chieftains, he
felt distressed over not joining them in this dedication-neither he nor his tribe So, God said to him, “By your life, yours is greater than theirs, for you will light and prepare the lamps.”’ Rashi: Bamidbar 8:2
The idea here being that the gifts of the nesiim (princes) will end when the Bet Hamikdash is destroyed, but the lights of the menorah will continue to burn through the acts of the Maccabim and our continual observance of Chanukah.
There is a deeper idea here, that of spreading light, of being an ‘Ohr’ both as a nation and as an individual.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe once said:
“It is written, ‘The soul of man is the candle of God’ It is also written, “A mitzvah is a candle, and the Torah is light.” A Chassid is one who puts his personal affairs aside and sets out to light up the souls of Jews with the light of Torah and mitzvot. Jewish souls are ready and waiting to be kindled. Sometimes they are close, nearby; sometimes they are in a desert, or at sea. There must be someone who will forgo his or her own comforts and conveniences, and reach out to light those lamps. This is the function of a true Chabad-Lubavitch Chassid.
The message is obvious I will only add that this function is not really limited to Chassidim, but is the function of every Jew. Divine Providence brings Jews to the most unexpected, remote places, so that they may carry out this purpose of lighting up the world.”
I look at Berlin, the work of the Lauder Foundation, the work of the Rabbi Roberts and KAJ, the work of Rabbi Teichtal and Chabad and what do I see?
I see that re destroyed.
Yet I see that re has rebuilt.
The re of Torah, the re of passion, the re of commitment.
So actually Billy, we did start the re, the re from Har Sinai, the message to the world to live ethical moral lives dedicated to Hashem.
It is a message, that in this crazy confused world, they need to hear more than ever
It is a message for us as well.
When you see the incredible rebirth not just in Berlin but around the Jewish world and especially in Israel, you realise the re of Torah that was bequeathed to us 3500 years
ago, is still very much burning, which is incredibly inspiring
So, to tweak the lyrics I heard this morning:
We did spread the re,
It was always burning, that’s our Torah learning
We did spread the re,
Many wanted us to die, yet Am Yisrael Chai!
Shabbat Shalom
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