HaMizrachi Weekly (UK Edition) | Parashat Ki Tavo 5784 by mizrachiuk

KI TAVO 5784

The Need For Strength

Rabbi Andrew Shaw Chief Executive, Mizrachi UK

I am currently writing this from 36,000 feet somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.

I am on my way to Livingston, New Jersey, where I will be the guest of two shuls who have ordered 15 Me’ilim for the Simchat Torah Project and I felt it would be very special to personally deliver the me’ilim and also deliver many drashot over shabbat at various times.

My topics will cover a wide range of areas, but of course focus on the project and the Jewish nation post October 7th.

This week that nation had a remarkable couple of days.

I was sitting in the Chief Rabbi’s Conference when we started getting the news of the most audacious attack on the terrorist infrastructure of Hezbollah People were awestruck by the ingenuity and genius of the Mossad and the damage it has inicted on the infrastructure and personnel of Hezbollah.

Remarkable.

Surely, for once the world would be united in their praise for Israel, striking at the heart of the barbaric terrorist entity with very few civilian casualties – a triumph of the highest order of good against evil

But no, the useful idiots in the media, the EU, the UN and others, found a way to condemn Israel.

Alistair Heath said it best in the Telegraph:

Robbed of its moral bearings, bereft of any sense of right and wrong, incapable of distinguishing heroes from villains, the West can no longer celebrate when good triumphs over evil.

Israel’s brilliantly audacious booby-trapping of thousands of Hezbollah pagers, followed by the blowing up of the terror group ’ s walkie-talkies, is a stunning llip for the forces of civilisation worldwide.

A tiny nation of just 9.3 million, of which 7.2 million are Jewish, living in a country the size of Wales, reeling from the worst anti-Semitic pogroms since the Holocaust, Israel is leading the war against barbarism, its young conscripts doing a job that would once have required intervention by a Western coalition acting as global policeman.

The fact that so many in Britain, Europe and America, especially the young, no longer take Israel’s side in this existential combat exemplies our cultural, intellectual and ethical degeneration.

How should we understand our current situation?

This week’s Parsha, Ki Tavo, is mainly known for the tochacha, the 53 verses of horrendous predictions if we fail to ‘listen to the voice of Hashem your God to perform all His commandments’. Devarim 28:15

However, the opening of the Parsha is far more uplifting and can remind us of the incredible, but difcult times we are currently living through.

It details the ceremony of the Bikkurim, where farmers were to take their rst ripened fruits to the Temple and present them to the Kohen, in a ritual that included a moving declaration of gratitude to God for His eternal role as the Guide of Jewish history.

We know the declaration very well – it forms for us today not the bikkurim ceremony but the core pasukim for Seder night at the heart of Magid.

‘And you shall call out and say before the Lord, your God, "An Aramean [sought to] destroy my forefather, and he went down to Egypt and sojourned there with a small number of people, and there, he became a great, mighty, and numerous nation.

And the Egyptians treated us cruelly and aficted us, and they imposed hard labour upon us.

So, we cried out to the Lord, God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our afiction, our toil, and our oppression.

And the Lord brought us out from Egypt with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm, with great awe, and with signs and wonders.’ Devarim 26: 5-8

However, this is not the full declaration of the farmer when recounting our history, as there was a fth verse to this passage:

‘He brought us to this place [the land of Israel] and gave us this land, a land owing with milk and honey’. Devarim. 26: 9

However, we do not recite or expound this verse on Seder. This is very strange since the Mishnah in Pesachim states explicitly:

‘And one must expound the passage beginning, “An Aramean tried to destroy my father” until one has completed the whole passage. ’

Rabbi Sacks, in his wonderful essay about this in his Pesach Hagaddah, notes:

‘The Haggadah as we now have it and as it evolved in rabbinic times is, in Maimonides words, ‘the Haggadah as practised in the time of exile,’ meaning, during the period of the Dispersion The missing fth represented the missing element in redemption. How could Jews celebrate arriving in the land of Israel when they were in exile?’

And there you have it.

We live in a miraculous generation –the fth verse has happened. Hashem has brought us back to the land. Yes, in our 76+ years we have had so many challenging and tragic times, none more than October 7th, but we are the Jewish people and we have come home.

Rav Doron Perez was the guest speaker at the dinner at the conference. He spoke movingly about his son Daniel zt’l, but also delivered a powerful message to us about

the idea of ‘Oz’ Daniel fought and died a hero by Kibbutz Nachal Oz, his unit was called Oz – Unit 77. And the State of Israel is currently in its 77th Year – the gematria of Oz.

What is ‘Oz’? It means having strength, a backbone The Jewish people need to stand up proudly as Israel defends itself and the west against radical Islam and the enemies of goodness, truth and peace.

We must pray that Hashem gives us ‘Oz’ - as we famously say: Hashem oz l’amo yiten, Hashem yevoreches amo bashalom.

May Hashem grant strength to His people, may Hashem bless His people with peace. Tehillim 29:11

The message from David Ha Melech is clear, only when we have Oz, when we are strong, fearless and brave will we merit Shalom. The pathetic strategy of appeasement of the West to Iran and its lackeys has brought nothing, certainly not peace.

We also must be unied as a nation, as I have said before, I am proud that Reform and Conservative shuls across America are also taking part in the Simchat Torah Project –we have to be united as the Jewish people, but that doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything. However, we do need to be united behind Israel.

I will leave you with the closing words of the excellent Alistair Heath article:

The fact that it is possible for a country as unjustly governed as South Africa to lead a genocide case against Israel proves that the entire system is rotten The case is backed by Iran, Brazil’s far-Left president, Ireland and Egypt: we must have been transported into an alternative, Kafkaesque universe.

Israel is the supreme embodiment of law-bound national, democratic sovereignty, of peoplehood, of matching a nation to a state, of post-imperialism, of capitalism and technology, and of the continued relevance of the monotheistic religions. If you tear down Israel, you destroy the very ideas that underpin the West, the international order implodes and the autocracies triumph.

The stakes are thus unbelievably high. We must support Israel, and allow it to nish the job of annihilating Hamas and defeating Hezbollah

He couldn’t have said it better. And as I land shortly at JFK, let us hope the world, especially America, understands what needs to be done

Am Yisrael Chai

Shabbat Shalom

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