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14 JULY 2022
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ASK THE RABBI Looking for answers? Send your question to Rabbi@RabbiSchochet.com IS IT G-D’S FAULT OR MINE?
FIGHTING FOR THE FUTURE
Dear Rabbi I have been married for twenty-five years. I would say that most of the early years were happy but the past five years have become increasingly more difficult. Is this a nisoyon from Above to test my resilience? Does G-d make marriages difficult to test human resolve? I like to think I am a good husband but my wife complains that I am not the same anymore. Michael
Dear Rabbi I am a mother of three children and two grandchildren. My son-in-law never had a Jewish education and wants to send his kids to a non-Jewish school. I told him doing so could mean the end of the Jewish line for those kids and that he has to have faith in and look to protect their Jewish future. He replied that it is hogwash and that at the current rate of intermarriage and assimilation, there isn’t much of a Jewish future to look forward to. What do I say to that? Hadasah
Dear Michael I think it has a lot less to do with G-d and a lot more to do with you – or both of you. I’m reminded of what my grandfather used to say: “Before marriage he’ll walk to the other end of the world for you. After marriage he won’t even walk to the local grocery store.” Inasmuch as every marriage takes two to tango, you need to focus on your own behaviour and ask yourself whether something about you has changed. Are you paying the same attention to detail? And if this has been going on for five years, why did you wait till now to address it? Did you think it was all just going to correct itself? Five years is a long time to be living in a state of unhappiness. You need to address the issues now, rather than assuming this is just your Divine calling, or something absurd like that. G-d intended for man and woman to work together in harmony. Don’t go blaming Him. That in itself smacks of shirking responsibility and that could be the starting point of your problems.
Dear Hadasah Share with him the following: What the Bluzhever Rebbe, Reb Yisroel Spira, went through during the Holocaust was mindboggling. The Nazis murdered his wife, his only daughter, his entire family, almost all of his hundreds of Chassidim. After the War, it took a lot of courage for survivors to remarry. But after his liberation from Bergen Belsen, somebody suggested a match to the Bluzhever Rebbe, a widow who had survived, amazingly enough, with her 4 children. And that woman, named Bronya, became the Bluzhever Rebbetzin. Years later, somebody asked the Rebbe how he knew, despite everything he had gone through, that he wanted to marry his Rebbetzin Bronya. And the Bluzhever Rebbe shared the following extraordinary story. At one point, when the Rebbe was in Bergen Belsen, he went to the camp officials to request permission to bake matzos. And,
unexpectedly, they responded, “OK...but whoever wants to make the matzos with you has to write down their name, and we’ll submit the request to Berlin.” Most of the Jews, of course, didn’t put their names down on the request, because they figured writing their names was as good as writing their own obituaries. But the Rebbe said, “Look, we don’t have anything to lose. We’re going to die anyway...” So the Rebbe and 4 other men wrote their names down on the request to make matzos. And they submitted it. But right away they regretted their decision. They feared their request was the same as calling out to the Nazis, “Hey there, please kill us!” But a few weeks later, the camp officials returned and announced, “OK, who are the five people who said they want to make matzos? Come with us...” Those 5 men, thinking those were their last moments on earth, said goodbye to their friends. But, instead of killing them, the camp officials informed them that their request had been approved. So then the question was, who would get to eat from the matzos? There were only a few small matzos and tens of thousands of Jews in Bergen Belsen. And then a mother of 4 children stepped forward and said, “Could you please break off small pieces of the matza for my children?” The other people there argued, “But your children are still small, they aren’t obligated yet to eat matzah.” But she answered them, “My children are the next generation. They have to know what matzah is. They are the future of the Jewish
people. So the Rebbe gave them matzah. So why did the Rebbe decide to marry that mother of 4 children after the War? The Rebbe later explained, “Nobody in Bergen Belsen thought about the next minute. You didn’t think about the next day, the next week. Survival was second to second. “And here is this woman who is thinking she’s going to survive? And that there’s going to be a next generation? “And I knew that if this woman had that kind of courage, if she was so connected with the story of Passover that she believed
we would experience our own personal Exodus from Bergen Belsen, then that was the woman I would marry.” The Rebbe and his Rebbetzin, who lived until 99 and 94, didn’t have any more children after the war, but the Rebbe raised Rebbetzin Bronya’s 4 children as his own. And the Bluzhever Rebbes today are those children who ate matzah in Bergen Belsen, in the merit of their mother’s astonishing determination and faith. Keep fighting for their Jewish education or at least determine a compromise of sorts, but their Jewish future is not negotiable.
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