This week when I went out on campus to help Jewish students say prayers and do mitzvahs for our brothers and sisters in Israel, there was some background noise, to put it mildly.
As large numbers of people walked past us shouting ‘free Palestine’ and ‘from the river to the sea’, implying that it’s ok to butcher thousands, including babies and the elderly, because they were occupiers. I wondered if this is what the early 1930’s in Germany felt like. It was a frightening moment here in 2023.
Today is my father, Prof. Harry Reicher’s 9th yahrtzeit. (r’ Moshe Zvi ben r’ Dov)
I found myself thinking about what he’d think of Penn’s campus today.
One of the many things he did in his life was teach at Penn Law School for 19 years.
One of the courses he taught there, which he created, was Law and the Holocaust. In it he examined how the Nazis created laws to help them perpetuate the Holocaust without technically breaking any laws. Germany was a highly cultured society after all. He wanted his students to understand that laws don’t necessarily equal morality, and they can be misused in immoral ways.
Things feel so upside down right now, people being ok with the mass slaughter and torture of our People, once again. Universities, the media, politicians, huge corporations, Uber for goodness’ sake, (are we all switching to Lyft now? Until we find out that they’re also sending money to aid our enemies).
But, and this is a big but, as I told so many on campus, the Jewish People will prevail, we always have and we always will because G-d promised that in His Torah. We’ve seen that in our 3,000 year history.
The only question is how much do we have to suffer along the way.
The Rebbe, and the teachings of Chabad Chassidus, teach that G-d is One, as we proclaim in the Shema every day, and that the world we see is a facade, created to enable a physical world to exist as a seemingly independent existence.
G-d desired a dwelling place in a physical world. How did He fit His huge spiritual force into physicality? By concealing it. To the point where we can live in this world and believe that He doesn’t even exist, despite the fact that He is recreating this world at every moment and the whole world is actually Him.
Why would He do such a thing? Why would we do what He wants if we don’t even know He’s there?
Because He wanted us to elevate this world, by studying His Torah and doing His mitzvahs. He wants us to do that until we finish all that elevation and reach the ultimate purpose of creation; when G-d’s presence in the world will be revealed, when we’ll understand His ways, when there will be no more war and terror, no more suffering and evil, no more pain and grief. The times of the final redemption, the times of Moshiach.
When it comes to bringing that about, the Rebbe taught that that’s in our hands, we can work on achieving that and that there we are not helpless.
Every mitzvah we do brings that idyllic world closer, and not only do we need to do mitzvahs but our job is to also share the knowledge and mitzvahs with all people in our sphere. That’s why G-d put them into our sphere.
Don’t know what the mitzvahs are? Want to know the deeper meaning of why G-d wants us to do them precisely as they are? That’s where Torah study comes into the picture. Besides Torah study being a Mitzvah itself, we should know the hows, whys and whats of G-d’s plan.
Let’s do our part, bring light into this dark world, peace, safety, security, and healing to all those in the Holy Land and around the world. The final redemption may it happen immediately.
~Nechama