A long time ago, Shmuely Boteach was the Chabad emissary at Oxford. During that time, he published a very interesting explanation regarding the Ten Commandments. He noted that the last nine are in the language of a command: thou shall or thou shall not. But the first one is simply a statement: “I am the L-rd, your G-d who took you out of Egypt.” So he asked how one performs a commandment when it is merely a statement. His answer was that every event in the world can be explained by the simple, physical causes related to the event or one may choose to see G-d behind that which occurred. When one sees beyond that which is easily viewed and attributes an event to G-d and not nature, fate or mazel, he fulfills the first of the Ten commandments.
I was reminded of this idea as we slide our way back to pre-October 7th, 2023. One will remember those days as filled with marches and demands for the government to resign. The issue then was “judicial reform” or simply returning the High Court to its legal role and getting it out of its alternative Knesset job. Those who marched on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv and in the area around the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem demanded that the government representing a clear majority of Israeli voters do the left’s bidding. They made the removal of the High Court from political and legislative matters an attack on democracy—by a democratically-elected government. This was no longer a “loyal opposition” of yore but rather a very noisy minority that simply did not have anywhere near the votes to topple the government. The hatred was palpable, with those on the right and left looking at the others as if they had nothing to do with each other.
And this is always a very dangerous situation for the Jewish people. When Haman commented that the Jews were “mefuzar” and “mefoorad”, he meant that they were geographically spread out but also that they did not get along. When the Jews are not altogether, that is when we are at the greatest risk from whatever Amalek is around in that particular generation. Haman had found the key to attacking the Jews: wait until they forget that they are brothers, the children of the same Forefathers. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, zts”l points out that Esther realized the problem and immediately told Mordechai to gather all of the Jews in Shushan—only if we get all of the Jews together do we stand a chance against an existential threat.
And for those of us who were here in Israel immediately after the heinous attack, the initial feelings of horror, disgust, and loss turned to feelings of achdus. Every day came out stories of non-kosher restaurants kashering their facilities in order to provide food for soldiers, or charedi Jews providing food, clothes, tefillin, and tzitzis for their brethren preparing to fight in Gaza. There was a tremendous feeling of the people being together, putting away differences, and focusing on defeating Israel’s enemies. I remember a long time ago when the Knesset members of the Shinui party went to the hospital to visit the mostly haredi victims of the Number 2 bus bombing and wondered if we could have such concern without the explosions and death that preceded their visit.
So if one looks at the event prior to the murder of 1,200 people and the abduction of another 256, there were plenty of points where the attack could have been prevented or severely limited. Soldiers across from Gaza had been providing information on heightened activities in the strip as well as movements of people near the fence—and they were ignored. This is “hester panim”. If they had been taken seriously by their superiors or had there been more weapons in the yishuvim or an army division on call, the outcome ostensibly could have been different. But we were busy hating each other and did not merit being saved from a very audacious attack. There were numerous points along the multiyear timeline when the attack could have been discovered and/or neutralized. But we did not merit such protection and the results were horrifying.
We could look at the events of 10/7 as just “chance”, “mikre” as the Torah calls it. But as discussed above, a Jew looks beyond the physical events and tries to understand why things occur so as to learn from G-d. There is a story of Rabbi Eliyahu Lupian, zts”l, falling down a flight of stairs. A talmid rushing to help him asked if the rav was okay. He said that he was. “So why don’t you get up?” “I want to understand why G-d did this to me,” came the reply. Without ruach hakodesh, one cannot say for sure that the violent marches caused or accelerated the Holocaust-level attack last October, but the latter certainly came immediately after months of the former. And on Simchas Torah, no less—one of the happiest days of the Jewish calendar. But we are back to the marches, who cares if it’s against needed judicial reform or fake concern about the hostages. The only goal is to get rid of Bibi and politically silence the millions who voted for him and his coalition partners. If they can’t do it via a no-confidence vote, so they’ll do it in the streets. They don’t care about the soldiers or the hostages or the unity of the Jewish people. They only care about power and dress it up with some cause to justify their actions.
Yesterday, I wrote a critical piece about one of the organizers of these marches. In the end, I did not publish it. We need to find ways to get along, even if the other side only wants division. So goes the story of Rabbi Levi Yitchok of Berditchev. When he was sent by misnagdim a pig’s head for mishloach manos, he gave the messengers a picture of himself to take back with them: “As you have given me an image of yourselves, I am returning the favor.”
