I was recently in a local park in Midwood with one of my children when I noticed the sign outside the public bathroom. It announced that New York City bathrooms are now “gender-neutral.”
What an affront to any citizen with traditional morals and values. Yesterday we wreaked havoc by redefining marriage, and now we have no set genders and are legalizing late-term abortion. Who would have thought we would ever come to this point?
We also now have members of Congress who openly revile Israel in addition to witnessing a definite resurgence of anti-Semitism in the U.S. and abroad.
I believe the writing is on the wall.
The tranquility and serenity we Jews have enjoyed in America – the level of acceptance and tolerance – is unprecedented in our history. No other nation has been as hospitable to the Jews as America. Never before have the Jewish people been so respected in a country – not in Poland, which was once called “paradisus Iudaeorum” (Latin for “Paradise for the Jews”), not in Spain during the Golden Age, and not in France after the French Revolution.
And yet, history proves quite conclusively that despite their long history in a particular “safe haven,” the Jews are always cruelly reminded that they really are outsiders. No matter how acculturated Jews become, no matter how much they contribute to academia, finance, medicine, science, or culture, they are marked for expulsion or extinction.
There was no greater attempt in world history to eradicate the Jewish people than the Holocaust. Hitler sought to exterminate each and every last Jew. He was almost successful. He hunted Jews down and refused to discriminate between a committed Jew and an assimilated Jew. A Jew was a Jew – period. In the end, one out of every three Jews in the world was barbarically murdered.
The Torah teaches us repeatedly that the Jewish people are on this earth to fulfill a mission – to elevate and inspire the world. When we fulfill our mission, we are promised divine protection. No nation can harm us. We will miraculously survive and defy all odds.
But when we fail to live up to our distinct mission and instead act like every other nation, G-d promises that He will step aside and leave us vulnerable to the nations. Depending on our fidelity to our mission, we are either protected or defenseless sheep among a thousand ravenous wolves.
How many Jews must fulfill the divine mission to merit G-d’s protection? Every single one. We are “all or none.” We are either “all” – united in fulfilling our divine mission and considerate of one another, or we are “none” – left to the capricious behaviors of those who seek to destroy us.
That is why kiruv, outreach, is so critical for the Jewish people and trumps every other mitzvah. If only a small percentage of the Jewish people recognizes its divine mission, its survival is in jeopardy. Kiruv amounts to pikuach nefesh. On it depends the preservation of the entire Jewish people. This is precisely why the Belzer Rebbe recently ruled that one must sell a Sefer Torah if one needs funds to rescue neshamos that have fallen away.
Prior to the Holocaust, most Jews were assimilated and did not identify with the Divine mission. Today, the statistics are even worse. Over 90 percent of American Jews don’t identify with it; in Brooklyn, over 60 percent don’t identify with it.
Hitler got one thing right. He understood the importance and intrinsic holiness of every single Jew. He saw the potential in every Jew.
Because we are “all or none,” our entire future, our very lives and survival as a nation, depends on us recognizing the kedusha inherent in every Jew and reaching out to him or her. Kiruv is not just a nice mitzvah; it is the most critical one.