NOV. 12, ‘25 // will be strangers, in a foreign land, they will be enslaved and tortured for four hundred years.” (Lech Lecha 15;13) The dread he must have experienced, the alarm and panic! My children! I have waited for them one hundred years! Notwithstanding the promise of redemption and great wealth after four hundred years, how can I even think of the suffering they will endure? Yet we see that Avraham Avinu remained calm and unruffled. He understood: For his children to become a great nation – they would need to be persecuted, deprived, tormented and enslaved. It would be the fire that would refine, purify, and release their potential to become the Nation of Hashem. Don’t our personal lives move on the same track? When we think about the heights our ancestors have reached opposed to the level we are on, we wonder. They didn’t have access to so much easy knowledge, devoted teachers, proper nutrition, and comfortable conditions the way we have. What was the secret to their success? Perhaps it was precisely the poverty, the wandering, the harsh climate that helped them focus on the eternal rather than the external? Consider the following astonishing facts: • The Rambam – Reb Moshe ben Maimon – wrote many seforim while on the run from Arab extremists. • The Shach, Reb Shabsi Cohen, lived during the tumultuous era of Begdan Chmilienetzky (Tach VeTat.) Yet, wrote his famous sefer Sifsei Cohen. • The Bal Shem Tov – Orphaned at a young age, forced to work as a teacher’s aide, yet managed to climb lofty peaks. • Rabbi Avraham Abali – The author of the Magen Avraham wrote his Magnus Opus in very brief concise language. His poverty was so extreme he did not have enough paper to write at length. Learning about these Greats, their elevated lives and unbelievable achievements, forces one to think: Where am I? Why am I so afraid of inconvenience? Why do I fall apart at the slightest discomfort? Why do I back away from every road – block? It will only mold me, carve my character, shape my soul – Go for it! In days of yore, heating was expensive – and so the Mikvahs were cold. But the Yidden were hot, full of fiery passion. Today the Mikvahs are hot – but the Yidden are cold. They don’t have to exert themselves, and so never formed that same fervent devotion to Hashem. (Harav Menachem Mendel of Kotzk.) Which reminds me. Reb Yosef Yosel Horowitz was the father of the unique school of Mussar, dubbed “Novaradik”. One of its goals was to develop courage, resilience, and strength of character. Sometimes they did it by deliberately acting in ways that were out of the norm: • They would enter a grocery and ask to buy shoes – thus teaching themselves not to care what people thought of them. • They would board trains, without money for fare, thus learning to rely with complete faith only on The One Above. Some considered these methods too extreme; others lacked the guts and daring. The Yeshivah however, produced many outstanding students, fearless and devoted in their Torah and Yiddishkeit. The famous Maggid Reb Yakov Galinsky, was a student of Novarodik. On a dark, stormy night, he went to the cemetery to immerse in the Mikvah used to perform taharos. Heart pounding, he walked into the room, determined to train himself not to be afraid (was that hollow laughter coming from a coyote Life is not meant to be a smooth path. Every test, every disappointment, every barrier is a call to strengthen our roots. When the dust settles and the fields bloom, we’re left to ask ourselves the same question that echoes through generations: Where am I? 124
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTY1MDA0