by MRS. BAYLA BERMAN | April 4, 2025 5:29 pm
Due to the Pre-Pesach busyness, I’m sending out a repeat email this week. And while it was written long ago (2015 I believe?) and only edited slightly, the message still rings true and clear, so I hope you enjoy! Have a Great Shabbos
Last week, I visited Poland for the first time. When you come back from Poland, as when you come back from any trip abroad, most of your friends will ask you a simple question, “How was your trip?” But unlike any other trip abroad, there is no simple answer. How do you define a trip to a place that is the burial grounds of over 3 million of your family members? How do you describe a trip that visited death camps, mass graves, crematoria, and the empty husks of once vibrant synagogues and yeshivot?
Do you call it a terrible trip? Do you say you had a horrible time? That would not be true; it was also a trip that included incredibly uplifting moments, and times where you felt more connected to the entire Jewish people than you ever felt before. Do you say it was an amazing trip? Really? Can you call standing at the edge of a pit containing 30,000 bodies amazing? Do you say it was uplifting? Depressing? Frightening? Traumatizing? Inspirational? Shocking? Overpowering? Perhaps I should just give out a card that says, “I’m sorry, I can’t really describe my trip, you need to be there to understand why. Please call the number below, and get yourself on a trip to Poland. Every Jew should go.”
The problem with a trip to Poland is that you don’t have any place in your brain to put what you see. Our brain is like a neat system of shelves and drawers. Every type of experience has its own storage place, and we know exactly where to file each one. Just had an exemplary meal in a nice restaurant? – Send it to section J-193. Fell down and scraped your hand on the rough pavement? P-321. Lost your job again? C-942. Someone you know just received word that they have Hodgkin’s lymphoma? Painful, but put it in K-412. Made some money in the stock market? T-871.
But there is no place to put a gas chamber. When you stand rooted to the ground, staring at a small concrete room, with Zyklon-B blue stains on the wall, and know that 170 people were forced to walk into it, never to walk again, you don’t know where to put that. When you look at the rusted peephole the Nazis used to gleefully watch people writhing in their final throes of agony, your brain refuses to shelve it away neatly. When you stand next to a mountain of ash and bone that used to be your family, the pain and horror has nowhere to go. Instead all of the thoughts and emotions race around your brain, faster and faster, overheating the system and causing total brain melt. And then you get back on the bus and have a granola bar.
Another problem with a Poland trip is that while you are shocked and traumatized by what you see, you also are fully cognizant of the fact that everything you see is nothing compared to the reality of what happened. Crematoria look like a bunch of ovens set in a neat row. They look like what a bakery might have looked like a century ago. You can’t see the pile of skeletal bodies in the corner waiting patiently to be shoved into the ovens to disappear from history minutes later in a cloud of billowing smoke.
The barracks in Birkenau look like an endless row of crudely shaped three tiered bunk beds lining both sides of the rickety wooden building. You can’t hear the sounds of six hundred human beings shifting endlessly in the freezing cold or stifling heat, scratching at the hordes of body lice, never able to find a comfort for even a moment for years on end.
You can walk the short walk from where Mengele performed his Angel of Death selections to where the factories of death stood (before they were blown up by the retreating Nazis), but you have no idea what a mother was thinking while taking that walk with a baby in her arms and two more tugging at her skirts. You can’t smell the constant smell of burning flesh, or feel what twenty degrees below zero feels like when you’re standing at attention at roll call for four hours in a January pre-dawn morning, wearing nothing but pajamas.
You are standing at the precipice of mankind’s greatest abyss and you can peer down the sheer black jagged walls, but never see anywhere near the bottom.
The one thing that you know for certain is that our people can never endure another Holocaust. I wouldn’t last four days, let alone four years. You realize that the Holocaust survivors, those steely souls sometimes still walking among us, are truly the one we should be calling the Greatest Generation, they are made of different stuff than we are.
You also realize that the most trite phrase we could ever utter is “Never Again.” Any rationalist knows that even a cursory study of history tells us “Likely Again.” We may have never experienced a Holocaust of that proportion before, but the earth the Nazis tread was already drenched with centuries of Jewish blood. Communities slaughtered by the Crusades, then again through blood libels, pogroms and the barbaric Cossacks, were visited a final time by the Nazis. Jews are the eternal whipping post of the world, and while we may find respite from time to time in a country that welcomes us with open arms, our entire history is one in which no country is above facilitating or ignoring Jewish blood being spilled. History has shown the veracity of the statement of the Torah, (Deut. 28:65) “Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the Lord will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart.”[1]
And since October 7th, the sense of “Likely Again” is only getting stronger. Professors on campuses across the US were busy preaching to their thousands of easily manipulated young students how they found the events of October 7th to be energizing and righteous. Over 60 student groups at Harvard, penned a letter blaming Israel for the massacre while it was still ongoing. Hundreds of major cities across the world saw weeks of protests with tens of thousands of people coming out in support of those whose open stated goal is our destruction. Jewish synagogues and institutions have been burned down, defaced, and vandalized across the world, and politicians give speeches decrying the anti-Semitism, but the Jews are not feeling any safer.
We desperately need G-d to redeem us the way He did when we came out of Egypt. We need him to take us out with great miracles, in such a way that the whole world knows that “Israel is My firstborn son. (Exodus 4:22)” We need Him to redeem us in such a way that “Then all the peoples of the earth will see that the name of the Lord is called upon you, and they will fear you. (Deuteronomy 28:10)” The same Torah who told us that we would experience mind-numbing horrors in our exile also told us that one day the miracles of our Final Redemption would so far outweigh the miracles of the original exodus that, “Therefore, behold days are coming, says the Lord, and it shall no longer be said, ‘As the Lord lives, Who brought up the children of Israel from the land of Egypt,’ But, ‘As the Lord lives, Who brought up the children of Israel from the northland and from all the lands where He had driven them,’ and I will restore them to their land that I gave to their forefathers.”
The good news is that we are just the right time of the year for that to happen. This Shabbos concludes our first week in the month of Nissan, the month on the calendar most ripe for redemption, as it says in the Talmud (Rosh Hashanah, 11A), “in Nisan they were redeemed and in Nisan they will be redeemed again in the future.” We just need to need it, we just need to feel the urgency for redemption one feels while standing near a mountain of bone and ash in Maidanek, or beside a gas chamber in Aushwitz. It is too easy to get lulled into comfort and complacency while living our cozy lives here in the US. We need to need it, because humans always have the energy to get what they need, but usually don’t have the energy and willpower to get what we want.
So how do we get it? How do we deserve redemption? Let’s look at what redemption looks like. Passover is the holiday of redemption and its most emblematic symbol is the matzah. What is the difference between the matzah we eat on Passover and the chametz we seek to eradicate before Passover? The difference between bread and matzah is nothing but hot air. It is the CO2 produced by the starch munching yeast getting stuck in the dough causing it to slowly rise (that’s why the inside of bread looks like thousands of little balloons, it literally is exactly that! Thousands of pockets of CO2 trapped in the dough). The bread of redemption is humble and flat, and the chametz we seek to eradicate is puffed up and arrogant.
The key to redemption is humility, the road to endless exile is arrogance. The arrogance that makes me feel better than the other Jew, the arrogance that drives a wedge between me and G-d. The arrogance that makes me label other Jews, “They’re lazy, they’re hazy, or they’re crazy.” The arrogance that makes me feel better than someone less observant than me (he’s not a good Jew) and someone more observant that me (he’s a fanatic). The arrogance that allows us to cut off members of our community because they support a different position than ours on communal, political or social issues. The arrogance that allows me to disdain my neighbor because of his success or lack of success, his fashion sense or lack of fashion sense.
When confronted with the horrors of the Holocaust, our group was instinctively humbled, and frequently found ourselves arm in arm, dancing with each other. We knew that we had to respond to hate with love and humility. But we don’t see that all the time, and the dough slowly starts to rise. Pesach cleaning is when we have to remove it from all of our hearts.
It is also the same arrogance that allows me to distant myself from G-d. “I’ve got this!” we think, we don’t need some invisible G-d to help us raise our kids, or help us make our money. We don’t need to follow every minutia of the laws He gave us, we can figure out a better way ourselves. “If he knew me, he would understand why I just need to do this, or don’t need to do that,” is another example of arrogant thinking, it’s our way of saying we are above His statutes, as opposed to, “I may not be able to do all that He wants of me right now, but I know that it is right if He said so, and I will work toward integrating His vision into my life as I best can.”
If we can remove the chametz from our hearts, while we remove the chametz from our homes, if we can really mean it when we conclude our seders with “Next year in the rebuilt Jerusalem!” this may be the year. By next year we may just be in a place where when we say “Never Again” it really rings true. It may be the time when we say, “In Nissan they were redeemed, and in Nissan they were redeemed again!”
Lishana Haba’a Biyerushalayim Habnuya!
Next Year in the rebuilt Jerusalem!
Parsha Dvar Torah
In this week’s parsha, Vayikra, we begin reading about the many offerings that were brought in the Tabernacle and Temple. There are offerings brought with livestock, fowl, and even flour and oil. One common denominator between all the different offerings is that they all had salt placed on them. “You shall salt all your meal-offerings with salt and you shall not omit salt, the covenant of your G-d, from being placed upon your meal-offerings. You shall bring salt on every one of your offerings.” (Lev. 2:13)
The Medrash tells us that this was a result of a complaint filed during the creation of the world. On the second day of creation G-d split the lower waters (the waters on earth) from the upper waters (the atmospheric water). The lower waters were unhappy with the fact that they were left far away from G-d, and complained that they wanted to be closer to G-d. G-d consoled them by telling them that salt which is taken from the sea would be placed upon all the offerings, and that water would be poured on the Altar during the holiday of Succos.
If this is the case, why do we put salt on the offerings, why not simply place sea water on them since it was the sea water that desired to be closer to G-d? Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky (1891-1986, Lithuania- NY) answers that the water elevates itself and joins the upper waters simply by evaporating. What’s left behind is the salt, that which does not naturally climb on its own. When G-d tells us that He wants the salt on all the offerings, He is saying that He wants to see us offer up the parts of us that are not inclined toward elevation on their own. The parts of ourselves that we view as the residue, the part that remains behind when we try to grow and raise ourselves up. That is what G-d wants to see us bringing before Him as offerings.
There should be no part of our personality that we hate. Some parts of our personality we love because they are naturally good. Then there are the parts that we should love, because when we iron them out, when we can even offer the “salt,” we not only grow immeasurably, but we tap capabilities we never thought we had!
A story is told of an elderly man who lived in New Jersey, who found himself becoming more involved in Judaism, and began transforming his life one step at a time. There was one area however, that he could not seem to grasp, learning Talmud. He tried and tried, but it seemed like every time he learned one word he forgot two. At one point he confided in his son that he felt a real desire to not leave this “salt” on the ground, he wanted to elevate even this part of his life that seemed so difficult to lift.
His son arranged for him to come every Sunday morning to a local yeshiva where different students would take turns learning with him. For years he came every single Sunday and studied with the students, often struggling with a single paragraph for an hour or more. But slowly he began to get a real foothold in this new area in his life. After four years of studying, he finally finished one complete page (double-sided) of Talmud. He knew it back and forth, with all the translation, commentary, and details.
Excited to have finally finished his first folio, he went to Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, one of the Torah greats, for a verbal exam of this new material he had studied. He aced the test, displaying his thorough knowledge of all its intricacies. Rabbi Feinstein excitedly insisted that the yeshiva students make a festive meal celebrating this milestone.
At the meal, attended by dozens of students, Rabbi Feinstein talked about how a person can acquire their place in the World to Come with just one manuscript when learned with the sacrifice this man displayed. After that, the man himself got up to speak, and emotionally thanked the yeshiva students for patiently learning with him for so long. He then continued to say that he had always been so afraid to die, feeling that he hadn’t yet fulfilled all of his potential. But now he could live in peace knowing that he had conquered his biggest obstacle.
Three days later, this man passed away, having merited in his lifetime to not only grow tremendously, but to elevate even the “salt” many people leave behind.
Parsha Summary
This week’s parsha, Parshas Vayikra begins with G-d calling Moses from the Tabernacle for the first time since His Presence rested upon it. Since the purpose of the Tabernacle is to enable the Jewish People to serve G-d in a focused manner and place, G-d’s first discussion with Moses is about the Temple service and the sacrifices.
The Torah describes the laws of the olah, the wholly burnt offering, as they pertain to animals and fowl. (Quick lesson: G-d says both the olah brought from an animal ($$$$) and the olah brought from a bird ($) will bring a satisfying aroma before Him. This teaches us that whether it is an expensive gift or an inexpensive one, they are equally satisfying before G-d as long as the intent is sincere.) The Parsha then elucidates the five types of meal offerings (that is meal as in fine flour, not meal as in bringing a four course dinner with a side of sushi). After describing these basic offerings, the Torah commands us to put salt on everything offered upon the alter (this is one of the reasons we dip our bread in salt after making the Hamotzi blessing – to remind us that our table should be like an altar, and we should eat in an elevated fashion, not out of gluttony).
The Torah then discusses the laws of the peace offering (called that because everyone gets a piece of the action; some of the meat goes on the Altar, some to the Kohanim, and some to the owners who brought the sacrifice) and the sin offerings. This is followed by a description of an offering brought when a group of the Elders of the Assembly make an erroneous judgment, causing a large group to sin. After that, we are told of special sin offerings brought if the king or the Kohain Gadol commits a sin. The message here is that the more elevated your status, the more you must scrutinize your actions since they have a stronger effect. When a sin is committed by a person of higher stature, the atonement process is more elaborate than the process for a commoner.
Finally, we learn of the Asham sacrifice, the guilt offering, brought for a variety of sins such as broken oaths, entering into holy areas while in a state of unknown impurity, stealing and then making an oath denying it, and certain cases of uncertainty as to whether one committed a grave sin or not. And that, my friends, pretty much sums the whole Parsha up!
From the second scroll, we read Parshat Hachodesh, in which G-d commands the Jewish people to set their calendar by the moon, the celestial being that goes through constant renewal. This was in stark contrast with the calendar of the Egyptians they were living among, who followed the solar calendar. They wanted their time to be governed by something that never changes or renews itself, we want our time to be used in constantly renewing ourselves and building a better self. May we truly take in the message of renewal and fearlessly pursue a new and better self, despite the fact that there will be ups and down, waxing and waning!
Quote of the Week: Live so that your friends can defend you, but never have to. ~ Arnold Glasow
Random Fact of the Week: The average taste bud lives only 10 days before it dies and is replaced with a new one.
Funny Line of the Week: Patience is the virtue of the lazy. – Ban Gak
Have a Fun Shabbos,
R’Leiby Burnham
[1] Even the USA is far from guilt. I saw an aerial photo taken by an American bomber over Birkenau. In the photo you can see 5 huge bombs in mid-flight headed toward their destination, the IG Farben chemical plant a few kilometers away! Had they dropped them on the rail lines bringing trains into Birkenau, or the crematoria a few hundred yards away, they could have stopped the death of hundreds of thousands, but that “wasn’t part of the US war effort.” We also saw the machines produced by IBM that allowed the Nazis to efficiently track and perpetrate the murder of millions, somethign they could not have done without the technology being provided to them by an American company.
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