And who doesn’t want that there should be
achdus amongst Yidden? But how many feel the need for it? How many of us
are driven by such a burning need for achdus that we are willing step out of
our comfort zone to make it happen? And how many of us are so tortured by this
need that we would be willing to compromise on anything that didn’t contravene
Halacha?
Apparently there was no show of hands of
those whose burning need for achdus was such that they were willing to step out
of their comfort zone to do something about it.
Hashem therefore took matters in hand and caused it to happen that tens
of thousands of Israelis were wrenched out of their comfort zones against their
will, and into shelters, in response to the Red Alerts that abounded during the
latest simulation of brotherly love emanating from Gaza.
The sirens are quiet now, and those tens
of thousands of our brethren have long since left the shelters and crawled out
from under the stairwells. And from all
appearances it seems that they have held up rather well. And if it would have been a test they would
have passed it with flags flying.
But it wasn’t. It was rather a crash course in
sensitivity training.
The real test, as such, begins now.
Before the Six Day War, children living
in the environs of the Hula Valley spent countless nights in the shelters due to
the Syrian artillery and mortar barrages coming from the Golan
Heights. Some of them never slept in their own beds.
While those days are long gone, their
spirit lives on in the south of Israel
which for years now has been the whipping boy of the vast majority of the
missiles being launched from Gaza.
In EmunahSpeak:
Goin’ Ostrich, we spoke of a piece
that had appeared in Mishpacha Magazine about Netivot when the first kassim
rockets fell within a kilometer of the town. The people quoted in that story made it very
clear that they viewed the possibility of rockets, chas v’shalom, falling on
Netivot as a tragedy of major proportions. That it was happening tog un nacht in Sderot
which is only a few kilometers up the road was not even mentioned, and therein lays
the real tragedy. One doesn’t have to
look further than Parshas Vayeira to see what kind of midda this is.
And then we asked:
What future is there in a country where
the concern of anyone as to what’s happening runs only to the extent that it’s
happening to them?
Now that the besserer mentchen living in
the coastal plain and in the environs of Yerushalyim have been recently
sensitized to the world of bomb shelters there can be no excuses anymore.
Are we going to feel the pain of the Jews in Sderot, Ofakim, Netivot Ashkelon,
and Ashdod, to name but a few of the communities that may well find themselves
still on the Hamas target line or will it be business as usual wherein, as we
said above, anyone’s concern for what is happening runs only to the extent
that it is happening to him?
That’s the test.
In EmunahSpeak: Nu? we said: the path to Moshiach, which
is in no small measure the path of achdus, will only be trod by transforming
the grief, emoted in the comfort zone of our chevra, from a proprietary emotion
to one that encompasses the entire Klal without dulling that emotional
edge.
If we make this our derech then the
missiles from Gaza
will hit nothing but a soft spot in our heart for a fellow Jew.
If not, then we had better take shelter.
