I heard from Senator Joseph Lieberman that when Al Gore chose him as his running mate in 2000, Joe’s late mother Marcia, a woman hitting 90 at the time, saw Mr. Gore. As a typical Jewish mother she approaches him and says: Al! You chose well!
As you know, Gore and Lieberman lost the elections. George Bush and his VP Dick Cheney were the victors. And it was a tight race. The unconfirmed story goes that Joe Lieberman naturally came home that day deeply dejected. The Vice President would be Dick Cheney not Joseph Lieberman. When his wife, Haddasah, saw him, she exclaimed:
Joe! Do not worry; don’t despair. In THIS home you will always be VICE President!
The Torah states in the opening of this portion: “Moses' father in law, Jethro, took Zipporah, Moses' wife, after she had been sent away, and her two sons and came to Moses, to the desert where he was encamped, to the mountain of G-d.”
Tziporah the wife of Moses, The Torah says very little about her life and personality. Guess how many times her husband’s name is mentioned in the Tanach? Here is the EXACT number: 770. And Tziporah? Three times.
Who was our nation’s first rebbetzin? The Torah says nothing about her persona. The Torah does give us some information about Eve, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah—our Matriarchs. Yet not a word is said to describe her, outside of her name. The only story tells us about her is in Shemot, where while in a hotel, she sees that an angel wants to kill her husband. She quickly circumcises their son, and saves Moses’ life. Moses owns his life to her.
Tziporah’s unique power and grace lay in her apparent absence—she did not need or crave the limelight in order to feel wanted, needed, significant and loved. Virtue for her meant the silent, dignified, unwavering and internal commitment to goodness, to G-d and to His creatures. She was so at peace with herself, she lived in herself and with herself. As such, she created a safe and silent haven for her husband, away from the bustling life he endured outdoors.
And her sacrifice was not small. This, according to the Abarbenel, is why she did not follow her husband back to Egypt, as she knew this will force him to spend time with her, while he was on a campaign to stage revolution. She gave her husband the freedom to change the course of history.
Moses, we know, was the humblest man on earth. In fact, where does the Torah state this face? When it discusses his marriage. Now we understand why it belongs there. Tziporah was his perfect match. They were both the most unassuming people. They were two individuals content to live an anonymous, humble life, with no fanfare or publicity. It is not that they were weak or frail; they were two courageous people. But they were content to live internally rather than externally.
In downtown Los Angeles, in Little Tokyo one block from the Japanese American National Museum, stands a statue of a man very few people know about or would ever recognize. His name was Chiune Sugihara, and he did an extraordinary thing seven decades ago.
Sugihara was a diplomat working at the Japanese consulate in Lithuania during the first years of World War II. As the Nazi forces threatened to overrun the small nation, thousands of Jewish refugees, who already had fled the horrors of Poland, crammed around the compound desperate for safe passage out of the country. Sugihara didn’t hesitate. Disobeying direct orders, and thus risking his own career and indeed freedom, he issued visa after visa, scribbling them out as quickly as he could and even enlisting his wife to help over the course of nearly a month, often staying up all night to process ever more. Survivors recall that Sugihara, who was forced to vacate the compound, even thrust completed, stamped visas out of his train window as it pulled away from the platform.
In all, six thousand people who would otherwise be destined for the gas chambers were spared; they fled to Japan and often on to other nations from there.
For years the survivors and their families tried to locate Sugihara, if only to thank him for what he did. He paid a heavy price for his actions; after spending 18 months in a Soviet prison camp, and finally returning to Japan, he was asked to resign his post, likely as a direct result of his incredible stance. Sugihara lived out the remainder of his days in obscurity until happily, in 1985 just a year before his death, he was honored with a “Righteous Among the Nations” award–an honor bestowed on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. He shares this title with the likes of Oskar Schindler.
Heroes come in all forms, and there are times each of us may be called upon to be heroic. Chiune Sugihara heard that call, and he answered it resoundingly.
The Talmud relates the story of Rabbi Akiva, a simple shepherd, whose wife seeing his enormous potential to revitalize Judaism after the roman destruction sent him to study for 24 years. When he returned home as the greatest sage of the generation, he told 24,000 thousand of his students these words: “What is mine and what is yours all belongs to her.”
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky