DO YOU BELIEVE IN YOURSELF?

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your future plans.

I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's so hard to find your way around Chinatown.

Moses knew all along it would not be easy. That is why he tried to get out of it. Thus, when G-d summoned Moses to embark on a mission of setting his people free, he rejects the invite. The people, he says, will deem him a liar, a charlatan.

What does G-d do? He gives Moses three signs to perform for the people. First G-d tells Moses to take his staff, cast it down to the ground, and then it turns into a snake. Moses recoils but G-d says, no, grab hold of the tail of the snake. Moses does that and it turns back into a staff. Then G-d says, take your hand and bring it in your cloak next to your chest, and then take it out. Moses does so, and his hand is white as snow, as though he was infected by leprosy. He puts his hand back inside, and when he takes out of his bosom, it is back to normal. Then the third sign. G-d says, take some water from the river Nile, pour it on the ground, and when it hits the ground it will turn into blood.

Are these just cute Divine magic tricks, or is there a deeper meaning behind them?

In this week’s portion, Vaeira, the answer is apparent.

What was Moses afraid of? Why did he refuse the mission? As Moses makes it clear, he is daunted by three major concerns.

First, the people. “Behold they will not believe me, they will say, 'The Lord has not appeared to you.'”

Second, he was afraid of himself. He isn’t suited for a task of such magnitude.

Third, Moses was afraid of Pharaoh. “Why would Pharaoh listen to me, since I speak with faltering lips?”

As it turns out, Moses was correct on all three counts. Despite his initial success in persuading the people, things soon start to go wrong and continue downhill. Moses’ first appearance before Pharaoh is disastrous. The King rejects Moses’ request to let the people travel into the wilderness for a holiday. He makes life worse for the Israelites. The people turn against Moses and Aaron: “May the Lord look on you and judge you!

Moses and Aaron return to Pharaoh to renew their request. They perform a sign – they turn a staff into a snake – but Pharaoh is unimpressed. His own magicians can do likewise. Next, they bring the first of the plagues, where the water of The Nile turns into blood, but again Pharaoh is unmoved. And so it goes, nine times. Moses does everything in his power and finds that nothing makes a difference. The Israelites are still slaves.

We sense the pressure Moses is under. After his first setback, he turns to G-d and bitterly complains: “Why, Lord, why have you brought trouble on this people? Is this why you sent me?

G-d has reassured him that he will eventually succeed, yet, as the Torah says, “Moses spoke thus to the children of Israel, but they did not hearken to Moses because of their shortness of breath and because of their hard labor.” 

 Alas, all of his fears were confirmed. The people rejected him; he is really inadequate for this calling. Pharaoh will not be taken down, he is not budging.

It is now we can appreciate the three original signs which G-d showed Moses when they first met at the bush.

G-d asks Moses to cast the staff to the ground, where it is transformed into a serpent. Moses runs away. The stick is intrinsically holy, but the harsh impact from the fall on the ground, the dirt of the earth can cause something sacred to appear as a venomous snake.

The symbolism was acute. The Jewish people are Divine and sacred; they are G-d’s stick in this world chosen to carry out His will and purpose. But this holy stick has been cast down to the earth. The trauma and suffering of Egyptian bondage caused them to become despondent and to give up hope. This is not who they are; it only happened because they were cast unto the ground, subjected to oppression, persecution, slave labor and death.

Moses ran from the snake as he fled from the thought of leadership over oppressed and bitter people. He already had an experience: When he tried saving a Jew from an Egyptian oppressor, other Jews informed on him. Was an informer not compared to a snake? G-d did not disagree. But he showed Moses a profound truth: Trauma causes us to often lose our innate identity, to forfeit our own inner beauty and sacredness. The people are not bad; but you must understand the distress, pain, and tears they have endured. Do not judge them. Do not run away from them. They are G-d’s staff!

Instead, G-d tells Moses, "Stretch forth your hand and take hold of its tail!"  Lift them up from the earth—and the scary snake will suddenly become a sacred staff.  

At this point, they may not believe in themselves, how can they believe in you? They see themselves as serpents. Moses, show them a vision of who they really are.

These three signs contain a timeless lesson for each of us.

The holiest staff in the world can behave like a snake if it is cast to the ground, traumatized by suffering, and entrenched in the gravel. Do not fear it. Lift it up from the ground, caress it, and it will be metamorphosized.

You may have a child, a friend, a relative, who is as scary as a snake. You do not think redemption might ever be possible. He will never listen; he will never believe. G-d tells Moses, and each of us, fear not what seems like a serpent. Lift it up, and its true essence will emerge.

Then comes the second lesson. I may say to myself: “I am just a simple guy, I can’t make a difference.” Let me keep my hands ticked away comfortably in my bosom. In life, this is not an option.

Finally, you may fear the various Pharaoh’s in your life and in the world. You may fear to tackle injustice, corruption, violence, abuse, and lies. How can you take on the powerful Nile? Remember, G-d knows everything. Nobody can hide behind The Nile forever to eclipse their bloody evil.  As long as you are loyal to truth, fear not. Reality always prevails. Such is its nature.

As we mark today 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps I glean inspiration from Simcha Rotem, the last known surviving Jewish fighter from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Rotem, known as Kazik, he passed away in Jerusalem, on Shabbat, December 22, 2018, at the age of 94.

Simcha was born in Warsaw, in 1924. He joined the Zionist youth movement at the age of 12. German bombing raids destroyed his family’s home at the outbreak of World War II, killing his brother Yisrael, his grandparents, aunt and uncle. He and his mother were wounded in the raid.

 “When I regained consciousness, I found myself under the wreckage of the house. Only after I managed to extricate myself did I see that our house was totally destroyed, and no sign of life was to be seen. I got to the shelter of the neighboring house and found both my parents and my sisters. I learned that the rest of the family had been killed."

After the Jews of Warsaw had been sent to the Warsaw Ghetto, he was sent to live with relatives in the town of Klwow.

“I remained there for three months, until mid-1942. Klwow had a ghetto without a wall and it was here that I saw for the first time a German killing a Jew and how his blood flowed. He had been caught outside of the ghetto and even though there was no wall, it was prohibited to exit the ghetto limits. The head of the Judenrat arrived and begged for the Jew’s life, but to no avail. They shot and killed him, departing on their horses. Simple. That was the first time I witnessed the killing,” Rotem told Yad Vashem.

In 1943, he returned to the Warsaw Ghetto and joined the Jewish Combat Organization, which was commanded by Mordechai Anielewicz.

We knew that the Germans were now planning to send every last Jew from the ghetto to die. “But, even at this stage, we probably still couldn't accept this thing... A total annihilation, in the twentieth century, in the very heart of Europe — something like this is just impossible. It was hard to accept this notion," he said.

The group of Jewish fighters gathered some primitive ammunition from the other side of the ghetto and prepared for a month to declare war on the Germans.  

The uprising began on Pesach, April 19, 1943, and Rotem acted as a liaison between the bunkers in the ghetto and the Aryan side of the city.

“Right in the beginning, when I saw the mass of German forces enter the ghetto, my initial reaction — and I guess I wasn’t alone in this — was one of hopelessness. What chance did we have with our miserable supply of firearms to hold off this show of German force with machine-guns, personnel carriers and even tanks? With masses of infantrymen, hundreds if not thousands, of soldiers on motorcycles and ambulances and more… An absolute sense of powerlessness prevailed,” he said.

But the mood changed swiftly and turned into "extraordinary exhilaration," he said. “It had been for this moment that we had anxiously waited! In other words, our emotional reactions were like extreme swings of the pendulum, from hopelessness to great exhilaration... over the mere fact that we could handle the all-powerful Germans, whose mere sight imposed terror and fear and completely paralyzed you," he added.

At first, the Germans retreated, after suffering losses and getting several of their troops wounded in attacks by ghetto fighters. "We thought they would keep entering the ghetto and we would have a face-to-face battle. We would kill as many of them as we could, and we knew that our end was completely spelled out. But they did it differently. They retreated and did the destruction work from outside. And we had no means to handle that. Within three to four days, the ghetto was in flames," Rotem recounted.

Simcha fled the ghetto through the sewers, and he got out! Simcha led the last fighters from the ghetto through the sewers, saving their lives. He kept them in hiding in the forest until the end of the war.

In 1946, he made Aliyah, was imprisoned by the British, and then fought with the Haganah in the Independence war. He built a beautiful family living in Israel and passed away two years ago.

He once described how when he fled the ghetto through the sewage system, he thought he was the last Jew from Warsaw to survive. He did not know how many Jews survived. But the day he breathed his last, he was comforted to know, that there were 6.6 million Jews living in our eternal homeland, Israel.

When Moses was empowered by the Divine to confront Pharaoh, he empowered simultaneously Simcha Rotem, who with an entire generation of Jews, did the impossible, taking their blood and pain and turning it into a call for renewal and rebirth.

That is why in next week’s portion, Bo, Moses tells the Jews to paint the blood of their Passover offering on the doors of their homes, on the night prior to their liberation. Not only would they go free, but they would use their pain as a springboard for rejuvenation and renaissance. It would become a call to action to always stand up for the blood of the innocent. Simcha, and an entire generation, turned the blood of death into the blood of life.

For this we remain forever grateful and inspired.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky