DO YOU KNOW YOUR MISSION?

The opening of this week’s Torah portion Tezaveh is:

You [Moses] shall instruct the Israelites to bring you clear oil of olives for lighting, for kindling the lamps [of the Menorah] regularly.

The obvious question is, since as the Torah continues to say Moses was not the one to kindle the Menorah, why did they bring the oil to him? Moses was the leader of the nation and oversaw the project of constructing the Tabernacle and preparing the necessary items. But why does the Torah emphasize that the oil be brought to Moses, something it does not do with any other item used in the Sanctuary?

The Midrash raises the following question: The Prophet Jeremiah states that G-d has called the Jewish people “an olive tree.”

G-d named you “Verdant olive tree, beautiful, with choice fruit.” But with a great roaring sound, He has set it on fire, and its boughs are broken.

The Midrash asks, why Jeremiah defines this fruit as their name when the Jews are called also by the names of other trees, the vine, the fig tree, the palm tree, the cedar tree, the walnut, pomegranates, and more. Why did Jeremiah define us as the olive tree?

The Midrash presents three answers, and as the Rebbe explained they are all part of one mosaic.

First, the olive is shaken and crushed to produce its oil. (Grapes are also crushed to produce wine. However, with olive oil, the product that comes out of the mill is closer to finality. With wine, the crushed red grapes produce juice which is still years away from being a mature wine.) The Jewish people sometimes need to be shaken and their outer layers removed to discover their true identity. Sometimes you need to “squeeze” a Jew to truly see who he or she is.

Second, oil does not mix with other liquids. When you attempt to mix oil with water, the oil will remain distinct and will not dissolve in the water.

Third, says the Midrash, not only will oil not mix and become dissolved in other liquids, rather staying in place, or sinking downward, but furthermore, the oil will rise, floating atop any other liquids.

Since oil is a highly non-polar molecule and water is a highly polar one, oil and water don’t naturally mix, and when left alone every oil and water mixture will always separate with the oil always floating to the top. The oil floats over the water because it is less dense. This is why they tell you on the salad dressing bottle filled with oil to always shake well before serving.

The same is true with the Jewish people, collectively and individually. The Jewish people are oil. They are distinct and distinctive. And even when so many tried to hold us down, remain downtrodden, subjugated, victimized, and depressed, like oil, we rise to the top, to ever-increasing growth, success, and grandeur.

Why then should the Jewish people not get “lost” in the majority of mankind?

We number 16 million, and there are 8 billion people. We do not constitute even one percent of mankind. We do not even constitute a quarter of a percent of mankind. We make up 0.2 of the human population… How then did we survive? How then did we maintain our national, spiritual, and religious identity? And what is more, how do we generate so much noise and ruckus? How do we have so much influence? It would be like a grain of sand becoming the focus in a football stadium. Why does anyone even notice that we exist? We should have in the past and the present considered some small, tiny tribe with its own weird culture which seems to be the truth.

The Rebbe explained that the above Midrash answers the question. We are the olives of the world. We are the oil of the planet; we do not dissolve, and we do not get nullified, because the identity of the Jewish people as G-d’s ambassadors to our world always remains unique and distinctive.    

And that is why G-d told Moses to instruct the Jewish people to bring the olive oil to him. This was not only a mitzvah about physical oil, but it was a timeless message for life: Each of us must discover our pure olive oil, that refined oil that was never tarnished, tainted, or dissolved. We must recognize, protect, cultivate, and nurture it, embrace our connection to our truest selves, our oil, that can never get lost and always rises to the top.

Moses helps you identify your mission and your unique job in this world. And when you have that, everything changes. Nothing gets in your way, because you never doubt your way. You realize that all the obstacles are just part of your way.     
No better example comes to mind than Mel Mermelstein.

Mel was born in 1926 and was raised in the famed Jewish city of Munkatch, then part of Czechoslovakia and, after the 1938 Nazi takeover, part of Hungary, Mel Mermelstein became a child of the war. When Mermelstein was 17, he and his parents and siblings were deported to Auschwitz.

Arriving in Auschwitz, his father told him and his brother they would have to split up, to increase the chances that one of them would make it out alive and live to tell the story of the Holocaust so the world would never forget.

On May 19, 1944, he was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Mermelstein spent a little less than one year at Auschwitz, then in January 1945 he was sent on a death march with 3,200 other prisoners to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. From there he was sent on a train without food or water to Buchenwald concentration camp. He spent two months at Buchenwald until he was liberated by U.S. troops on April 11, 1945. His parents, two sisters, and a brother were murdered in the camps. Before his father's death, Mermelstein had promised his father he would tell everyone what the Nazis were doing.

When the death camp was liberated, Mermelstein weighed 68 pounds and was the only surviving member of his family.

His pledge was put to the test in 1979, when the ill-named “Institute for Historical Review,” founded by  longtime Holocaust denier Willis Carto as a group that could adopt the nomenclature of academic institutions to provide legitimacy to antisemitism, offered a reward of $50,000 to the first person who could prove that Jews had been gassed at Auschwitz. If there was ever a definition of insanity and Chutzpah this, was it!

Mermelstein took them up on their bet. He “provided documents, eyewitness testimonies, histories, photographs, and even a can that had contained Zyklon B to the institute. He told of seeing his mother and sister driven into the gas chambers in 1944. 

When Mel heard nothing back from the institute, he sued. After five years of testimony,  Superior Court Judge Thomas L. Johnson ruled in favor of Mermelstein  stating that the Auschwitz killings are “capable of immediate and reasonably indisputable accuracy. It is simply a fact.”  The Institute agreed to pay Mermelstein $90,000 to settle the case.

But Mermelstein was far from finished. Over the next decades, he made 40 trips to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and other Nazi death camps, collecting his evidence: cyanide canisters, bullet casings, pieces of barbed wire, bone fragments, and pieces of cremation ovens.

Mermelstein built a museum in his lumber yard in Long Beach, CA. to display some 700 artifacts and then invited students to tour the facilities. A few years ago, his semi-museum was put on display at the Chabad Jewish Center in Newport Beach, California, under the leadership of Rabbi Reuven Mintz.

“He equipped himself with these tools of darkness, utilized to murder millions of people, and he turned these tools of darkness into instruments of light,” Rabbi Mintz said to the Los Angeles Times.

Some people dedicate their lives to denying reality, to suppressing truth. But Mel knew that he needed to serve as the “oil,” a voice for reality and truth.

Jonathan Pollard, sitting shiva for his wife Esther in Jerusalem, related a remarkable story about the last words he heard from his wife Esther.

Esther, 69, passed away on the eve of Rosh Chodesh Adar I. For almost three decades, Esther was completely, selflessly, and passionately committed to one mission in life: seeing justice done for her husband, Jonathan.

Jonathan Pollard served 30 years in federal prison for selling military secrets to Israel while working at the Pentagon in the 1980s. He was arrested in 1985, pleaded guilty, and was given a life sentence. The two married while Pollard was incarcerated.

Long before virtually the entire world came around to recognizing the cruel and unusual punishment meted out to Jonathan – who served longer for his actions than anyone else in a similar situation in American history – Esther was pressing his case across the globe, in every kind of venue, to anyone who would listen. She would speak to school groups, to rabbis, to journalists, to Knesset members, and to United States senators.

Pollard said that Esther’s last words on this world had “completely changed my life.” He said, that “she was dying, and her eyes were closed. She opened her eyes, and I was holding her hand and…I don’t know where she was, she was just looking up. She said in a very low small voice these words:

“My Neshama volunteered to come back for two missions. One of them was to bring you home and the other one was to bring you home as a Jew and not as a goy.’ She said the first mission was the easier one. The harder mission was to make sure you returned home as a Jew.”

She then said: “Now I have accomplished my mission I can go home.” And then she died.

It does give perspective on her extraordinary almost superhuman devotion to her cause. When you know who you are, and you know what your mission in the world is, nothing can stop you. You can’t get distracted, intimidated, or overwhelmed. Because you know that all the obstacles are part and parcel of your mission. You know that this is it and there is getting away from it.

Because you are like oil you have no doubt who you are, and thus nothing can keep you down.

Shabbat Shalom and a Happy Purim Katan,

Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky