HAVE I EARNED THE GIFT OF EXISTENCE?

A government official was arrested for accepting a bribe from a contractor. A friend who went to visit him in prison asked, "How are you going to get out of this mess?"

The official replied calmly, "I got into trouble for accepting a bribe; I will get out of it by giving it."

Not much is known about the lives of these five sisters, daughters of Tzelafchad, and no sons that profoundly influenced the Jews’ approach to the world as recorded in this week's portion of Pinchas.

The five daughters approached Moses with the petition, saying: Give us a portion along with our father's brothers.

Moses presented their request to G-d, who responded: "The daughters of Tzelafchad speak rightly. Give... their father's estate to them." G-d then instructed Moses to include the following clause in the Torah's laws of inheritance: If a man dies and he has no son, you shall pass his estate on to his daughter.

Like every story of Torah, this one too has a deeper, spiritual dimension to it.

The Talmud states, “Men go to war, women do not go to war.” Of course, there were always exceptions, especially in times of crisis. Men were seen as having a more aggressive disposition, so battle came more naturally for them. Women were seen as more capable of empathy, nurture, and possessing more internal wisdom and strength.

Therein lays the deeper significance of the laws of inheritance as commanded by G-d in response to the petition by the daughters of Tzelafchad.

People are very different from each other; some of us are introverted, others are extroverted. Some of us are aggressive, others more sensitive. Some are competitive, and some are much more subtle. Some of us are outgoing, and some of us are more internal.

"If a man... has no son," if a person ascertains in his or herself a lack of "male" aggressiveness and combativeness, he/she might deduce from this that he/she has no role to play in the "conquest of the land." Such a person might be inclined to devote all their energies to the refinement of his/her inner self and leave the task of sanctifying an unholy world and transforming it into the Holy Land to those with "sons."

Says the Torah: conquering and settling the land is not an exclusively “male” endeavor. Every Jewish soul has a "portion in the land," a corner of the material world it is empowered to possess, civilize and sanctify. Every one of us must change our corner of the world and influence our environment. Sometimes this is a task which calls for a certain degree of aggressiveness and confrontation; but there is also a "feminine" way to transform the materiality of our lives into a "Holy Land," which is often much more effective.

At times, receptiveness and empathy are far more effective in overcoming the hostility of the "enemy" and transforming its very nature. The absence of a "male heir" in the soul may in fact indicate the presence of a "feminine" self no less capable of claiming the soul's portion in the world and transforming it into a "home for G-d."

I heard the following story from Rebbetzin Rochel Fogelman, from Worcester. In 1953, I brought a group of women to see the Rebbe. I especially wanted them to meet the Rebbe because they were all well-educated, and they always had many questions but were rarely satisfied with my answers.

Among them was one woman who was a nurse. She came from a European Chassidic family but she wasn’t all that religious. She was one of my questioners and I mentioned this to the Rebbe’s secretary, in advance of the meeting.

When the Rebbe spoke to us, he quoted the verse from Proverbs: “The ways of Torah are pleasant and all its paths are peace.” He said that this is also the way of a woman to be kind and pleasant and gentle, and that’s why a woman has a special power to make even the most difficult situations seem palatable and easy.

And then he gave an example of a nurse, which at that time was chiefly a woman’s profession. Why are women, such good nurses? He said the doctor may write out a prescription for the patient, but it takes a nurse to make sure the patient takes the medicine on time and swallows the bitter pill so that it can be effective. The woman has the unique skill of sensitivity and empathy, so she can administer even a bitter medicine in a gentle and sweet way. What a patient needs more than anything is not just a competent doctor, but an empathetic nurse to uplift the patient and to sweeten his or her stay in the hospital.

And then the Rebbe compared this to Judaism. When we don’t understand it, Yiddishkeit can sometimes be hard to accept, he said, but a woman in her home can make all the ways of Yiddishkeit become sweet, pleasant, palatable, and beautiful… for this is a special power that a woman has.

The Rebbe then asked the women to influence the entire city of Worcester with the light of Torah and Chassidut and inspire our husbands to do the same.

This is the deeper message of the story.

"If a man... has no son, you shall pass his estate on to his daughter." The very fact that a person is by nature disinclined toward the aggressiveness of the "male warrior" indicates that he has been granted the capacity to transform his surroundings via his "daughter" - by employing the more compassionate, non-confrontational side of his soul.

No matter who you are, you must be a leader, someone who brings holiness to the world, who takes “territory” of the physical world and make it holy and G-dly.

This is the law of life revealed by the daughters of Tzelafchad: Not all conquests are achieved by overpowering one's adversary. Sometimes, with love, empathy, compassion, and nurture we achieve much more and deeper.

This is true of women in the most literal sense of the word. We live today in a world where women must assume leadership positions and transform the world. Women often have wisdom, passion, depth, a sensitivity that can be far more impact. The Jewish world needs male leadership, but it equally requires female leadership, vision, charisma, passion, and emotion.

Today, I am inspired by one such woman, her name is Chani Neuberger.

Chani, 43, is from the heavily Jewish Brooklyn, New York, where she attended the orthodox Bais Yaakov Jewish day school for girls. Today she is one of the most powerful leaders protecting the security of America. She has now been chosen to serve as one of the highest-ranking women at the National Security Agency (NSA).

An Orthodox Torah observant Jewish woman whose parents were among the hostages rescued by Israeli commandos from Entebbe Airport has been tapped to head the United States National Security Agency’s new Cybersecurity Directorate. Neuberger helped establish the U.S. Cyber Command, has been with the NSA for nearly a decade.

In 1976, Chani’s parents were passengers on an Air France flight that was hijacked by the Palestine Liberation Organization. They and other Jewish passengers faced execution — but were saved by a group of Israeli commandoes.

Though her parents are not Israeli, they were held by the hijackers for a week along with Israeli passengers because they were Jewish.

“My parents had American passports, but because my father wore a kippah they knew he was Jewish and decided to keep him, too,” she related.

"The Israeli military saved my parents," Neuberger says. "My life would look very different if not for that military operation. So I understand that there are threats were sometimes only a government, only a military, can bring peace."

What makes her story unique is where she came from and how it helps explain her rise to the top of the U.S. national security establishment.

As a girl, Anne Neuberger went by her Hebrew name, "Chani." She grew up in a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., largely segregated from the secular world. She spoke Yiddish at home and attended an all-girls Jewish school, where half the day was devoted to religious instruction.

Her devotion to her faith tradition largely is a product of her family history. The neighborhood where she was raised was settled by Jews who escaped Nazi gas chambers because, at the time, they were young and strong and therefore suitable for slave labor assignments — while older and weaker Jews were sent to their deaths.

"I didn't realize until I grew older that the oldest people in the community were pretty much all the same age," Neuberger says. "Most had lost their parents. My mom says when she was growing up, nobody had grandparents."

Of her eight great-grandparents, seven perished in the death camps. Their surviving children — Neuberger's grandparents — started new lives in America. They were ultra-Orthodox back in Hungary, and in America, traumatized by their war experiences, they reaffirmed that identity.

"There was a deep sense among my grandparents that their parents had been killed for their faith, and they had an obligation to bring up a generation for whom that faith and that tradition were meaningful and to recreate it in these kids who were proving that Hitler had not been successful at eradicating this commitment to faith."

Among those postwar kids were Neuberger's own parents.

"So we heard a lot of that growing up," she says, "that sense of, 'You're a link. A link in a family chain that was broken, but it's our obligation to rebuild that link.' "

In that sense, Neuberger inherited her religious commitment. But she has defined it in her own way. Her Jewish faith includes the notion that people with talents should make the most of them and that they are accountable for what they have achieved.

"Knowing that I'm named for a great-grandmother who was killed with her children when she was just a few years older than me makes that very personal," Neuberger says. "It's that sense that time is a gift, and that one should use it to do good."

"I try to lead an examined life, I try to lead a life where I'm asking myself that question: Have I earned the gift of existence, in some way?"

After marriage, she attended graduate school. Her decision to move from financial services into national security work was prompted by the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Neuberger says she wanted to serve the country that gave her grandparents and parents a refuge. So she left Brooklyn to become a White House Fellow.

In the years since her life choices have worked out.

Indeed, she insists that religious practices like hers can actually be helpful in dealing with workplace challenges.

Neuberger's point: Her professional achievements have come not in spite of her faith. They've come because of it.

Here’s what she said about Orthodox life in the NPR piece.

“The discipline and rigor, the restrictions on what one can eat, the restrictions on how one behaves, I hope I bring that in values, living true to one’s values, trying to bring that integrity into the way you approach your job each day and how you interact with people, every single day,” she says.

Neuberger says: Her “professional achievements have come not in spite of my faith. They’ve come because of it.”

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky