Transcript
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The Jewish people have had few advocates
and friends as dear and as staunch as
Senator Daniel Inouye. Senator Inouye
served as a United States Senator
[music] from Hawaii from 1963
until his death in 2012. He was a highly
decorated World War II veteran
>> [music]
>> and one of the most powerful Democrats
in Washington.
Asked why he became such a strong
supporter of the Jewish people,
>> [music]
>> he told of his wartime recuperation from
battle wounds in a hospital in Italy. In
the next bed, there was a Jewish soldier
who'd also been badly wounded. Inouye
had never known Jews in his native
Hawaii and he'd been taught that as a
child that Jews had horns.
Well, when they removed the bandages
from this Jewish serviceman's head, no
horns were visible.
The two became friends and from this
Jewish serviceman,
>> [music]
>> Inouye learned of the centuries-old
hatred and persecution of the Jews.
As a first-generation Japanese American
whose family had been discriminated
against, this struck a strong chord with
Inouye.
And when he recovered, he set out to
find out why it was that the Jews had
suffered so much.
His research led him to become a strong
supporter of many Jewish causes. He
arranged for large American government
funds for Israeli defense
>> [music]
>> and also for religious institutions.
So great was his identification with the
Jewish people that at one point [music]
he considered converting.
When asked why he didn't convert,
he replied that he felt he could do more
for the Jewish people as a non-Jew
[music] than as a Jew.
But Senator Inouye was not the first to
think that Jews have horns.
Michelangelo's famous statue of Moses
[music] shows the lawgiver with very
solid stone horns. The myth of Moses'
horns comes from [music] a
mistranslation of the Hebrew word keren.
Keren can mean a horn, but it can also
mean a beam of light. In fact, the Latin
word corona, from which the English
[music] word crown derives, comes from
the Hebrew keren.
If you look at the Sefer Torah, you'll
notice that the first word of the book
of Vayikra, from Leviticus, is written
in an unusual fashion. The last letter
of the first word Vayikra, the aleph, is
written much smaller than the rest of
the word. Why is it so small?
When God told Moshe to write the word
Vayikra,
meaning he called, [music]
Moshe didn't want to write that aleph.
It seemed to Moshe that it gave him much
too much importance. How could he write
that God called [music] to him? Who was
he after all? A mere man.
Moshe wanted to write Vayika without the
aleph, meaning he, meaning God, happened
upon him. In other words, God just came
across Moshe, so to speak. He didn't go
out of his way to [music] appear to him.
Now, in spite of Moshe's protestations,
God told him to write Vayikra with an
aleph.
Moshe put the aleph at the end of the
word as God had commanded him, but he
wrote it small.
The aleph is the letter that represents
the ego, the me.
It's the first letter in Hebrew of the
word I, ani. When a person sees himself
as aleph, the big aleph, number one,
he's usurping the crown of he who is
one.
The Torah tells us that Moshe Rabbeinu,
Moses, was the
>> [music]
>> humblest of all men. Moshe saw, as no
man before or since, that there is only
one aleph in creation, only Hashem.
>> [music]
>> The mystical sources teach that when
Moshe finished writing the Torah, some
ink was left in his pen.
As he passed the pen across his
forehead, the drops of ink became beams
of light shining from his visage, his
crown, his keren.
The extra ink that was left in Moshe's
[music] pen was the ink that should have
gone to writing that big aleph.
Instead, it became a corona of shining
light to adorn the humblest of [music]
men.
