My Great Grandfather Was Arrested By The FBI - THE Parshah On Fire - Nitzavim

The people living in the times of the Noviaescoll once approached him with the following question. With avoidar rampant and the basement is destroyed and Judaism looking increasingly less glamorous. These tired and worn out Jews wants to know if they were to walk away from it all and just assimilate into the world around them. Would that make them non-Jewish? Did their Jewishness depend on their conscious decision to follow it? Or was it just ingrained in them whether they liked it or not? The reason they asked this question was because they wanted out. But they wanted to know if walking away would just absolve them from the obligation to keep the Tyra. Would they still get punished one day for not shaking the Lulov or eating pig? Or would their decision to leave just rid them of all their religious duties? Now we all know the answer to their question to us seems simple. But is it really? In essence, they were asking a fundamental question about Yiddish. Every other religion in the world basically is intellectually based. If one intellectually subscribes to that religion, then he's part of that religion. If one makes a conscious decision to break off of that religion, then he's not part of that religion. Is that the same with Judaism? And if it's not true, why not? These people reasoned with Yasco saying, "Listen, when our ancestors stood at Hari, they chose Judaism. We didn't. Why are we bound to a choice that they made? If our grandparents chose to become vegetarians, that wouldn't automatically make us vegetarians, right? So why should their choice that they made to accept upon themselves the yoke of Torah be binding on us? They intellectually chose to accept accept it. Why can't we intellectually reject it? The same exact question was asked by the Jews of Spain to the great 15th century sage Arama, the author of the Akida Zitzk. And these frightened Jews who were faced with the horrific choice of either converting to Christianity or dying. They asked if conversion to Christianity just absolves them from all their religious duties. Our grandparents, they said, chose Judaism, but now under our current conditions, we feel like we have to choose Christianity. And perhaps if our grandparents knew how hard it would turn out to be, they wouldn't have accepted Judaism on our behalf. Can we shed our Jewishness? That was their question. So the and turned to their respective communities and basically gave the same answer. Both pointed out the fundamental mistake that the people were making in their question. Our ancestors didn't choose Judaism and then forcefully bequeath it to us. It is not an intellectual concept that can be just abandoned at will. You don't become non-Jewish if you shed the philosophy of Judaism in order to get baptized or convert to Islam. We don't receive Judaism from our parents. Every single one of us stood at Hari and willingly accepted the Tyra and Hashem's kingship. This wasn't an intellectual acknowledgment. It was a transform. It was a transformation. The anim animalistic instincts that were bottled up inside of us, that grotesque beast that lurked beneath our skin which we developed in Egypt was effectively eradicated by a blast of spirituality that we got on our scenai. We got an injection of holiness that instantly elevated us to become God's ambassadors on earth. It was not an intellectual idea. It was not conceptual. It was not a mental agreement. It was Hashem granting us the exclusive access to the elixir of life, the holy and sacred Tyra that literally went into our bloodstream. And while most religions are belief-based, you think like them and then you're just in Judaism is a blood deep. If you're born a Jew, your body is Jewish, whether you feel it or believe it or deny it or even like it. Jewishness isn't a mindset. It's an identity encoded in you. You don't join it. You are it. The human body is compared to two is comprised of 248 limbs and 365 different ligaments and senus. There are 248 positive mitzvah and there are 365 negative mitzvah. Is that a coincidence? Of course it's not. It's due to the fact that when we received the Tory, the 613 mitzvah became infused into every single one of the 613 parts of our body. It instantly raised us above humanity. It instantly charged us with a mission of cherishing that holiness and bringing it wherever our feet may take us. Our very DNA became supercharged with godliness. Running off and jumping into some Christian Baptist bath or aligning with the Islamic faith or doing yoga with a bunch of Buddhists on some mountain in Nepal cannot surgically remove the holiness that's embedded inside of a Jew. It cannot take away our Judaism because Judaism is our essence and our very our very selves are Jewish. The holiness that we got on our seni came with immediate ramifications. We no longer could act the same way others did. What was morally acceptable to others was no longer morally acceptable for us. Our holy bodies required different food to fuel it and therefore a Jew is prohibited to eat certain foods. Notwithstanding the fact that those foods don't seem to have effect whatsoever on non-Jews at all, it's because our supremely holy bodies are physically supercharged with sanctity and therefore must be treated as such. This reality has proven itself over the course of human history. Thousands of various religions have been tried by the world since its inception. only Judaism has endured because it's not an idea that can just fly away with the intellectual winds of the time. It's not a religious trend that just it gets outdated or archaic or inconvenient. It's a physical force embedded in the body of a Jew and it gets passed down to the next generation whether or not that generation is even aware of its existence. The holiness is inherent. It's a spark of the divine. Those sparks could sit for thousands of years, but they will come to the surface at some point or another and a Jew will feel them and it feel its cries and allow them to glow again. Jews who know nothing about Judaism still seem to hang on to something, a seder, yam kipper, a yardside candle, a yizkar. Even Jews who oppose Judaism. Jew Jews who have been irreligious for literally centuries still have that spark inside of them. And sometimes without even realizing it, they refused to let that spark go. Listen to this story. There was once a frantic knock on the door of the home and the opened it to find a soldier in the Russian army and the ushered him in and asked what he could do for him and the large soldier he sat down. He began crying uncontrollably and a little bit surprised he asked the man what was wrong. And the soldier looked into the eyes and told him the following. You may think that I'm a regular Russian soldier, but I'm not. I'm really Yukarovski and I'm a Jew and I was grabbed by the Russian army when I was 5 years old and I haven't done a single Jewish thing since. Every day I think about Judaism. Every day I long to be back. Every day I feel something inside of me, but I what can I do? I mean, the Russian army is a brutal pa place for any human being, let alone an innocent Jew. I'm going to have to go back to my camp, this soldier says in a few minutes. Can you give me some words of inspiration? What will become of my Judaism? What will become my Jewishness? Am I still a Jew? What will become my children? Looked at this poor soldier and he told him the following. He said, "Every Jew has a soul inside of him that permeates his very essence with holiness. And there's no force and there's no ideology, no army, no union, no revolution can ever take that away from him." The Jewishness, the Jewish soul is bulletproof. So walk with your head held high, knowing that every cell in your body is different. You may not know the intricacies of Judaism, but if you keep up the courage to tap into your soul's infinite holiness, it will its presence will be felt forever and it will one day be rekindled. In this para, when Moshe told the Jewish people that they are all standing on the mountain making a covenant of bris with Hashem, he wasn't talking about a business deal where one side could hire a really expensive lawyer to get rid of the argument of the other side. He was talking about a metamorphosis of holiness. And he wasn't just talking to the people physically standing there. He was talking to every future soul in the Jewish people's galaxy. Hari dispensed holiness into the souls of Jews for every time and for every era. From the holiest Tom I'm learning in some hilltop in Tavaria to a soldier in the barracks of the Russian army. Listen to this idea. The Jewish people seem to have a little obsession with water. We wake up in the morning and we wash our hands. We walk into Shaw to Davin and we wash our hands. We go out of a bathroom and we wash our hands. We sit down to eat bread and we wash our hands. We sit down to eat anything dipped in a liquid and we wash our hands. We touch our shoes or scratch our head and we wash our hands. We are forever running to immerse ourselves in a mikvah. Sometimes people do it yearly, some monthly, some daily. Ever thought about it? What does pouring water over our hands accomplish? What does immersing in water do? So the Mishnu in his second explanation to the of he writes that the reason we wash our hands is because we are charged with being holy. By pouring water over our hands, we internalize that idea. Now the question remains, what does pouring water over our hands have to do with being holy? What does washing our hands after we scratch our heads or touch our shoes have to do with sanctity? And you can't say that it's for cleanliness because we're obligated to wash our hands even if there's no noticeable dirt on it. So why are we doing it? The answer lies in the translation of the word nitilas. The word nel according to Rab Hersh means to raise. By pouring water over our hands, we signify to ourselves that we are different. We are higher. We are holier than the anim animalistic lustful world that we live in. We pour water on our hands because water is different. Water represents a place where the typical human can't be. It's a place where the ordinary human can't survive. And yet, that's where we are. We live above humanity. We carve out a little island of holiness in this earthly tsunami we live in and we forever make that our residence. We walk around feeling the charge of kadusha we received at our scenai and we never tell ourselves that that Tory wasn't speaking to us. We don't say that. We don't say that was then and this is now. Every single one one of us was there. The holiness that was given to us then was given to us to the Jews in Granada in 1129 or the Jews in Tunisia or the Jews in Turkey or the Jew in Usbekiststan to the Jews in the Lower East Side in 1919 and the Jew right now in Los Angeles or Toronto or Miami or Petikva or London or Baltimore. The Tyra spoke to us all. It injected ourselves with the perfect amount of kadusha to enable us to take on any challenge we face no matter the time and no matter the place. It's not an ideology we inherited. It's a physical force we were born with. It's that spark that enabled us to look away when our Spanish neighbors ideal idolize things like bull fighting and the torture of animals or that spark that made us uphore the gladiator fights that the Roman society loved or the spark that keeps us morally sound in a western world that's completely drowning in immorality. It's the spark that makes a Jew a Jew. Listen to this story. Towards the end of the Second World War, a mysterious German submarine crossed the Atlantic Ocean and shockingly made it all the way to American shores. And it promptly opened its doors and six shadowy spies got out of the submarine and they ran inland. And these six spies were tasked with planting bombs at different strategic locations throughout America in an effort to sabotage the American army in its war with Germany. Five of the six men ran off without being seen, but the last one was spotted while running on a nearby dock by a local fisherman who raced to the police and reported him. And after describing roughly what the man looked like, the police forwarded the case to the FBI who began a frantic search to catch this spy. Now, here's where the story gets wild. My wife's great-grandfather, Sigfried Hoper, a German immigrant who he was a big sadic. He was also a brilliant inventor and a professor at the prestigious Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. And despite having lived in America for years before the war broke out, he was nevertheless suspected by the FBI as being the last spy that ran off that submarine. And even though it was totally ridiculous that a religious Jew would be a German spy in the middle of World War II, they nevertheless suspected him being that he was German and he was a professor who knew a lot about making radio technology and the like. So they began tracking his every move. And then one day the FBI broke into his apartment to investigate and they started opening every drawer and they were started leafing through every closet. And eventually an FBI agent came running out of the bedroom and says, "Aha, I found it. I have found something that shouldn't be here. I have found something that is unequivocal proof that you, Mr. Hopper, are a spy." And he reaches up and he holds up a shel. Now, who would possibly wear a wig but a spy trying to disguise himself? You, my friend, are a spy and you are under arrest. and he was promptly arrested and placed in jail. Unfortunately, after many people came to his defense, pointing out the complete absurdity of a Jew working to help the Germans in the middle of World War II, he was eventually released from jail and went on to live a beautiful life. But there is something that amazes me about this story. When Jewish people see a wig, they see holiness and sanctity. We see the beckoning of Sinai for us to focus on our inner royalty and not our outer physicality. When a non-Jew sees a shaitel, it strikes him as so bizarre, so unusual that a woman would cover her hair. So odd that a woman would choose to hide such an attractive feature that the only other explanation that they could come up with is that that person must be a spy. We are a people who stood at Hari and underwent a metamorphosis. a people who possess special selves which are inheritable. We are biologically different from the rest. We are a people who bridge heaven and earth. We are a people who have a spark inside of us that no matter what and no matter when will forever shine bright. Adolf Hitler could not have been more right when he said Judaism is not a religion. It's a race. True. We're a race. a race that contains unimaginable holiness. Because Jews don't just think different, we are different.