The Holy Madman Saved From The Nazis

Before World War II, Reb Mordechai Bar Koff lived in a small town near Berlin. [music] His father was the shamash of the shul. When his father passed away, he inherited the job. His world was the shul. He arranged the benches. He prepared the kiddush. He checked the sifrei Torah. When a sefer became too worn to use, [music] it was up to him to bury it because to him every sefer Torah, every siddur, every page of Gemara was sacred. Then came November of 1938, Kristallnacht, the unofficial start of the Holocaust. It was the morning after. [music] The streets were covered in glass. The shuls were burnt. Jewish shops were destroyed. Sifrei Torah lay in the streets completely desecrated. Jews were murdered. There was fear in [music] the air that you could almost touch. And Reb Mordechai walks out into it, not away from it, into the shul. He made his way through the wreckage of his shul, and he began collecting whatever he could salvage. Burnt siddurim, torn pages, fragments of different sifrei [music] Torah. And then he walks out into the streets, and he saw the same story. Torn pages scattered everywhere, blown out from other shuls, mixed with ash and glass. And he began [music] to pick them up, too, one by one. For days, he walked through the streets of Berlin, a burnt-out city like a man on a mission no one else [music] could understand. He would roam around the streets, find pieces of sifrei Torah here and there, and he would bend down, pick them up, kiss them, [music] and place them carefully into his bag. He would then go to the cemetery where he buried them. Each time he returned [music] to the streets of Berlin, he found more pages. Each time he was mocked, but he kept going. Soldiers fired nearby. People were beaten in the streets. He was insulted and laughed at and mocked, but miraculously, no one [music] stopped him. He figured these holy sifrei Torah must be protecting him. Years go by, >> [music] >> and the war is over. Mordechai settles into his post-war life, grateful that he survived, but a little curious as to how. One day, the famous German archives were finally opened to the public, [music] and a friend of Mordechai named Menachem Herms, who was a historian, went to the archives to collect as many documents as he could. A few days later, he returned with a suitcase filled with documents and a look of astonishment on his face. He went to Mordechai's house and sat down in the living room, and he turned to Mordechai and said, "Mordechai, how did you survive the war?" Mordechai looks at him and says what he's been telling himself for the last several decades, "The swaram that I collected in the streets, they protected me." Menachem looks at Mordechai and says, "Mordechai, you're not going to believe this. Your name appears in the German [music] archives." What? What's my name doing there? So, Menachem [music] explained, "The Nazis had a plan. They feared that one day the world would accuse them of destroying an entire people, and that doesn't look so good. So, they decided to preserve a small group of Jews, people they labeled mentally unfit, so they could later say to the world, 'We did you all a favor. This is what the Jewish people were like. Look at them, a bunch of madmen.' And the file goes on to list people that would fit that description. And in that file, Menachem continues, 'Your name appeared, described as a madman wandering the streets collecting scraps of paper, strangely kissing them, and then burying them, clearly, in their words, [music] insane.' You had been approved for survival not in spite of how you acted, but because of it. You were the one of the insane Jews chosen to live." Mordechai stares blankly [music] at Menachem and breaks down into tears. The world has always [music] looked at the Jews as strange, obsessive, different, way too careful about things no one else cares about. But what they call madness, we call devotion. [music] What they call obsession, we call loyalty. What they call foolish, we call holy. What they call irrational, we call eternity. [music] And perhaps that's the takeaway. The world will always have a commentary about how the Jewish people live their lives. But the Jew was never living for the world's approval. So let them call us what they want. Let them misunderstand us. Let them write their reports. We know the truth. Our way of life wasn't voted on. It's not shaped by fleeting trends or governments or civilizations. It was given to us by Hashem and no empire, [music] no ideology, no passing culture will ever be able to convince us out of it because every now and then the world thinks it's got the end of us. But we know that's exactly where our story begins.