Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Tragedy can bring out the greatest potential

[Music] they used to say in Chicago vote early and vote often I'm not sure but God willing obviously I'm in the business of my political endorsements either way it's over anyway but God willing I coach Bronco should give us the leadership that can help you assume I am and unites all of the inhabitants of all persuasions and create a city of Shalom Yerushalayim the regional name which shall then which is actually city of peace in fact I wasn't going to talk about this so let me digress a little bit the name of the etymology of the name of you shall I'm is actually a very very interesting etymology the first mention of Jerusalem in the Torah is after abiram was victorious against the 4 kings and he recaptured loads and multi setec the king of shaolin brings a frown a bread and wine and because i'll actually tell us that mark ascetic was none other than shame the son of noah who was very old and mousy said a king of righteousness was kind of the hereditary title for the king of the holy city so the city's name was shall then and the king was called mouthy 7 so the original name was show them and that's the english salem right where they burnt the witches but that was the city of city of peace so where do you get to your room where do you get the first part so cuz i'll actually tell us it's like minneapolis st. paul because when i for him was willing to sacrifice his on the temple mount ephraim renamed that mountain which was mount moriah my maria he called it hashem year at hashem will see a shem will look down and see all that we have done to serve Hashem here so therefore the you shall I am is really two cities show them is a regular city and Neera is the Temple Mount here at Sheldon says well close but we're not quite so how do you get from you rascal em to your room I am so cuz I'll say it's simply a matter yera is you dress I love hey so if you collapse the elephant a right one-in-five just gets six so therefore the elephant hey became a vote so it's your rule Shah lame now that actually corresponds exactly to the English Jerusalem but you still have a little bit of a problem where do you get the next year the Arusha lie in poor and indeed if you look in Tanaka will always say that you shall lie him although we read in Yerushalayim is always spelled without the second good so it has actually spelled your ruche all name so cuz I'll once again come to our as you as you said yerushalayim is a plural your diam Rock nyam nyam nyam yerushalayim are two Jerusalem's and that is not East and West Jerusalem we don't consider that to be two cities but rather it's the heavenly yerushalayim and this is July am on earth and they have to be in alignments and we're not when they're not in alignments we are in trouble there was horrible there was Gullah s-- and the like and therefore you shall I am is a combination of two ideas which I want to talk about for a moment year at and shall then and you shall I am of mala and and and matzah now what's interesting is this although the translation of year in the context is Hashem will look a Shem will see but because I'll point out it is the same letters as Europe meaning fear and reverence so as a result because I'll have a license to interpret the yira of you shall I am as fear and reverence of the Almighty so it turns out there for that year ax the euro is the fear and the reverence of God and Shalom is peace and that is a very very evocative combination of names because it really encapsulates the dilemma and the contradiction and the polarity and the tension that exists within our holy city and that is year a reverence of God connotes a certain fire and a certain passion to serve Hashem which by definition cannot be totally tolerant a person who truly truly believes that there's a certain way of serving a college parcel cannot look at other things and say well I'm okay you're okay you know that's the way we see it so by definition yera normally leads to a certain amount of intolerance and yet God by combat combining the two names of yireh and Shalem is telling us your passion and your reverence for God must be connected to Shalom to creating peace and harmony among people and in the world that we live in we often find that people of era are not always people of Shalom and vice-versa as well people of Shalom they're not always people of Europe because if I'm okay you're okay and if all ideas are equally legitimate then there is no moral absolute value here everything is a matter of tombery English for chaos everything's a matter of personal personal taste so you can find Shalom personalities and you can find Europe personalities but the city's very name calls upon us to unite these two opposite ideas and I remember I may have mentioned this before so forgive me many many years ago before I was even a solo rabbi so I was a consumer of dress shows instead of a producer of precious those were good days but I remember I was Baltimore and I attended to Drescher's on Shabbos sugar two different shots so the first show was a Modern Orthodox show which was pretty left wait meaning because this is before open war that actually wasn't this left wing as orthodoxy is but it was modern not everybody kept Shabbos exactly but it was a very warm friendly place a nice place you walked in you were welcomed so the rabbi gave of the Russia about how important it was to greet people the Sabre punim UFOs and to be friendly and to be warm British have good message then I walked into a more usable show in which everybody was very very meticulous in all the mitzvahs but it was a bit of a cold forbidding place you know nobody welcome Joe etc so the rabbi spoke about the importance of keeping Shabbos Kahala so I thought to myself was a little sarcastic that says it would have been great if the opposite Russia would have been given in each place I mean let the modern place hear about the importance of keeping Shabbos Olivia sheep is your place here about the importance of being warm the way it is now each one is mystical preaching to the choir each one is hearing the things they're already good in when in fact the challenge of chuhwa for all of us is to go beyond their comfort level and to grow in a vote as a sham in precisely the areas in which were a little weak so the issue shalom must learn to be stronger in his religious commitments and the ish era needs to be more tolerance and understanding and respectful of other people and reach people not through coercion demonstrations rejection but through love and caring and compassion in the length and this is the great challenge of living in your shall i am you know thus far market ocean tell us that the for traditionally holy cities of erage israel correspond to the four elements so it says you shall i even corresponds to fire and to very a correspondence to water and the young canary and spots which is very ethereal and airy no mystical city of spots is air and have one the the dirt of the column and that is the asoto of one but you shall name is the city of fire but fire can have good aspects negative aspects fire could be passion excitement and fire could be my focus and anger and hatred you know I remember I once had an occasion I needed to take a taxi from spotty Gousha why am I wearing a shop a tone or some and finish up a tone in spots and I needed to get back so we had a taxi and the cab driver came to you Shelia and he immediately is confronted with horns blowing all over the place and he says he says he had been a cab driver in spots for 25 years and not once has he ever heard a horn and usually everybody's bombarded with noise so the truth of the matter is you know as soon as you get to you sure you can sense a kind of tension a nervousness in the air no you know just like New York you know I have them now you could say that's a sign of life that's a sign of vibrancy that's a sign of things happening but at the same time all too easy tab that turned into a bitterness and a month locusts which we see over and over and over and over again in really virtually every every area of life certainly religious secular but even within religious and within secular there is a concept whenever there is a disagreement in Israel there's very rarely any attempt to find a common denominator it's always you are an idiot to are one who is 100% wrong and the other side feels the same way and as a result it's very very hard to be minced cut down and then particularly so I think the very name of yuusha life it's very very significant because on one hand it encapsulates this tension of this polarity and at the same time it is telling us we need to strive to incorporate both elements in our lives so the name is very significant that we all that would typically attend today whatever else happened today that perhaps we can move in a good and pure the way I will tell you I know that he's not gonna win and the the rainy candidate DLC toys I just saw the commercial and you'll start commercial on YouTube had a very very excellent commercial I mean I don't know anything else about him under those policies but the commercial was he says he's a car ad but he remembers he or shall I am not sure if there ever was such a thing but he remembers the usual I am when you weren't label that it didn't make a difference and this is a magnificent mosaic of all of the different cheaper save and all the different types and together we build a wonderful that place again good a very very good commercial and I help Ezra fish em that whoever is going to be the the mayor and on the City Council will carry forth that type of that type of agenda I also want to mention again again as aside but it will tie into the main my main remarks that all of us I know are very very heartbroken about the great great tragedy that occurred in Pittsburgh over Shabbos which was a tragedy not just for the families who lost the loved ones but really a tragedy for the Jewish people as a whole and it is a sad reminder that we're still in Dulles we're still in balance that is even here but Tomoko Mayer it's there you know I can't help thinking just a few days before there was a Hasidic guy who was the first I think Orthodox Jew that has a mainstream record contract he was actually cited with a mainstream company I think show alembert something and he was honored to sing at Fenway Park at a sporting event he's saying god bless america I don't know why it wasn't the national anthem but you know God Bless America and the last words of course Gotland god bless america of course also written by a Jewish guy Irving Berlin although not been the most religious of Jews he also wrote quote white Christmas but ok that's what he's very trained by the way I'm Sanford I could see they have a story I'm sure it's not true they have a story that you know there was a very famous British Jewish philosopher Isaiah Berlin and when the great intellectuals of the twentieth century and it says that during World War two Churchill wanted to really have a meeting with Isaiah Berlin to get a perspective on the ideas that he needs to work on for the war war everything so he asked today to bring Isaiah Berlin to the to his office to the war room under the Parliament so they mistakenly brought Irving Berlin in fact was in London at the time and they had a conversation for rounds an hour and Churchill is said to have remarked you know very nice man but somehow he wasn't that well-versed in philosophy as I thought but it doesn't drink totally true but this is a story that they tell but anyway at the end of the last line of God Bless America is America my home sweet uncle's room and although there is no question there is no question that the Jewish community certainly the American Jewish community and even even in Israel needs needs to be grateful to the United States of America for many many things United States game Jews opportunities gave them freedom it allowed them largely to pursue their religion to achieve economic prosperity and anyone who simply says America's a glacier corrupt society it's really a coffee Toph and Roberto Feinstein said many many years ago that the United States was an example of Modena shelter set a meeting a country a society that was built on respecting the dignity of human beings and treating them with kindness and compassion so certainly a Jew should be a patriotic if a Jew is an American that you should be a patriotic American but still at the same time you can't really consider it in my home sweet home our home is only here this is our different countries accommodate us at various times some do so with proper and noble and good behavior and some do so with little behavior we've been through all of the variations but how there is only one home and I don't know I don't want to be another I don't want to connect it because you know I somehow just have these two pictures in my mind somebody talking about home sweet home followed by this brutal massacre in in Pittsburgh now it's true that this guy who did it in Pittsburgh is just a nut just a crazy person so you might say it's not indicative of anything it's just a crazy guy acting in a crazy way but still you know even craziness it's going to reflect a certain poison that is percolating through society meaning if for example you had racist society then the craziness will tend to be a treat of black so the very fact that the craziness was manifesting as an act of anti-semitism and a hate crime Robert doesn't craziness diminish the crime well yeah instead of evil evil it's this is the man's intent he went against moral law yeah as opposed to crazy never well your what your right again I mean whether whether he was criminally insane I imagine if that's gonna be decided by courts and you know who knows but but but you are correct the line between crazy and evil is a very very elusive line and we can sometimes use it to excuse responsibility well you could argue every mass murderer must have been crazy because normal people don't do mass murders so what are you gonna say so Hitler is off the hook because he must have been nice know it Son of Sam went to jail for I understand I understand but I just meant to say but they were crazy I just meant to say that perhaps his behavior should not be indicative of tensions in society but I would suggest that indeed there must be something something there so I guess the bottom line is that obviously our hearts and our prayers should be for the bereaved families and we hope that um will give them comfort and give them strength at a very very difficult time and arts felis are with them but at the same time it's it's really a such a tragic reminder that the gullets is not really the home of the jewish people and you know it's time to time to come home in various ways now granted we have we have incidents here as well we're not so safe here as well but at least what do they say if things are gonna happen let it happen where you're where you're at home and you're with your people and greater see is my end and all of this should lead us to pray for the machiya so this is really a meeting and a hakama to what i wanted to talk about tonight i want you to talk about the idea of a Munna and a certain aspect that emerges from the partion the Vilna Gaon writes initially a very very amazing but the only go rights that the whole purpose of the Torah is to bring us to a muna and betta home in Hashem now how that is so he doesn't really say and I can't demonstrate it necessarily now by we're quoting the film the gun how by wearing filling do I come to a muna I'm not sure but he says your end goal is a moon out we'll be talking now I want to first explain the synonyms here we talk about two ideas of belief there is M mu naught and there is be talk on what is the difference between a moon ax and B taco so emunah is more in the realm of the intellect I believe that there was a God who created heaven and earth I believe there's a god that loves me that cares about me that will sustain me that will give me strength and even though life will have its difficulties and sometimes its tragedies but mbuna alone is cerebro you believe it but be taco which really means security trust serenity it's when you internalize the Emunah on an emotional level right I could be my men in a shell when I have a million shekel in the bank of course a Shem is the source of ragazza but when I have zero shekel in the bank that's what I need to have baton be taka is when as it were the rubber hits the road and one is faced with challenges one is faced with difficulties so be taught on we might call it as applied a moment and Munna as applied to the particular circumstances of your life now one has to understand how many benefits a Munna has and Munna gives you hope gives you courage it gives you resilience and Munna also gives you confidence by that I mean the following I'd be talking about it that is when a person lacks Emunah or lacks be talked on then when they are confronted with challenges there's going to be anxiety there is going to be fear and when you make decisions out of fear and anxiety the quality of the decision itself is not going to be as good when you make decisions based on a calm understandings the rush M is running the world and my job is to do the best that I can then you will make good decisions just from a totally practical step but you know our resurgence used to say when they when they were talking about having to do surgery under extreme emergency conditions that if a soldier came in with a severed artery a bleeding artery they would tell the surgeon you can repair it in two minutes if you don't rush that was a very important message don't rush you'll do it in two minutes you rush you're gonna mess up right this is the thing our incessant desire to get things over with because we're anxious and scared resides in numerous mistakes and goofs so they tell the story about the brisker of that the brisker roof was in the warsaw ghetto and miraculously he was smuggled out and he came to Eretz Israel and the bris Karev had what we would call a nervous temperament meaning he was always a Christian this very day briskets have a nervous temperaments in the sense that they're always concerned where they don't say a mitzvah or not true did they do this right you do that's right and they think and they rethink it's kind of a a spiritual OCD why the Briscoes why didn't they do this well this was well the recent whiskers do it is because their leaders did it there now why their leaders did it that goes back to their personality of people why individual people do it that way but the brisk errs tend to imitate what their founding fathers did the basal maybe where I am the Briscoe of etc so in the Warsaw Ghetto which was a very very tense situation the words together Jews were dying like flies every day some by Nazi brutality some by starvation some by disease and some even by the bombings of of the Allied forces under light people were dying the brisker of himself lost his wife and he never remarried and he lost some of his children all the British and other children did survive and the least Arab seem to have been calm he was he did not seem to be tense or nervous so someone had the nerve it's kind of a good specific question to ask someone had the nerve to ask I mean a Rebbe you're always such a nervous person hmm and now you have so much reason to be nervous why are you so calm in the middle of the Warsaw Ghetto so the brisk Arab answers when it comes to doing mitzvahs that's my responsibility Hashem said that's my job when it's my job I'm always worried I might mess up I might goof up I might make mistakes but let's say you're in a situation where there's absolutely nothing you can do to help yourself you're in a situation where you're literally totally at the mercy of other forces now some people might go crazy and commit suicide with me it's the opposite he said that's precisely when I am the most problem because when I no longer have the responsibility I know that it's cool hola Shem and the Shem will help me now I want to emphasize that the brisker Roth was not being Pollyannish the brisk you see this is a very important point the risk Arab was not saying oh god will make every story a happy ending everything will come out nice and cheery he knew that wasn't the case he knew there was a holocaust he himself lost his wife and she ate some children he saw Jews dying every day the statement God Zumba Tova does not mean as people sometimes it means everything will come out the way I would like it to come out there is tragedy there is death there is suffering and that's gonna be inexplicable sometimes we don't have the explanations and so on for an explanation at best might be insensitive and that worse to be totally idiotic and the irrelevant so Godzilla Tovah is not saying I even tell you of Pollyanna although that has a certain role in life as well when you're optimistic things turn out in a better way but in a more deeper way it's that things are not random and meaningless that even in our struggles there were opportunities for growth and opportunities for positive transformations the person that eyesight is a person who is not giving you a Torah perspective per se at least directly and that is of course Viktor Frankl Viktor Frankl was Jewish but Viktor Frankl had no Jewish education he was an assimilated secular Jew and in fact his wife at least his last wife was Catholic but Viktor Frankl I think is someone that we could call a genuine spiritual intuitive in which through his own cogitation and we have to believe that God gave those things to him he came up with ideas that are really what the Torah teaches and Viktor Frankl was in the concentration camps he was very a psychiatrist and he developed this idea of logotherapy which is to put the name that he gave to his school of thoughts which is man's search for meaning and he pointed out we have very little control over what happens to us in our lives but the last control we have is how we choose to respond and in every confrontation with evil with adversity with difficulty with suffering there is a moment of choice do you choose to respond with goodness and nobility and courage or do you choose to become embittered and broken and shattered and the measure of a human being is the type of choice he makes to respond to a situation and Frankel therefore develop the idea which is really a theory of evil so to speak that evil is a catalyst in the universe to bring out the potential goodness of a human being in terms of how they respond to those difficulties he gave the example that in the concentration camps themselves he knew people well he knew people before the war who you know they were not tsadikim he would not have called them righteous but in the camps they risk their lives to give medicine and food to starving people they became transformed they became righteous they became saintly and had their lives just been normal without those challenges you know who knows there wouldn't have been any particular occasion now again people say well isn't there an easier way to get people to be virtuous other them than this I mean you needed a Holocaust for there to be a State of Israel you know some people frankly will say I don't want to get into that debate that if you needed a Holocaust were there to be a State of Israel then it would have been better not to have a state it as well not have a look I don't want to get into that particular debate but certainly whenever you make the argument that evil can be a source of transformative good there are people who will counter it age worth the cost that's too expensive and cost for whatever benefit you're achieving you know I don't have the answer to that I'm not gonna answer the question because I don't have an answer but all I can tell you is that Lamesa looking at it from the realm practicality we do know that adversity and challenge can be the catalyst of moral transformation now that doesn't mean it always happens just as there's a famous saying God never gives you a test that you can't pass I would paraphrase it with another thing God never gives you a guaranteed pass so in any challenge we can and we do fail so there's no guarantee over here but at least potentially again get your Frank will points out we can make that choice and that defines us so anyone that you have not read a man's search for meaning which is his most famous book it's very worthwhile by the way I just heard maybe four by the sister Chabad likes to clean everybody but Abad claims that that Franco in the late 50s his work was not regarded with with much respect this is before man's search for meaning or and I think it was after he even after he published it but initially it was not accepted and people did not look at it very positively was considered to be too soft it was not scientifically rigorous enough and of course he lived in Vienna which was the home of frightened you know Freud and Freud had different motivations that people have so Franco was opposed apparently going to give up his career and just really retire early or whatever it is and somehow the Rebbe got a wind of this and the Rebbe said that shalyah have to tell him keep up your work because your work is important for the world and that encouraged him to go on and the story goes that although he was married to a guardian it was certainly not a shomer Shabbos but he worked filming every day he put on to go that he didn't want anyone to know about it but they discovered that he used to go into a room he used to lock the door for 15 minutes and it was discovered that he actually predict about spillin and he said it was a very very important thing good thing so so as we confront yet another tragedy in Pittsburgh and the like this is a perspective that we could keep in mind in fact I'll tell you I started from a Holocaust itself that Simon Wiesenthal used to say some of the famous Nazi hunter and he was also not an observant Jew but he recounted an encounter that he had with Rabbi Eliezer silver and this was after the war when the Jewish refugees were still in displaced persons camps in Germany they had not yet decided where there would be gone and Rabbi Eliezer silver was a great rabbi who came from Europe to the United States after World War one initially he was in Springfield and then the harrisburg and then he went to Cincinnati where he spent his career and remember so it was a very colorful rabbi in fact very common swear this top hat and he spoke a very heavily accented English she was not fluent in English but he was very flamboyant in fact they have a story that he was once an expert witness at a trial about a Contras issue including Ohio and he has to be qualified as an expert you know when you testify as an expert you have to establish your credentials so somebody asked him is it true that you are the greatest living rabbi in the United States so a silver was quiet for a moment and the judge said you should answer the question or we silver says well I'm not sure one hand they want to be modest on the other hand their mother Oh Samantha told the trippity that's why I'm hesitated but so anyway grab my silver had very go strong political connections with an extremely powerful Republican senator senator Roberts attempt if you know your American history Robert Taft was the son of a former president and chief justice William Howard Taft and Robert Taft himself was the majority leader of the Senate at a time when the Republicans control the Senate so he really was the most powerful senator in the United States and robbery silver had a very close relationship with Robert anyway because of this robbery silver got permission to wear an American army uniform to be able to have access to all the displaced persons camps and nobody would stop him because he ward the honor the uniform of a colonel the US colonel so he shows up in Germany and he's dressed like a United States colonel with a big beard and there's a military policeman an MP who stops it because this does not look like an officer in the United States Army and says no please show me your papers show me your identification and well my super starts burning away in the other saying call tap call tap go theft and of course that's so preposterous just I said call Queen Elizabeth or whatever does that mean there's no how about me there's no particular reason why the MP should believe that Robo sober is any shy ffice to robert taft but a sober keeps on going and going and gone so finally they're so exasperated that before they send him to jail they decide to make a transatlantic call to call a robbery camp now in those days it wasn't like today and I see took a half an hour just to make the connection and the connection is not very good but they finally get Robert Taft on the phone when they say you know senator I'm so sorry to bother you this is so stupid that you know I'm sure that there's no point here but there's this crazy guy with a beard who doesn't speak English I don't know what language he's speaking and he claims you know he's your best friend and he has your authorization to do this it's a rapper Taft knew right away who this was he says you have rabbi silver there he says let that man go because if you do not and a half an hour's will be controlling your whole base just get rid of let him go where he wants no it's oh that's it okay so wrap my sober devoted a lot of time going to the DP camps visiting like you can see pictures of him in a military uniform so we still should tell the story so every silver came through where he was and he organized the prayer service to feel up and you noticed that Wiesenthal didn't go to the pressures so he goes over to Wiesenthal incense why don't you tap in with why don't you join us so recent all said that after when I saw in the war I don't dive in anymore so my sober thought was obviously the Nazi brutality says no no no it's not what the Nazis did its what did you did when I was in the concentration camp I think you'd think it was Bergen Belsen I saw it Haseena should you who smuggled a sitter into the camp and that was a very very daring act of courage if the Nazis would have discovered it they would have killed him and I was so amazed and impressed that he's a man of such faith that he's willing to risk his life to dive into a channel but then I began to notice he was renting out the city to people in exchange for their bread rations in five minute increments in other words give me your bread for the day you can have the sitter for five minutes and he was doing it to men and to women and even to children who are religious children and I said to myself if a religious just so-called religious Jew could use his religion as a mechanism of taking bread out of the mouths of starving men women and children I don't want to have anything to do with that religion that religion is cruel immoral debased that's not the God I want to connect him this is Wiesenthal telling the story after the war and Wiesenthal said rabbi silver told me something that i have never forgotten rabbi silver told me why do you look at the man renting The Sitter and taking the bread look at the people who are willing to give up the bread in order to have the sinner look at their commitments look at their faith look at their baton look at the fact that even under circumstances where God seems to have abandoned them totally they want to serve Him don't you look at those people and see something good and something something only don't you realize that this is your nation and you can be part of them and Wiesenthal said the famous Nazi after we so softly so thought that every since then and he used to recount this story over the next 40 45 years I realized that side by side with the most radical evil can be the greatest potential for the nobility in how we respond and of course we know this we know this in Israel unfortunately we know it's well in Israel how precisely when there is tragedy that often elicits the greatest responses of generosity and kindness and care and concern why can't we be so nice to each other when things are good it's a good question but somehow it is the tragedies that often bring out the best and most noble responses whether it's mine 11 in the United States whether it was the kidnapping and murder of the three Eva students a few years ago the massacres in Turkish arrived and of course the terrorist incidents that that's still with sureno are happening so this is the idea of capturing with Toba capsule with Toba is a more complicated idea it doesn't mean things will have a happy ending but it means that every experience in life is a catalyst for transformation the way Repsol evasion put in the problem of evil should not be approached as a theological problem it should be approached as a halawet problem but wonder what does that mean theology is trying to understand God why did God do something that may be an unanswerable question and of course a lot of people is not God per se it's human choices but how Lhasa focuses on what is my responsibility given the reality I'm in how lucky is focused on what do I do when I'm in this situation that is a meaningful question that is an important question that is a question I might be able to answer I might be able to say what do I do with this situation that I'm how do I turn it into something good many of you might might know the Mandel family has sherry and Seth Mendel she's not he's kind of a big famous now because she's already written that two or three award-winning books rabbi in nemesis Mendel live in Toccoa and around ten years already I don't remember how many years but maybe about ten ten years they lost a child a sweet child Kobe was not Bar Mitzvah yet he was fasting 12 years old and he what he and the classmates Yosef he shred we're both brutally murdered they were exploring the caves under to color beautiful beautiful show and some courageous Arab freedom fighters took rocks sharp rocks and bangs on their heads until their brains who was doubted forgive me for being so exquisite and in this heroic act of self-determination these two beautiful children were brutally brutally murdered I remember that to know the Kobe and Kobe in fact techno they had come from Maryland so uh they were good friends of my son in Maryland a classmate and the like and you can imagine maybe you can't imagine what the Mandel's went through I mean Berkeley shame they had they had other children but to lose a child this way to lose a child in any way man had been to lose it this way just how it aged the hearts unbelievable and the despondency was so great that they really really didn't know didn't know how they're gonna go on they didn't know how they can take care of their other children they didn't know how they could go on living they didn't know it looked like no what do you do how do you go on and you know that's kind of an unavoidable part of the process god forbid anyone that faces this is gonna have that time frame in which there is utter utter hopelessness it's not even a matter of sadness I mean in a way if you're sad enough to cry and sob but that already is a partial aspect of recovery this is kind of a numbness and deadness you just don't know that the blackness of just being in a place that you just can't get out of but what eventually happened if you know if you know the family or you know the story is they decided to devote their lives to helping families that have been victimized by terrorism they've created a whole worldwide foundation called in honor of their son in memory of the son the Kobe Mandela Foundation and this is a an organization that creates summer camps and retreats and it provides medical and psychological and financial assistance and therapies and group for workshops and as a result of this tragedy that face them that no parent should ever ever ever face they brought hope and strength to literally thousands of thousands of families and indeed said mrs. Mandela has written two books about recovering from tragedy and how to grow from tragedy I mean she is kind of almost the rebbe one of the rebus there are others as well one of the revs of the generation about how you take the most devastating evil that could befall you and you turn it into a source of positivity and growth and helping and you know it's easy for me to say it but there are people who do it and these are really the teachers of the generation that we have want to grow Frankel is another example begin there there there are a narrative so unfortunately in other places as well many many too many examples of this phenomenon but it's an amazing phenomenon so it's a phenomena that cannot fail to move you how people can take the worst situation that one can imagine and that becomes the source of the light that they bring to the world you know the Tsar has an unusual phrase the sower has a phrase Bootsie not the card denisa and in a very difficult Aramaic of the sower this actually means the black light the black light very unusual phrase we normally associate the color black as the absence of light right when something's black there is no light the sower says in the blackness there actually is a light although you can't see and this is what a person is able to uncovering able to kind of see the light even in the darkness it's not the light only at the end of the time it's the light in the darkness of the tunnel the tunnel itself there's a similar story it's kind of a Hanukkah story but they were close enough hmm I can mention it this involves the equation burger Rebbe where did the great Ksyusha Pepe's this is he's not alive anymore now a dynasty has been taken over by by a descendant but the poison burger Rebbe during the Holocaust lost his wife and lost 11 children 11 children office children he married after the war and had other children and this is the first night of Hanukkah 1944 so this is towards the very towards the end of the war the war ended - at April 45 December 44 inches you know if you know why this was in bergen-belsen also and as you know if you know the history of the Holocaust 1944 was a very very bad year for the Jews of Hungary in particular because the Nazis already knew that the war was going to end and it would not end with their victory they have they already had a sense that things were not going to end the way they wanted but they were absolutely determined so liquidate as many Jews as they could at the end and therefore the ghettos of Hungary were liquidated in an extraordinarily fast way the pace of extermination in Hungary was was even more than in Poland I mean there were many more Jews in Poland but in Hungary there was a very very rapid extermination because it was towards the end of the war and this was in 1944 at December 44 that's why the gun and the question of Eisenberger Rebbe organized the lighting of the Chanukah candles no this was very very dangerous this had to be done in absolute silence it has to be done very late at night you know two o'clock when guards we're not watching so carefully and at two o'clock in the morning hundreds and hundreds of Jews are gathering and they made a wig from the pyjama uniforms that's the best they wore and they had some rancid margarine that they could use as a little bit of well they were gonna blow out the candle right away they weren't gonna let it even burn on how long would it break anyway so imagine hundreds of hundreds of people that they're all next to the poison Berger Rebbe and he makes the first brother maja flick ner shel hanukkah me but then he makes the second brother shun Nissim la beauté no he made miracles for our forefathers now it's the third brother the third brother for the first night is she happy yah no that i sham has kept us alive and he hesitated he didn't make the brother when he looked around and he thought to himself and then he looked around again and then he made Chevy on him and people sit on me after he left and after the candle was blown out right away there was a fellow who walked over to him who was not participating and he said you know Rabi I don't believe in any of this stuff when I used to do it when I was younger but after what I saw here there's no God that I can believe it you believe in it I'm not questioning I'm a tolerant guy people want to be religious if it gives them comfort so beans but Rebbe I have a question to you for you I understand how you can make the first breath that God commanded us to do a certain mid-south if that's what you believe so God commanded you to do a medicine and grab me I ain't even understand the second brother he did miracles were our forefathers you believe a thousand years ago or two hundred fifteen hundred years ago there was a miracle of Hanukkah okay there was a miracle of Hanukkah but Rebbe saffiano is thanking God for being alive to experience this occasion are you grateful to be alive you lost your wife you lost 11 children do you know how many Jews go to sleep every nights in this place hoping they will die and not wake up now it's true by the way this is an interesting study unit of itself that the suicide rate among Jews in really throughout throughout World War Two was extremely low there were some famous examples the the head of the Warsaw Ghetto commited in land of money research certainly which I don't remember ever pronounce his name correctly but he can he eat what's that that's another one yeah yeah but I'm thinking of someone else who committed suicide and then the inhabitants of together were furious over that they saw that as an abandonment they saw that as taking the easy way out instead of helping so the suicide grades per se was extraordinarily low and among religious juice it was even lower which is an interesting phenomena but still many hoped and prayed that God would take their lives so Rebbe how can you make a Chevy on him now the Rebbe tastes credit could have said shaken sappy chorus I don't want to talk to a person who doesn't believe in the Torah the Rebbe didn't say that the Rebbe said you have a good question no that's why I hesitated on one hand I keep the halacha the hwacha says I'm supposed to say Saffiano and the other hand God is a God of truth and you don't lie to the Almighty how could I lie thank you for letting me be a lie when I too didn't always have a desire to live I didn't know what to do I have to make a break up and I'm not allowed to live what do I do so I said so a this is what the Rebbe said but I looked around and that's why I turned around and I saw the faces of hundreds and hundreds of Jews that had nothing that lost everything then had no particular rational reason to hope that their lives will ever get better and yet they had faith and they had courage and they wanted to do what they could and I said to myself what a privilege what an honor it is for me to experience the greatness of the human spirits and the nobility of the Jewish soul and for that the Rebbe said I could make a shot be honest even in bergen-belsen to be able to see what you wish the Jewish EMA is capable of Mika operating throughout who is like the nation's Israel going up like the arts so I think this is a reflection as we look at the most recent tragedies in our long long long tragic history and these things happening but now the United States generally has become you know and this happens to be a Jewish thing so obviously it affects us much more deeply but if you go through all of the different shootings god forbid it's almost a common place somebody shows up and massacres a bunch of people and of course what's going on in Europe is even is even worse and we are in a situation where a lot of bad things are happening a lot of tragedies are happening and we need a ship's mercy but at the same time it's our responsibility to ask how do i generate light from the darkness how do I see the light even in the darkness how do we use these occasions as catalysts to create love and unity and togetherness and artists maybe a chef is showing us this is what happens when you and beings are so filled with hate it's not just I hate you so I'm not going to talk to you or rank you over for Shabbos or Peggy that's bad enough but when you live in a world of hate it turns into a world of murder and it turns into a world of destruction and Hashem is showing us the extremity of the tendencies that we might regard as relatively minor but what those things can lead to and therefore the challenge that we have is to understand take the next step and build bridges of love and artists and I bet this route and in that way perhaps culture the hatred that is engulfing the world and so many on so many levels so Beatrice a chef made me grow from these negativities and once again our prayers and our thoughts are certainly with the families that have lost their loved ones and because both will bring us to the ghoulish lame up in a ravine [Music]