Main Message of Pesach

I've been asking people, what do you think the main message of Pesach is?

I've gotten 10 answers so far and although there is a little overlap, what I love about this is the variety of answers, all valid.

So you can think about it, and post an answer if you like, and eventually I will post the answers that I got.

The Fish Story that Sparked a Tikkun

14 years ago, people were buzzing about the talking fish in New Square. Some believed the story, others scoffed. It became the source for many a joke.  You can read about it here

I had no reason not to believe it and I looked askance at those who automatically dismissed the story.

Last year, before Pesach, Family First magazine had a remarkable story. In it, a woman shopping in a very busy hardware store before Pesach saw a woman who looked out of place in New Square, who looked like she needed help.  She offered her assistance and the woman said she was making her first Pesach and was not sure what to get and what to do.

The woman, who looked like she was in her early 30's explained that she drove all the way from West Haven, Connecticut to New Square because of the fish story.  Her family was traditional - they went to synagogue for Yom Kippur, and each year there was a big family seder. But then it petered out and her father died, and she did not attend a seder since she was 17.

She said her father loved to fish in a brook near her home.  When she heard the story about the fish that said "tikkun," she felt her father was talking to her through the fish, telling her to correct what she had abandoned, to make a Pesach seder again. And she thought "there was no better place to start than here (New Square), the place that was witness to the fish with a message."

The New Square lady helped the woman choose what to buy for Pesach and a few days later she went to West Haven to help her kasher her kitchen and get it ready for Pesach.

We Do Have Choices

In a talk, Rivka Malka Perlman told about a young man whom her brother (Benzion Klatzko) is trying to be mekarev.

The person is tough and bitter and her brother asked him what's your story?

He said, when I was younger I was okay, but then my mother got sick and passed away. I was very lonely and having a very hard time in school, and I ended up connecting with not the greatest kids.
One day, the boys threw a rock at someone's car and the alarm went off. The owner came out screaming but the other boys ran off and I was blamed for it. The man said I'm calling your father and the police. The police came and took a report. My father came and took me home and was very disappointed with me.

I was punished and I didn't know what to think. I had gone from being an average person to a horrible person. I left school and did horrible things.

***
One day he was at a pizza shop and a nice man came over and spoke to him. He began casually meeting him, and he gradually spent more time with the man and began to trust him. The man recommended a summer camp for him. He was excited to go and the man said he would take care of the money and speak to the boy's father.

He hadn't been in a Jewish environment for so long but this seemed like a chance to start over.
His father gave permission and camp was a fresh start and he was reminded that he's actually a nice guy, and he started to have fun again and to heal from his mother's passing.

He came back from camp a new person.

The guys back home saw that he was different. They invited him to a barbecue and he was nervous about attending because he hadn't had friends back home in a long time. He decided to give it a try. He wanted to be the kid he was in camp, but it was hard to do that at home.

The barbecue was wonderful and he felt so grateful that the good times could last. He went inside to the kitchen for more drinks and saw, to his dismay, that the host was the owner of the car that had been hit by a rock. The man yelled, I remember you, I don't forget kids like you, you think you can come to my house and be part of a barbecue here, what are you doing on my property? Get out of here, you don't belong here!

"That was the end for me. I joined a gang and that's me today."

***
I heard this story and thought, it is so important to teach children about free choice, that Hashem makes things happen to us, but we get to choose how to respond. We are not compelled to react one way or another.

Losing his mother and feeling lonely, made him friendly with fringe kids. Being yelled at, apparently wrongly, made him decide he's bad. Going to camp and having a good experience, made him feel he's good. Being yelled at again, made him feel turned off from everything and everyone. He behaved like a marionette - when his "strings were pulled," he moved in that direction.

One can imagine someone else in similar circumstances responding differently. It's not like this young man had to respond as he did, though he may have felt that there was no other way. It is this that I think we must convey, that we do have choices in our responses, that the way we respond is not a given.

As I read in a book about happiness long ago about a former prisoner of the Soviet gulag who spent 12 yrs. in concentration camps, starved, beaten, humiliated, who lost two fingers to frostbite who said, "Victim! I am not a victim! I survived!"

Many people can’t do this. They carry their hurt forever. They begin to define themselves as their pain.

Life hurts but you can’t allow yourself to get wrapped up in this hurt, constantly reliving it, fearing the future and grieving the past. That’s victimization.

Other people can hurt you but only you can victimize yourself.

Then and Now

Mrs. Grama, whose sensible view I've quoted before here, wrote another sensible piece in Inyan magazine that began with her relating three incidents.

In the first incident, a father takes his three year old to the Steipler Gaon and says, "He still doesn't talk."

The Steipler asked him, "Can he say at least one word?"

The father said yes, he says Abba.

The Steipler said, then don't worry, with Hashem's help he will talk.

In the second incident, a young father asked Rabbi Nissim Karelitz what to do about his four and six year olds who constantly fought.

R' Karelitz said, Tell them stories [that emphasize good middos]."

Third incident - an 11 year old boy's principal asked the mother to come down to the school where he told her that her son was brazenly breaking the rules and was having trouble concentrating in class.

The mother consulted with an experienced and successful mother of a large family who knew her and her son well and was told she must do a better job protecting her son from being bullied by his older brother, a child needs to feel safe in his own home, and told her how.

Mrs. Grama says the three stories ended well. She points out that nowadays, with these situations, most people would have consulted with a speech pathologist, a behavioral psychologist and a psychiatrist who would likely have:

asked the parents why they hadn't started intervention earlier and advised immediate speech therapy

discussed sibling rivalry and appropriate parental intervention followed by behavioral therapy

prescribed medication to calm the child followed by therapy.

She asks, are we made differently nowadays? Or is it our way of thinking that has become corrupted?

We Can Daven for Anything

Rabbi Dovid Kaplan, in an Inyan magazine article, wrote that he heard that Rabbi Tzvi Meir Zilberberg said in a shiur that over Chanuka he slept a total of 17 hours. This is because he wanted to absorb as much of the spiritual energy of Chanuka as he could.

Someone went over to him after the shiur and asked how it was possible to go for eight days on a little more than two hours of sleep a night.

R' Zilberberg responded, "Do you know how many years I've been davening to need less sleep?"

R' Kaplan said his embarrassed reaction to that was, "Oh, I didn't realize you can daven to need less sleep." He had thought that davening was just for parnassa and health and things like that.

***
I had a teacher who, if I'm not mistaken, said not to ask Hashem for the petty things. This is wrong. We can and should daven to make the bus or train, to find parking quickly, to get a seat or a good seat, to find what we're looking for, for the dish to come out good, to get a quick response, and everything else! Not that R' Zilberberg's tefilla was for something petty. The point is, Hashem is the address for everything, and we shouldn't limit our requests to the standard ones.

Women Are Absent

I find it interesting how we never hear a story about the beis din shel maala (Heavenly Court) that has a woman involved. If you know of any, please tell us ...

All those stories, about arriving in the next world and having one's deeds scrutinized, and piles of mitzvos and sins, and angels or tzaddikim getting involved in the judgment, and what it is like in the place of reward or punishment, never have a female as the protagonist! Why is this so? For that matter, I don't think I've read any stories about Jewish women who are nearly dead or apparently died, who come back to life to tell what they've seen in the next world.

I'm not talking about women who are no longer living coming to someone alive in a dream; there are stories like that.

For that matter, some of the questions that the Gemara (Shabbos 31a) says a soul will be asked do not apply to women. The questions are:

אמר רבא בשעה שמכניסין אדם לדין אומרים לו נשאת ונתת באמונה קבעת עתים לתורה עסקת בפו"ר צפית לישועה פלפלת בחכמה הבנת דבר מתוך דבר ואפ"ה אי יראת ה' היא אוצרו אין אי לא לא. Rava said: After departing from this world, when a person is brought to judgment for the life he lived in this world, they say to him ... Did you conduct business faithfully? Did you designate times for Torah study? Did you engage in procreation? Did you await salvation? Did you engage in the dialectics of wisdom or understand one matter from another? And, nevertheless, beyond all these, if the fear of the Lord is his treasure, yes, he is worthy, and if not, no, none of these accomplishments have any value. 

Did you conduct business honestly? (some women are in business; many aren't).
Did you set fixed times to study Torah? (not for women)
Were you involved in being fruitful and multiplying? (a man's mitzva)
Did you look forward expectantly for the redemption?
Did you engage in the pursuit of wisdom?
Above all else, does the person have fear of heaven?

The Pious Ones

I read The Pious Ones and thought it was quite good. The author, a writer for The New York Times, describes himself as "a fairly assimilated Jew who nevertheless attends synagogue and observes many biblical traditions," and yet he looks very favorably upon Chassidim. He puts a positive spin even on things that don't seem so positive.

His first chapter, about Yitta Schwartz, refers to a NY Times article he wrote about her: here . He said that the less than prominently placed article ended up at the top of that day's list of most emailed stories and stayed on the list for many more days.

Update on Modern Forms of Communication

As a follow-up post to this one here about communication nowadays, there was an article in Binah by someone who says she was as anti-cellphone as they come.  Whatever advantages owning one had, they were outweighed by the disadvantages, as far as she was concerned.

But there was a price to pay, she says and she finally bought a cellphone. Why? Because the lack of communication was disturbing.  Her friends and people she knows all text, and she missed out on more and more things that were important to her like meetings she attends that are arranged by text. By not texting, the organizer had to remember to call her (which is a bother) which she did not always do and not having a cell phone was putting the organizer out each month.

There were mazal tov texts that she never received, bris information she didn't get, and carpooling texts in which she wasn't included. "Not having a cellphone, I was separating myself from the klal, a klal that embraced texting as an easy mode of communication. Because like it or not, cellphone ownership (including texting) is a societal expectation."

She has since seen other advantages to owning a cellphone, though she says they are side benefits and not reason enough to own one.  She now owns one "in order to stay connected with my family, friends and community. In my opinion, cellphone ownership and close relationships are only mutually exclusive if you allow them to be."

This supported what I wrote years ago, that I communicate more with people with modern technology. It may still be true that for young people, it stifles their communication. I'm not even sure that is true.

Interestingly, kosher phones in the US are filtered phones which may allow some Internet connection and texting, while kosher phones in Israel do not allow any Internet or texting. So what in America is called "kosher," in Israel is called "treif."

No Sandwich

So this is what I learn from Yisro.

That when it comes to fathers-in-law and sons-in-law, 1) a father-in-law can criticize his son-in-law as it says: Yisro saw everything Moshe was doing to the people and he said, what is this that you are doing? ... What you are doing isn't good!

2) That you can give unsolicited advice (maybe this applies only to fathers-in-law to sons-in-law).

3) That the advice does not have to be done with the "sandwich method," in which criticism is "sandwiched" between two positive comments.

Hard to Relate

There is a famous Ibn Ezra on the dibra of lo sachmod - "Do not covet your neighbor's house. Do not covet your neighbor's wife, his manservant, his maidservant, his ox, his donkey, or whatever belongs to your neighbor." He says, a commoner does not think he will marry the princess because he knows the princess is out of his league. We only desire things we can relate to. If something is completely beyond us, we don't consider having it.

The Ibn Ezra says that if we consider that people have the things they have because Hashem wants them to, then we will not covet things that other people have.

Can Americans relate to the Ibn Ezra's analogy? I don't think so. American kids are raised with the message: You can be whatever you want to be.  You can be an astronaut. You can be the one to find the cure for cancer. You can be president of the United States. There is nothing you can't have or be if you want it enough.

This message has been internalized in the frum mindset.  You can grow up to be a gadol who will be on people's walls here . And why can't a middle class - lower middle class - or poor family have a fancy wedding like a rich person who can afford it? Back in the shtetl you can be sure that the cobbler never dreamed of making a wedding like the town parnas, but nowadays, with everyone equal and supposedly deserving of the same things as everyone else, why shouldn't the poor do and have what the rich do and have? The Ibn Ezra's understanding of lo sachmod is much harder for us to grasp.

The Wrong Address

I have been reading a diary that is printed weekly in Ami Living. A mother tells about her wonderful son who did beautifully in school through high school. Then he inexplicably began acting strangely. She says it is ten years now that she has been experiencing horrible situations with her son, his drug use, stealing, suicide attempts, outbursts, lack of religiosity.  For a while it was a mystery, until her son confided in her husband that he had watched inappropriate things (no further details about this). This is a letter that I wrote to the magazine which they have not published:

I have been following the tragic story of a woman's son's deterioration over the past many installments of Up the Down Escalator and I am perplexed.  What set the young man off was seeing inappropriate things. This led to consultations with psychologists, a social worker, and even medication and hospitalization.

But seeing inappropriate things is a spiritual problem! Out in the 'velt," seeing such things is not viewed as a problem! It would seem that the right person to consult about this would have been a rabbinic guide who could have provided a Torah perspective, direction in teshuva, and guidance in how to get back on track, spiritually.  

Wishing all of us yeshuos,

To me, it sounds like asking for a loaf of bread in a hardware store, shoes in a grocery story.  They may as well consult with a podiatrist; why a psychologist? These professionals were of no use and worse, the young man deteriorated under their care. It is painful to read how misdirected he was. They focused exclusively on his depression and other psychological symptoms and not on what got him in the mess in the first place.

Neither of Them Understood

I read two stories this week having to do with Rabbi Moshe Feinstein z"l and I thought they go well together.

One story, told by R' Simcha Bunim Cohen, who was a bachur at the time, took place in 1979 on a Shabbos afternoon at MTJ.  When R' Moshe, who usually said a dvar Torah shalosh seudos time, felt weak and unable to speak, someone volunteered to speak but said he did not Yiddish and could only say it in English. R' Moshe said he should say it in English.

As the man spoke, R' Moshe sat on the edge of his chair, fully focused, not taking his eyes off the speaker, smiling and nodding the entire time. But R' Cohen knew that R' Moshe barely understood English!

After Shabbos, in the car going home, R' Cohen asked R' Moshe whether he understood the dvar Torah. R' Moshe said: Only two words.  When R' Cohen asked why R' Moshe had looked so intently at the speaker, R' Moshe said, Chazal say: derech eretz kadma l'Torah (good manners precede Torah). If a person speaks publicly and I don't look at him and show that I'm listening, how will I be able to pasken and say shiurim?

***
The other story (in Torah Tavlin Tefilla and Haftorah) was about a man who came from out of town, every year, for the Aguda Convention, just so that he could hear Rabbi Moshe Feinstein speak. Then he would leave.  What most people, who saw him year after year, did not know was that the man did not speak Yiddish and yet, he sat through R' Moshe's speech which was delivered in Yiddish!

Someone who knew him finally asked him, "Why do you come here especially to hear R' Moshe when you don't even understand what he is saying?"

He answered, "Do you think I need to understand what R' Moshe is saying? And he cited Moshe Rabeinu at Har Sinai, "Moshe yidaber," that Moshe spoke but only Hashem could hear him. I just need to look at him and my neshama understands everything he says."

Mature Eleven Year Old

An 11 year old commented that she is not looking forward to being bas mitzva because then she will have the ol mitzvos (yoke-responsibility of mitzvos).  And she is not looking forward to age 20 because then she will be chayav b'dinei shomayim (obligated by heavenly judgement).

This was presented as something quite negative, that there is no joy in her observance of Yiddishkeit. I countered with - she sounds mature, like a yirei shomayim, not someone fixated on her bas mitzva party and presents.

True, she should be told that Yiddishkeit is about serving Hashem with joy, and this should be emphasized in various ways, with halacha and stories. But how wonderful it is to hear that a child that age takes mitzva observance seriously.

The other extreme is a focus entirely on Hashem loves us no matter what. Although that is true, it seems to be producing people who think they can dress as they please, go where they want, and do what they want, because regardless of their actions, Hashem loves them.

We need to meet in the middle and teach both yiras shomayim which includes yiras cheit, and simcha shel mitzva.

Idealistic Women

At the Agudah Midwest Convention, R' Dishon read a letter that he received.  The letter, from a woman in Lakewood, told him off (his words). He felt the tears and pain in the letter.  It said:

What do you want from me? You say to spend quality time with your children. Can you tell me when? I get up at 6:00 in the morning and have to hurry and get ready.  I can't afford a babysitter [to come to the house], so at 7:00 on the icy road, I run to bring my son to a babysitter.  

Then she goes to a town near Lakewood to teach. She comes home 2:00 and has to rush and prepare lunch because her husband has to get ready for 2nd seder. When he leaves, she cleans up the house. Her boys comes home from cheder at 4:00. In the evening she's falling apart and she has to prepare for teaching the next day.  Where is the quality time for my kids? she asks.

Unfortunately, the lecture ended with R' Dishon extolling these ladies who live such a life, who are so idealistic, and he does not respond to her question.  Nor does he, in any way, say: This is a crazy life you are living, in which you sacrifice your children for your husband's learning.

As R' Elya put it, " 'What you are doing is in gantzen nisht nohrmal!" (completely abnormal)" see here

The madness continues.  And so do the articles about the myriad problems that children today have, and the mothers with PPD and numerous emotional/mental problems.

Shabbos Reminders

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