Spyglasses

I keep coming back to this Torah (it follows me around) and I feel compelled to write about it. 

The Midrash (Tanchuma Shelach 7) tells us when the twelve spies were traversing the land of Canaan, G-d sent a plague so that the inhabitants would be busy burying their dead and hence not notice the spies.

But all the spies saw was a constant trail of funerals and they came back and reported this as yet another negative trait of the land. The Talmud (Sotah 35a) records:

It is a land that eats up its inhabitants. Raba expounded: The Holy One, blessed be He, said: I intended this for good but they thought it in a bad sense. I intended this for good, because wherever [the spies] came, the chief [of the inhabitants] died, so that they should be occupied [with his burial] and not inquire about them.

So many times things have occurred in my life that seem very negative, and I have moaned and complained about them. Yet behind the scenes, perhaps these very occurrences are the very best thing that could have happened.

I just can't see it, as I have on my negative glasses, my kvetchy "spyglasses". And G-d, as described in the Talmudic passage, might say to me, a little sharply, a little compassionately: "Hey, hey, sister, a bit of gratitude here. Everything has been organised for your own good, so stop whining and get with the plan." And the royal route into doing that is gratitude practice. Daily, hourly, every moment. Thank you Hashem for all of it.

That's the only way, really. 

Because while you are surrounded by the funerals, and feeling shaken and disturbed by them, it's really difficult to guess that there is something good behind it.

- - My original post ended here. But now I must add a postscript:

* * * 

The tragic tale of Yechezkel Taub, the Yabloner Rebbe, throughly researched and brought to light by Rabbi Pini Dunner, has haunted me ever since I heard of it.

A Hasidic Rebbe, on fire for the Land of Israel, brings his Hasidim over from Poland around 1920 to found a settlement - later known as Kfar Hasidim. There, some are murdered and some die of starvation. The land truly proves to be one that "ate its inhabitants." 

The project runs out of money and fails, barely scraping by. The rabbi, heading to the USA to fundraise, ends up stuck there during the war, unable to return, unable to help the struggling community.

Then the Holocaust occurs and the Yabloner Hasidim who remained in Poland are wiped out. This was the last straw:

The pain was overwhelming. And moreover, where was God in all this? Did He even exist? If He did, was it not crystal clear that He had utterly abandoned the Yabloner Rebbe? So many people’s lives had been lost or devastated—and he, Yechezkel Taub, had been the agent of their destruction. His entire Hasidic sect had been wiped out, and those who remained alive in Kfar Hasidim despised him for his role in wrecking their lives.

In late 1944, as the full weight of his distressing predicament became clear, and his anger at God grew and kept on growing, the Yabloner Rebbe decided on a drastic course of action. Without Hasidim, he decided to himself, he was no longer a rebbe.

For the next decades, he lived a quiet life as a secular Jew, no beard, no payos, calling himself George T. Nagel. Finally, when he was an old man, his great nephew persuaded him to return to Kfar Hasidim. He was naturally reluctant to go back to a place where he felt everyone remembered him as a thief who took their money, and the one responsible for the deaths of dozens of hasidim. But he agreed.

Arriving, his niece asked him to go to the social hall. It was full of people. One of them approached him and introduced himself, jogging his memory. Then: 

“Look over there …” Chaimke pointed toward a group of people in the middle of the hall. “That’s my son with his wife and children, and next to him my two daughters with their husbands and children. My parents, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, and their children—all murdered by the Nazis. But we came with you, Rebbe. We built this place. We founded this village. We survived. And you were the one who saved our lives. And for that we thank you. Thank you for our lives, and for the lives of our children and grandchildren. We can never thank you enough.”

Another woman, Sheindel, spoke:

Sheindel had a lump in her throat as she spoke, and she struggled to get the words out. “Rebbe, Rebbe, where have you been for so many years? We missed you! We needed you! Without you we would all be dead, and we would not have had our beautiful lives in our beautiful Israel. Why did you leave? Everything turned out OK in the end. Look at us, look at how lucky we are. We escaped from the murderers and built our own homes in God’s promised land. You said we could do it, and we did it.”

The response of the Yabloner Rebbe was:

My friends, my dear, dear friends...I am so moved by this warm welcome. I don’t have very much to say. I have missed this place and all of you so much for all these years. I never understood how much this place meant to me, and how much I meant to you—until now. I never thought about what you just said. I never thought about the fact that I saved your lives, only about all the lives that were lost. I never thought about what I gave you, only about what I took away from you. But now it’s all become clear.

All the pain and trauma were real, were overwhelming. The Yabloner Rebbe blamed himself for the failures and disasters, and in the process, lost God, lost his faith.

How could he know that, in the even bigger picture, he was actually saving lives and paving the way for dozens, hundreds, of lives to flourish in Eretz Yisrael that would have been snuffed out in Europe.

In this example, we've been vouchsafed that rare glimpse into the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the divine workings, where the horribly bad is actually, in the end, the good. 

* * *

Yechezkel Taub, the Yabloner Rebbe, died in 1986 and was buried in Kfar Hasidim, with a gravestone full of praises as befits a Hasidic Rebbe and founder of a settlement in Israel.

May his memory be for a blessing. 

(For more listen to the 18forty podcast about this story here )