Kiddush Levanah: Under the Light of the Silvery Moon (Part 7)
“My walk on the moon lasted three days. My walk with
Charles Duke – Lunar Module Pilot, Apollo 16
Kiddush Levanah then continues with the following sentence, one that is repeated three times: “Just as I dance toward you but cannot touch you, may none of my enemies be able to touch me for evil.”
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch explains this as meaning that just as we cannot touch the moon and change its trajectory in any way, so too our enemies cannot change Hashem’s course of history. Despite the seemingly dismal dimensions of Jewish history, everything that happens to the Jewish nation and to world history is Divinely ordained.
Rabbi Eliyahu Meir Bloch (1895-1955) was one of the heads of the Telshe Yeshiva in Lithuania prior to and during the Holocaust. In 1941 he traveled to the United States on a fundraising mission for the Yeshiva. While there, the German army invaded Lithuania, and most of the faculty and the student body were liquidated by the Nazis, including his wife and family. Rather, than sink into despair, Rabbi Bloch reestablished the Yeshiva in Cleveland, Ohio. The Yeshiva subsequently relocated to Wickliffe, where it continues to flourish today. When explaining the verses in the First Book of Shmuel (20:21-22), he would say, “There is a tremendous lesson being taught here. When a Jew is forced to flee, it is not because his enemy is chasing him. Rather, Hashem uses the enemy to ensure that the Jew goes where Hashem wants him to be. A Jew never runs from an enemy. Rather, he runs to a place that Hashem has destined for him.”
As Rabbi Yaakov Emden wrote some three hundred years ago (Siddur Beit Yaakov, Sulam Beit Keil), “When we contemplate our situation in the history of the world, we realize that we are a nation exiled, like scattered sheep. After all the thousands of years of hardship that have befallen us, there is no nation as oppressed as ours. Our enemies are numerous. With hatred and jealousy, they have raised their heads to uproot and destroy us. Even so, they have been unable to fulfill their plans. The most powerful of nations have risen against us and long ago fallen, their memory forgotten like a passing shadow, but we who cling to Hashem survive today. Despite all the torments of our exile, we have not forsaken even one letter of the written Torah, and the words of our Sages still stand strong. They have been impervious to the hand of time. What could the clever philosophers possibly say to explain this? That it is a coincidence?
“By my life, I swear that this is a greater miracle than those Hashem performed for our forefathers in Egypt, in the desert and in the Land of Israel. The longer the exile lasts, the more the miracle becomes obvious and Hashem’s might is revealed. Everything that we undergo today was already foreseen by the prophets, who bemoaned the terrible length of the exile long before it began. From all their words, not one has fallen aside. He who would dispute this, his words are like smoke and the passing clouds.”
There have been so many moments in Jewish history where one could mistakenly think that we have been abandoned by our Father in Heaven. It is not true. Whatever we experience has been decreed upon us and proves that Hashem is orchestrating every single detail of our existence.
As Winston Churchill, the mythical wartime leader of Great Britain declared, “You have enemies? Good. That means you have stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
We stand up for Hashem. We are His ambassadors in this world and we are the everlasting proof of His Divine blueprint. A blueprint that no individual and no nation can ever realign.
To be continued…
