The story is told about Frank, who had a frustrating day at the office. His work was not up to par and his boss came down hard on him for a variety of misdemeanors. Making up for incomplete work, Frank left the office at 7:00 p.m. Late as he was, he figured a trip to the corner pub wouldn’t hurt his spirits.
From his cell phone, he called his wife to tell her that he had just left the office and would be home within the hour.
After a few drinks, he got into his car and headed for the parkway. His judgment impaired by a mean combination of frustration and alcohol, he headed home in the southbound lane. Unfortunately, his car was pointed north!
In his rush to get home, he began dodging the oncoming cars. Suddenly his cell phone rang. “Frank,” his wife shouted to him in a panic. “Please be careful! The radio just reported that there is a madman on the parkway driving a car in the wrong direction!”
“One madman with a car going in the wrong direction?” asked Frank incredulously. “There are hundreds of them!”
During the last few months, we have been driving on a highway with thousands of cars going in the opposite direction. They were honking their horns waving flags and flashing their lights. But this time Frank was right. We were driving in the right direction; all of the other cars on our side of the highway were driving in the wrong direction.
Somehow, we managed to navigate through them.
The last year has been so emotionally draining for all of us. There is hardly an element of life, be it morality, politics, Eretz Yisroel, and first and foremost the supremacy of limud haTorah, that has not faced formidable challenges by hordes of naysayers, pessimists, adversaries, and overt enemies trying to derail us, morally and physically.
We are still standing. And although the words of Mr. Trump were said in the context of a physical attempt on his life, the cry of “Fight. Fight. Fight,” must be exclaimed to confront every circumstance.
But we get worn down and we need chizuk. Every so often something happens that gives us a small reset either after or even during a calamitous event.
I remember Parshas Noach almost 50 years ago. I was zoche to eat the seudas Shabbos in the home of the cousin of my father, Rav Boruch Rosenberg, rosh yeshivas Slabodka in Bnei Brak. He posed the following question: Why is it that in the world we live in today, with all its hashchosah and perverseness, we are not subject to having a mabul again? Of course, the Ribbono Shel Olam, promised that He would never again bring a flood to destroy humanity, but what is the p’shat? What does that mean? Does that mean that although the world is deserving of a mabul, and equally as corrupt as the generation of Noach, He will still not bring the mabul? He surmised that perhaps part of the havtocha was that the world would never be allowed to fall to such unrestrained perversity equal to the generation of Noach.
I don’t remember if that was a definitive answer or as we say in the yeshivos, a kler, but I do think that every so often there is a reset button. In the stock market, there is a concept of a “correction.” Every so often when stocks seem to climb and climb, seemingly out of nowhere, there is a sudden drop. The market can fall as much as 10 or 20 percent in a short span of days.
Perhaps, in life as well, surely in this bitter golus, there have been many corrections. For decades, maybe even a century there was a Golden Age in Spain, and then — it all crumbled. The Inquisition forced the Yidden to flee, convert, or give their lives either al kiddush Hashem, or as Marranos, hiding their identities and beliefs, a lifestyle that they were hardly able to sustain for Jewish continuity.
Europe, although it was constantly pockmarked with pogroms and crusades, also had certain times of relative peace and emancipation for Jews. German enlightenment and Polish equality prevailed for short periods and there were those who thought that we could exist on the European continent and maybe even flourish until the coming of Moshiach. Of course, the most recent catastrophic European correction, we know as the Holocaust, changed all that. I don’t have to detail every period of peaceful growth and then a sudden calamitous correction. They occur all too often, wreaking havoc on both our mortal and spiritual sense of serenity. But even the relatively peaceful 80-year post-Holocaust lull, is beginning to severely subside, with overt threats to the physical and spiritual well-being of communities in Holland, Belgium, France, England, and beyond.
A world that was seemingly so pro-Jewish and pro-Israel, has made its correction, and the wake-up call we are receiving is like ice-cold water rousing us up to a new reality. Gone are the days I remember as a boy.
I still remember back in 1967, right after the Six Day War one of my teachers (or maybe even a rebbi) bringing in a full-page ad, placed in what I recall was the newspaper of record, none other than the New York Times.
In bold letters, it screamed. “WE DO NOT WANT TO DO ANY BUSINESS WITH JEWS AND LOOK FORWARD TO SERVING ONLY ARAB CUSTOMERS.”
In small print at the bottom, it was signed by the advertiser, Riverside Memorial Chapels.
Try that today.
There is an advocacy list that sends the most depressing text messages about every antisemitic pro-Hamas event that is taking place across the United States on a daily basis. The goal is for the recipient to send out emails to the local town councils who want to condemn Israel as genocidal, divest any relationship from Israel, or colleges that attempt to host pro-Hamas speakers or promote an anti-Jewish (Zionist) rally with faculty members on their campus.
The emails often work, the resolutions are stopped and the rallies and antisemitic speakers are stifled, but it’s like the arcade game of Whack-a-mole. You bang a hammer on the head of one critter, and another one pops up and rears its ugly head.
There is not one car heading in the opposite direction, there are hundreds of them!
But the news of a President-elect, who is threatening to pull funding from antisemitic universities, invoke sanctions on the virulent antisemitic countries that threaten the Jewish populace of Israel, and speak openly against the immorality pervading our country is hopefully a bit of a correction in the opposite direction. It’s going to be a tough battle, but maybe a smile from above tells us that there is a ray of hope and with teshuvah and tefillah, we can right the ship.
But for now, like Frank, we drive on, even if there are hundreds of cars driving in the opposite direction.
