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SERMON RESOURCE FOR SHLUCHIM

DISTRIBUTION DATE:

THURSDAY , JUNE 7TH 2018 –24TH SIVAN 5778 PARSHAS SHLACH

SERMON TITLE: The Reward of Sacrifice

The Reward of Sacrifice

Good Shabbos!

It was on April 1, 1933 in Germany that the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, which had just risen to power, declared a national boycott against Jewish-owned businesses.

Bear in mind that anti-Semitic boycotts and persecution against Jewish-owned businesses, and Jewish college students, Jewish judges and Jewish professionals, had been going on for years by that point. But on that day, the Sturmabteilung, or SA, which was the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, attacked numerous Jewish businesses. Wearing their trademark brown shirts, they destroyed merchandise, assaulted Jewish owners and employees, and stood before entrances to prevent members of the general public from shopping.

On the prominent Alexanderplatz thoroughfare in Berlin stood a massive department store which at the time was the largest in all of Europe, never mind Germany. It employed between 2,000 and 2,500 employees, and even the highest-ranking members of the Nazi Party were regular customers there.

The name of the store was N. Israel. It had been founded in 1815 by Nathan Israel, a German Jewish businessman. It had grown and expanded over the years and decades, and by the 1930s, the Israel family was one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Germany. On the day of the boycott, some 700 Jewish workers were employed by the store.

Well, the Brown Shirt thugs stood outside the entrances and tried to keep Germans from entering and shopping. One German woman told the thugs, “My grandparents shopped here, and I’ll continue shopping here!”

But the SA goons then went into the store and started arresting Jewish employees—but as for the primary owner, Wilfrid Israel, who had dual citizenship, he was not touched. Besides being a German citizen, he was also a British citizen—and during that time, the Nazis did not harm citizens who held foreign documentation.

Now, Wilfrid Israel, who had relationships with various leaders of the Nazi Party, was one of the first Jews to really understand the true mission of Nazi Germany. And so he started to invest all of his energies and his influence to save Jews from Germany.

The N. Israel department store business had a lot of cash on hand, and so Wilfrid Israel would send his assistant, a Jew named Pollack, to bribe the Nazi officers to set his workers free.

Those employees could not stay in Germany any longer; they had to run. But where to? Which country would accept them? Wilfrid Israel wove good relationships with the British consulate in Berlin, and with that, he provided the British with vital intelligence on the Nazis. In exchange for

2 that, he asked not for money but for entry visas from the British Empire to then-Palestine or England.

And thus, immediately after he would free these Jews from the Nazis’ early concentration camps, he would provide them with passports complete with exit visas, allowing them to immediately leave German soil. What’s more, he continued paying their salaries even up to two years after they had been living in other countries. From 1933 through 1939, he rescued an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 Jews.

But then, on November 9, 1939, there came Kristallnacht. On that night, the Nazi Party broke into N. Israel (and Jewish stores and synagogues all across the country) and destroyed the place. Wilfrid Israel understood that this was it—that the end was here. It was then that he got the idea of the now-legendary Kindertransport—and for the next ten months, he and his fellow heroes, both Jewish and not, got thousands of Jewish kids out of Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia and into England.

Before the end of 1939, the Nazis forced Wilfrid Israel to “sell” the N. Israel business, and he was forced to leave Germany. He moved to London—but he kept coming back to Germany to see to it that the contingents of Kindertransport children got on their way. And when the war broke out, he kept working from England, doing everything that he could to save even more Jews.

Now, most people who hear this story ask, “What happened to Wilfrid Israel? Why have I never heard this story?”

Well, in 1940, Wilfrid Israel visited Israel. He had come to visit a Kibbutz on the shore of the Carmel. That Kibbutz had been established by a group of young Jews who had immigrated from Germany in 1933; Wilfrid Israel had been supporting them economically in establishing it. Now, he was very happy to visit, and he said that he wanted to come live there in the future.

He then went back to England and, in 1943, he was sent by the Jewish Agency to bring visas to Jews in Portugal. But on the flight back to England, his plane was shot down by a Luftwaffe fighter plane, and they didn’t even find his body.

In his will, Wilfrid Israel bequeathed the archives of his work to the Kibbutz. In grateful appreciation, the Kibbutz built a residence named in his memory. It was called Beit Wilfrid (Wilfrid’s House), and they “buried” the archive in the building’s basement and never told anyone about it. In that way, the archive was eventually completely forgotten.

But a few years ago, one of the Kibbutzniks started doing research into the story of Wilfrid Israel—and discovered the archive in the basement, along with files of documents and letters from world leaders with whom Wilfrid Israel had been communicating.

For example, in one letter, a man named Albert Einstein writes, “I cannot free myself of the sentiment that you are simply too good for this world,” and that people like him give him the

3 feeling that there is hope for the human race. And so, based on the trove of letters and documents that he found, the young Kibbutznik put together a documentary called “the Hidden Man.”

And that brings us right to this week’s Torah portion.

In this week’s Parshah of Shlach, Moshe Rabbeinu sends 12 spies to spy on the Holy Land and report back to him what the situation there is.

So when they come back, ten of them report that it will be impossible to conquer the Land. Only two report that they will indeed succeed in conquering the Land. Who were these two? Yehoshua and Kaleiv.

About Yehoshua, we are told explicitly at the beginning of the Parshah that Moshe added the letter yud to Yehoshua. His name had been Hoshea, but Moshe added a yud and made him Yehoshua. And Rashi adds, “Moshe prayed for him, ‘May G-d [spelled with the two-letter Name of G-d spelled with yud and hei] redeem you from the plot of the spies” (Bamidbar 13:16). That means that Moshe, in addition to adding G-d’s Name to Yehoshua’s name, also gave Yehoshua the power to not be influenced by the opinion of his fellow spies. So it’s no wonder that Yehoshua was opposed to their views.

But what about Kaleiv? Where did he get the strength to oppose the majority of his fellow spies? It wasn’t that he simply followed the lead of Yehoshua—on the contrary, he led the minority opinion. He was the one who stood up before the entire nation, as the Torah tells us, “And Kaleiv incited the entire nation regarding Moshe, and he said, ‘We shall surely go up and inherit it!” (Bamidbar 13:30). And even in the verses following that, we are told that that when Yehoshua and Kaleiv told the entire people, “But do not rebel against G-d!” (Bamidbar 14:9), the entire people wanted to stone them—and it was only at the last moment that G-d saved them.

So it’s one thing with Yehoshua, who was a disciple of Moshe Rabbeinu. About Yehoshua, the Torah (Shmos 33:11) tells us, “the lad did not budge from inside the tent.” But Kaleiv? Where did he get that power?

So the Torah tells us that the spies “came as far as Chevron” when they were in the Land, and Rashi there points out that the word for “came” is singular, not plural—meaning, as Rashi goes on, that “Kaleiv went there himself” to pray at the graves of the Patriarchs to not be tested by his comrades and be part of the plot” (Bamidbar 13:22).

But the fact that he went on his own to pray that he not be influenced by them… where did this initiative come from?

Who was this Kaleiv?

4 So for starters, Kaleiv was the husband of Miriam, the sister of Moshe Rabbeinu (Rashi, Shmos 17:10). Kaleiv also had a son, a very great man in his own right whom most of us sitting here have never heard of, Chur. In the entire text of the Torah, Chur is only mentioned twice— but form those incidences where his name is recorded, it emerged that we are dealing with a man of tremendous stature.

The first time Chur is mentioned is at the Battle of Amalek. Right after the Jewish Nation leaves Egypt, we are told at the end of the Parshah of Beshalach that Amalek came to do battle with the Jewish Nation, and that Moshe ordered Yehoshua, “Go out and fight with Amalek… and Moshe, Aharon and Chur climbed to the top of the mountain” (Shmos 17:9).

So Yehoshua went out to battle, and Moshe, Aharon and Chur stood fasting and praying that entire day so that Yehoshua and his men would win the fight against Amalek. The Torah adds to that, telling us that when Moshe lifted his hands in prayer, the Jews dominated.

But “Moshe’s hands were heavy, and they took a stone and placed it beneath him and he sat upon it, and Aharon and Chur supported his hands, one from this side and one from this side” (Shmos 17:12). And if Aharon was Moshe’s “right-hand man,” it would mean that Chur was Moshe’s “left-hand man.”

The second time that Chur is mentioned in the Torah is at the end of the Torah portion of Mishpatim. It's right after the Giving of the Torah, which we commemorate with the holiday of Shavuos, when the Jewish Nation heard the Ten Commandments from G-d. And then, Moshe notifies them that he’s going to go up on Mt. Sinai to collect the Tablets of the Covenant. So the Torah tells us that Moshe turned to the elders and said, “Stay for us here until we return to you; and look! Aharon and Chur are with you; whosoever shall bear matters [meaning, any party to a dispute] shall approach them” (Shmos 24:14).

Basically, Moshe notified the entire nation that throughout the course of the entire 40 days during which he’d be missing from the camp, anyone who had any legal question or dispute involving another should approach Aharon or Chur.

And that’s the last we hear of Chur. So now we can ask the same question about Chur that we asked about Kaleiv, or Wilfrid Israel: Where did Chur disappear? And why have we not heard more about him?

So, everyone knows the story of the Golden Calf. And one of the most confusing things about that story is the behavior of Aharon HaKohein during that episode. When the Jews came to Aharon and said, “Rise and make for us a god, for this man Moshe, we do not know what happened to him”—and Aharon did not protest against them and did not tell them, “Are you crazy?! Moshe will surely come back!” But instead, we find that he practically joined with them! The Torah says, “And Aharon said to them, ‘remove the gold nose-rings… and bring them to me.’” And when they brought that jewelry to them, he took it from their hands, tossed it into the fire, and out came the Golden Calf.

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So now we can ask: Why did Aharon not try to hinder them from making the Calf?

So Rashi says something very interesting. He points out that Aharon “saw Chur, the son of his daughter, rebuking them, and they killed him” (Rashi, Shmos 32:5).

And the Midrash (Vayikra Rabbah 10:3) goes into further detail: “When Israel did that deed, they first went to Chur and said to him, ‘Rise and make for us a god,’ and since he did not listen to them, they rose upon him and killed him… and then they went to Aharon and said to him, ‘Rise and make for us a god’; when Aharon heard that, he was immediately scared… he said, ‘They’ve killed Chur, who was a prophet; now, if they kill me, a Kohein, they will fulfill the verse, “If there be killed in G-d’s Temple a Kohein and prophet,” and they will be immediately exiled!’” And so when they came to Aharon, he tried to buy time during which Moshe would return.

And so it’s no wonder that the father of Chur, who had sacrificed his very life to stop the Jews from sinning with the Golden Calf, was the one who would try to stop the Jewish Nation from the Sin of the Spies. Those were the two “sins” of the Jewish Nation of the Generation of the Desert.

Essentially, Chur had a similar experience to that of Wilfrid Israel—he got killed at a young age.

But Chur had something that Wilfrid Israel did not. He had children. Right after the Sin of the Golden Calf, G-d commanded the Jewish Nation to build the Mishkan as an atonement for the Sin of the Golden Calf. “G-d said, ‘Bring the gold of the Mishkan to atone for the gold with which was made the Calf” (Midrash Tanchuma, Terumah 5).

Now, who was the one appointed by G-d to build the Mishkan? The Torah tells us, “Behold! G-d has summoned by name Betzalel son of Uri, son of Chur”—meaning that Chur’s grandson was chosen to be the appointee over all the Mishkan construction work. So the Midrash tells us, “Why did the Torah see fit to mention Chur here? It is because when Israel sought to worship idols, Chur gave his life to G-d and didn’t let them, so they rose and killed him; G-d said to him, ‘By your life, I shall repay you! All the sons who come forth from you—I shall raise up for them a good name in the world’ ” (Shmos Rabbah 48:5, Tanchuma Vayakhel 4). And thus, in the merit of his sacrifice, Chur merited that his grandson Betzalel be the one who built the Mishkan.

The Rebbe frequently repeated the following saying: “G-d does not remain a debtor” (Hayom Yom, 28 Elul)—G-d doesn’t owe anyone anything. So G-d repaid Chur for his sacrifice—and He repaid Wilfrid Israel for his sacrifice, in that over 70 years since his death, there is now great interest in his actions, including books and movies telling his story. And that’s just the beginning.

But the greatest reward for the soul of Wilfrid Israel is when someone hears his story and is inspired to get up and go do something to help another Jew in some place in the world. That’s the greatest boost that can be for the soul of that Jew of heart and spirit who saved tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust.

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Good Shabbos!

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