ב''ה

SERMON RESOURCE FOR SHLUCHIM

DISTRIBUTION DATE:

THURSDAY , AUGUST 16TH 2018 – 12TH ELUL 5778 PARSHAS KI TEITZEI

SERMON TITLE: Praying for our Fellow Jews

Ki Teitzei Praying for our Fellow Jews

Good Shabbos!

We are now in Hurricane season. And for all those that don’t live in Hurricane zones, with the instant Internet and social media, most of us see and hear what goes on in near-real time.

It was heartbreaking to see people in senior-citizen homes standing in waist-deep water waiting for someone to come rescue them; to see the awful destruction caused by the hurricane; to read about the police officer who drowned trying to save someone.

As Jews, we always turn to the Torah to find some text that relates to such situations, and what we must do in response.

And so the most famous story throughout Tanach involving raging waters, of course, is the story of the Navi (Prophet) Yonah, of “Jonah and the Whale” fame, which we read as the Haftarah on Yom Kippur afternoon. Let’s review the story.

So one bright Chol Hamoed Sukkos day thousands of years ago, G-d asked Yonah to travel to the great city of Ninvei and notify them that “their evil rose up before G-d” and that they should repent. But Yonah didn’t want to do it. Why not? Well, Ninvei was the capital city of the Ashurite Empire, a world superpower at the time which had also conquered parts of the Kingdom of Israel—and so, to Yonah, to put it in modern term, it would have been like going to Berlin in 1942 to tell the Nazis to repent and spare themselves G-d’s punishment. Ninvei, after all, was enemy territory, and so Yonah understandably didn’t exactly want to go there and tell them to go back to being good people. He thought it better for them to be destroyed and the Jewish Nation be saved from a bitter enemy.

So Yonah went down to the Port of Yafo (the modern city of Jaffa, which is still a port city) and booked a berth on a ship going not to Ninvei but to Tarshish, which is totally someplace else. He wanted to avoid doing what G-d told him to do. Once on the ship, he went below decks and went to sleep. But then, once at sea, a huge storm broke out. All the non-Jewish sailors called out to their gods while Yonah slept. But then, the captain approached him and said, “Get up and pray to your god!” But Yonah was not prepared to pray—not even for the sailors. But when they cast lots and discovered that it was because of Yonah that this great story visited them, someone advised that Yonah be dumped into the sea. And so ultimately, as we all know, the sailors went right ahead and literally tossed him overboard.

So Yonah gets swallowed by some kind of giant “fish” (not a “whale,”), the Tanach tells us, and deep inside the bowels of this huge sea creature, he finally starts to pray. And what a wonderful prayer it is! In it, Yonah describes in detail how he was flung to the depths—“all your breakers and waves passed over me” and “I was surrounded by water up to my soul.” So

2 Yonah calls out in prayer—but for whom does he pray? Only for himself—not for the sailors and certainly not for Ninvei. But ultimately, he completes his mission and saves Ninvei.

But there is another place in the Tanach that evokes a situation similar to that of hurricane zones. That would be Chapter 107 of Tehilim (Psalms). In that chapter, Dovid HaMelech (King David) describes four types of very tough situations in which people turn to G-d in prayer—and then thank G-d when they are saved. The first is people getting lost while traveling through deserts and praying to G-d. Then you have “dwellers of darkness and death-shadows,” referring to people in prison who pray to G-d to release them and who thank G-d when they are released. The third case is critically ill people who arrive at the very gates of death “and they cried out to G-d”—but then G-d heals them and they thank Him. And the last case is “those who go down to the sea in ships; who do labor in the great waters.” This is referring to sailors caught by sudden storms and whose ships go up and down among the huge waves—“they reel like a drunkard.” But they cry out to G-d and He hears their prayers, “and He set the storm to silence,” and they thank Him. In contrast to Yonah’s prayer, this chapter of Tehilim is written in the plural from beginning to end—all the people mentioned pray as a group, and not that each individual prays only for himself.

But what’s interesting about this chapter is that when we read it not in a separately-printed Tehilim but as a full original book of Tanach, we discover that with the verses that talk about “those who go down to the sea,” there is the mysterious upside-down Nun before and after them—sort of like parentheses.

Now in a Torah scroll, as a general rule, there are no nekudos—vowels.

Neither does the text of a Torah scroll contain any reading aids—no periods, no punctuation, nothing to mark the beginning or end of a sentence. The Torah reader must know from tradition where the verse ends and where it begins. And so, it’s quite the departure from the norm when you do find places here and there in the actual Torah-scroll text that do have some nekudos above the letters—which the Sages proceed to study and explain in terms of why the Torah adds them.

So with the “Nun Hafuchah,” the Upside-Down Nun, we only find that once throughout the entire Five Books of the Torah.

In the Book of Bamidbar, there is a verse everyone knows because we sing it every Shabbos in shul when we open the Ark to remove the Torah scrolls: “Vayehi binsoa ha’aron.” And in the actual Torah-scroll text, there is an upside-down Nun immediately before and after it. And the Talmud discusses at some length what lies behind these upside-down letters. And being the Talmud, we find several opinions on the matter.

But throughout the entire Tanach as a whole, there is one other place where we find the Nun Hafuchah: Chapter 107 of Tehilim. But there, hardly any Sage has any discussion about it.

3 So perhaps we can explain it as follows:

The letter Nun in the Hebrew alphabet is the first letter of the word “nofel,” a verb which means “fall” or a noun referring to a “faller” or “one who falls.” (And that’s why “nofel” doesn’t appear in “Ashrei,” the common chapter of Tehilim that we recite three times a day.) And perhaps this is to symbolize that the four situations described in Chapter 107 of Tehilim describe people dropping to lower levels. Desert travelers, the first, are merely lost—they haven’t yet lost their freedom or their health. Then you have prisoners, who have lost their freedom but not their health—as people say, “As long as I’m healthy…” Then you have people who are sick, who don’t even have their health—but at least they have time (or some time) with which to fight for their lives. But with the last of the four, people going down in the sea— there the Tanach gives us an upside-down Nun, to emphasize the seriousness of the situation. A person about to drown in the sea is in the worst situation of all—we’re talking about minutes or even seconds here. With the first three situations, we’re talking about falling—but with drowning (or any threat of immediate death), we’re talking about already fallen, about having already hit rock bottom, about having nowhere else to run or go. And that’s why the prayer of such a person comes from the very depths of one’s soul.

So the lesson in this, my friends, is that when we are witness to natural flooding, when people drown and when thousands of homes are damaged, and among them at times even fellow Jews and Jewish institutions in an “Upside Down Nun” state, it is incumbent upon us to rise to the occasion and help them however we can—and more than that, to pray for them.

Let us hope and pray that we never see such disasters, and may this coming year be one that is not only free of such situations, but one marked by the ultimate best situation—the coming of Moshiach, speedily in our days, amen!

Good Shabbos!

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