This Shabbos I will be in the Golan with yeshiva so I won’t have time to write over a full Dvar Torah. Instead, I’d like to say over a thought I heard from my friend, Aron Hertz.
Chazal teach us that each one of the Avos had one specific middah in which they “specialized”. Avraham’s was Chesed, kindness and good deeds, Yitzchak’s was Avodah, serving Hashem, and Yaakov’s was Emes, truth. Yitzchak inherited Avraham’s middah of Chesed and combined it with his middah of Avodah, and Yaakov took both the middos of Avraham and Yitzchak and combined them with his own qualities, using them to personify the middah of emes. What this means exactly is something which could take pages to explain (maybe we will write about it next week), but in the meantime let’s leave it at that.
Aron wanted to explain how each one of these middos has stayed with us as we have traveled through our different galuyot (exiles). After the destruction of the first Beis Hamikdash (Holy Temple), the Jews knew from a prophecy by Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) that they would return to Eretz Yisrael and rebuild the Beis Hamikdash after seventy years. They considered this a great chesed from Hashem that even though they had sinned enough to have the Temple destroyed, it would only be seventy years till its’ rebuilding. Here we have Avraham’s middah. This not only includes you doing chesed, but also being able to recognize the chesed that someone else does for you. This is known as Hakaras Hatov, literally translated as recognizing good, basically meaning appreciation, which is one of the most important traits a Jew must have according to Chazal.
Skipping ahead a few hundred years, we come to the destruction of the second Beis Hamikdash and the galus that continues since then. We have no promise as to when this galus will end and as a result, we must constantly work on our Avodas Hashem in order to stay strong in this time of darkness. At the times when we were shut out from the rest of the world, in the shtetls in Europe and the Jews in third world countries in Asia, we used them to build up our connection to Hashem through davening, learning Torah and living Jewish lives.
After World War II, when the walls of the shtetls and ghettos were torn down, and the Sephardic Jews came west, we entered the third stage of the galus. Now that we are again at the forefront of the world, it is more important now than ever for us to stick to our beliefs. It is our job as Jews to take all that is impure in the world and turn it into the good and pure thing it was supposed to be when Hashem created it. We must use the middah of Emes to insure that we stay true to our Jewish values in a world of turmoil. And just like Yaakov combined the middos of Avraham and Yitzchak in order to complete his middah of emes, we must also utilize all the middos of our Avos in order to stay truthful to our faith and each other.
Shabbat Shalom!
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AIMeM
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