Shabbat HaGadol - The Story of a Great Jewish-American©
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| Photo by Tierra Mallorca on Unsplash |
If you bought your house before the pandemic, consider yourselves very fortunate. There were unwritten rules that people did before buying a house: getting pre-approved for a mortgage, don’t make an offer based on your heart, send in a lower bid and meet in the middle, and always, always do a full home inspection.
These rules no longer apply, but there’s one, in particular, that seems like such a departure from the past, seemingly terrible advice: do not get an inspection because while you’re waiting for the inspection, someone will buy the house with no questions asked.
In Florida, buying a house without an inspection is a risky proposition because you don’t know what’s in the walls. Every Florida homeowner’s worst nightmare is the M word - Mold.
What would the Torah advise you to do? Inspect the walls, not just for mold though. Let me explain:
We read the following in our parashah this week, in Leviticus 14:33-57. Here’s the introduction to the subject (Leviticus 14:33-35).
וַיְדַבֵּר יְהֹוָה אֶל־מֹשֶׁה וְאֶל־אַהֲרֹן לֵאמֹר׃
The LORD spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying:
כִּי תָבֹאוּ אֶל־אֶרֶץ כְּנַעַן אֲשֶׁר אֲנִי נֹתֵן לָכֶם לַאֲחֻזָּה וְנָתַתִּי נֶגַע צָרַעַת בְּבֵית אֶרֶץ אֲחֻזַּתְכֶם׃
When you enter the land of Canaan that I give you as a possession, and I inflict an eruptive plague upon a house in the land you possess,
וּבָא אֲשֶׁר־לוֹ הַבַּיִת וְהִגִּיד לַכֹּהֵן לֵאמֹר כְּנֶגַע נִרְאָה לִי בַּבָּיִת׃
the owner of the house shall come and tell the priest, saying, “Something like a plague has appeared upon my house.”
We heard about Tza’arat in last week’s parashah, a skin affliction, but this week, we learn that this infection can spread to a house. No surprisingly, our Sages wrote a lot about this subject because it is a strange situation. In the Tosefta, the rabbis wrote, that this leaper's house never existed, and will never exist, but it was included in the Torah in order for us to debate, learn, and grow from the teaching. In Midrash Vayikra Rabbah, there is a well-known teaching that the Tza’arat in the walls was actually a sign of good news for Bnai Israel who were settling into the homes of the previous tenants, the Canaanites. When they inspected the walls, they discovered hidden money in the walls.
As an aside, if you’re buying a home and don’t have enough for the down payment, I wouldn’t count on finding gold in the walls in South Florida.
Here the rabbis are focusing on the physical aspect of the issue, but many rabbis looked a little bit deeper into what the Tza’arat in the house could be, connecting it to the case of the person with the skin affliction, the Metzorah. The Rabbis took the word Metzorah and said it actually means, Motzi Shem Rah - loosely translated as a person who has an evil tongue, in other words, someone who gossips. In the case of the home, there is some moral failing by its inhabitants, and the tza’arat is a punishment.
One commentator, the Kli Yakar, says that the moral failing was stinginess. Inheriting this home was actually a test for its Israelite inhabitants - would they share their bounty with the poor among them, or would they keep everything for themselves.
The Etz Chaim takes it a step further even. “A home is a family’s private refuge. Thus a home afflicted by plague represents the breakdown of the social values that kept a family safe and united. It was a cause for concern if the problems of society at large had come to infect the home.” The selfishness was a symptom of a greater moral failing - a blindness to the needs of others.
I will take it a step further though - perhaps it can lead to an even more severe moral failing - looking at another human being as if they are not human at all, as if they were animals that could be slaughtered.
There is another interesting aspect to these laws - a homeowner could not diagnose his own house, he needed the Kohen to do this. We need people who have a greater sense of the world to help us look at the moral afflictions in our houses.
On Thursday, I had the honor of attending an event where a 103-year-old Jewish man received Florida’s highest honor: the Governor’s Medal of Freedom.
Ben Ferencz was born in Transylvania in 1920, but his family emigrated to America
Ben is one of my heroes, and I think he’s one of the greatest heroes in American history, but not because of his courage in battle. He’s a hero because of what happened after the war.
Ferencz wrote: “Indelibly seared into my memory are the scenes I witnessed while liberating these centers of death and destruction. Camps like Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Dachau are vividly imprinted in my mind's eye. Even today, when I close my eyes, I witness a deadly vision I can never forget-the crematoria aglow with the fire of burning flesh, the mounds of emaciated corpses stacked like cordwood waiting to be burned.... I had peered into Hell.”
But he also saw other things - American soldiers executive SS officers on sight due to what they saw in the camps, and newly freed prisoners throwing their former captors into crematoriums alive. I will shed no tears over their deaths, but I think what Ben learned was that a summary execution would bring revenge but not bring true justice. What good are we Americans if we give in to our rage without a just trial?
When the Americans liberated the camps, Ben searched for documents from the Nazis. He knew that there had to be a trial, and he was preparing for that day even in the heat of battle.
Through his search for evidence, he learned about the Einsatzgruppen, the SS unit that killed an estimated 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine in 1941. He came to his supervisor with the evidence in Nuremberg and demanded that these men be put on trial. They said, we don’t have the resources to do it, but he wouldn’t give up. Finally, they relented - if you can put together a trial and do your other work, then you can do it. He was 27 years old, he had yet to prosecute a case, and here he was, the Chief prosecutor at the largest murder trial in human history.
I advise you all to watch the movies made about him, and his books to learn his full story. Twenty-two defendants were put on trial for the murder of a million people, all were convicted, and thirteen were given the death penalty.
Without Ben’s courageous actions of uncovering the truth and insisting on a fair trial, we may have never known about the murder of millions of Jews, nor who perpetrated them. But Ben’s heroics continued; he had a long game in mind.
Ferencz’s primary objective had been to establish a legal precedent that would encourage a more humane and secure world in the future. World War II changed his view of the world; the war to end all wars showed him the darkness of humanity.
On Thursday, he shared his reflections on those pivotal days, and what he asked of the court: “We ask this court to affirm man’s right to live in peace and dignity, regardless of his race or creed.” He then spoke about the killing of civilians and introduced a new term that had never been used in an opening statement: Genocide. This trial was about ending genocide, and the eventual end of war.
This is why he is one of the greatest American heroes; he opened our eyes to the moral failings of humanity; mainly, our blindness to each other. Ben saw that Hitler and the Nazi’s ideology infected an entire nation, and it wasn’t because they were unintelligent. He tried officers who had two doctorates, they were brilliant people, but morally inept. The Tza’arat infected an entire nation.
The term Never Again came into our lexicon after World War II. Never again would the world accept genocide, and yet, it has happened over and over, and it is happening now. But we cannot only blame only the leaders of these countries; the Tza’arat spreads, and it infects others.
I recently saw interviews with Russians who spoke about the war in Ukraine. They used language like, they need to be cleaned out, men women, and children. In other words, genocide. But, he went further - the very act of using violence against humans should be eliminated.
On Thursday, he said, “My hope was that we could create a more humane and peaceful world where no one would be killed or persecuted because of his race or religion or political belief,” he said. “We see it still happening today, people running with their infant children, hospitals being bombed, and we have not yet learned the lesson from Nuremberg despite the fact that we laid it out clear.”
You might think this is a pipe dream, but his aspiration for the perfection of humanity is deeply Jewish.
In our Haftarah for today, Shabbat HaGadol, we about Elijah the prophet who will come to the world on an awesome day, when the prophet will reconcile parents with children, and children with their parents, but the literal translation is to restore their hearts.
Parents and children live in the same home, just like the home we spoke about in this week’s parashah. The prophet Malachi is teaching us that we must examine our moral failings, repair them, and then, heal.
Ben Ferencz broke the cycle is murder by restoring justice. But if he were here today, his Shabbat HaGadol sermon would be a lot shorter than mine. He lives by six words which I will leave you with today:
Law, not war
and
Never Give Up
And at 103, Ben Ferencz still has not given up on his dream of creating a world where world peace and protecting the dignity of every human is a reality.
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