Dear Children,
First of all, I love you: you and your mother are my world.
All around me were signs of hopelessness and helplessness. Let me enumerate.
The first sign: as we got closer to the 9/11 anniversary, German television was filled with stories about the "tragedy" that occurred just two years ago - and how the United States responded poorly to the "tragedy" by using its might to assault weak defenseless countries like Afghanistan and Iraq; how badly the war against terrorism was going and how the US would have fared much better on the world stage had we just followed the Clintonian example - i.e., don't mix in, swallow hard and move on, don't upset the world stage by trying to find those responsible for, let's say, the murder of 230 marines in Lebanon or the attempted destruction of the World Trade Center, or even the ultimate destruction of the WTC and the cold-blooded murder of 2,000 innocent people. I even heard one German commentator ask why the US can't act like Israel, which blows up some empty buildings following the now regular murder of its innocents. But I'll get back to that soon.
The second sign was that I finally got up the courage on this, my fourth trip to Germany, to ask one of my colleagues to take me to the old Jewish section of Frankfurt-Am-Main, a city described by history books as the center of German Jewish culture, with such great luminaries as Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, Rabbi Isaac Breuer, etc., a city my mother used to describe as a teeming Jewish metropolis. I was not surprised by what I saw (or didn't see, to be more exact), but I was sad, particularly for those Jews with those wonderful memories. My late mother, your Grandma, never went back, and I'm happy she didn't - let her memories remain of Frankfurt in 1932, the year before her family left and the year before Hitler, yemach shemo (may G-d curse his name), began his rule of terror and near annihilation of European Jewry.
And then came the reports of the double "suicide bombing", or as I call it "mass murder", in Israel. As word leaked out about who the victims were and I realized I knew one of them, I sat in my hotel room and cried. I cried for the korbonot themselves, the sacrifices the Jewish people are making just because we're Jews. I cried for the family members, each of whose lives are shattered, if not destroyed. I cried as well for the Jewish nation, which has put itself in the position of not being able to properly respond to those acts of mass murder the State was created to prevent from happening again to the Jewish nation.
And I cried for the thousands of patients and future emergency patients who won't have Dr. David Applebaum to take care of them. Dr. Applebaum was an angel, comparable to the angel Gavriel referred to in the Torah, the head of emergency medicine at Shaarei Tzedek Hospital in Jerusalem, the hospital I've taken all of my missions to visit. Dr. Applebaum was the one who took the time (of which he had very little that was free) to show us what terror victims go through, who showed us the ball-bearings packed into the bombs that the monster mass murderers use to inflict greater pain and injury on the victims. He was the one who convinced me to hold a fund-raiser for the hospital, to raise funds for a new emergency room to make his workplace more efficient, more state-of-the-art, so Dr. Applebaum and his team could save more lives.
Now he was the victim, killed together with his daughter, the beautiful bride, on the night before her wedding.
All of the victims are special people, but I knew Dr. Applebaum. My friends, the Friedmans, had gone for the wedding, since their cousin was the groom-to-be. Now they went to the double funeral instead, attended by over 5,000 people.
And, finally, I read in the paper that the Jewish population in the US is down by 5%, that inter-marriage is on the rise and the number of Jewish people who have any knowledge of the Jewish religion is dropping.
So why is this letter entitled "hope"? With all this helplessness and hopelessness, where is the hope?
As I walked to my gate this morning at Frankfurt Airport I heard a young woman say to her three children ?Ayn mi lshol et hashealah.? (there is no one here for me to ask questions).
I asked her, ?What is your question??
Shocked to hear another Hebrew speaker in Frankfurt Airport, she responded that she's looking for the big shopping mall in the airport.
And then she said, ?We're making aliya and the kids want some new toys to take with them.?
I said, ?You're making aliya now, on this trip??
She responded, ?Yes, there's never been a better time. What about you??
I was dumbfounded. Should I tell her about all the things I try to do to help Israel in the States? Should I tell her about the large, close family we have in the US and how difficult it would be for us to move? Or should I tell her how difficult it would be to find a comparable job in Israel? Which of my wonderful excuses should I use?
?Someday,? I respond, ?someday, im yirtze Hashem (if G-D wants).?
But this chance meeting gave me my hope. With all that's happening to our people, particularly in Israel our home, there are amazing people out there making aliyah, going home.
?Bless you and yasher koach (congratulations),? I said to this young woman and her kids, ?you are all great people.?
And bless you and yasher koach to all of those making aliyah, our only real tangible response to the terror being inflicted on our people every day.
First of all, I love you: you and your mother are my world.
All around me were signs of hopelessness and helplessness. Let me enumerate.
The first sign: as we got closer to the 9/11 anniversary, German television was filled with stories about the "tragedy" that occurred just two years ago - and how the United States responded poorly to the "tragedy" by using its might to assault weak defenseless countries like Afghanistan and Iraq; how badly the war against terrorism was going and how the US would have fared much better on the world stage had we just followed the Clintonian example - i.e., don't mix in, swallow hard and move on, don't upset the world stage by trying to find those responsible for, let's say, the murder of 230 marines in Lebanon or the attempted destruction of the World Trade Center, or even the ultimate destruction of the WTC and the cold-blooded murder of 2,000 innocent people. I even heard one German commentator ask why the US can't act like Israel, which blows up some empty buildings following the now regular murder of its innocents. But I'll get back to that soon.
The second sign was that I finally got up the courage on this, my fourth trip to Germany, to ask one of my colleagues to take me to the old Jewish section of Frankfurt-Am-Main, a city described by history books as the center of German Jewish culture, with such great luminaries as Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, Rabbi Isaac Breuer, etc., a city my mother used to describe as a teeming Jewish metropolis. I was not surprised by what I saw (or didn't see, to be more exact), but I was sad, particularly for those Jews with those wonderful memories. My late mother, your Grandma, never went back, and I'm happy she didn't - let her memories remain of Frankfurt in 1932, the year before her family left and the year before Hitler, yemach shemo (may G-d curse his name), began his rule of terror and near annihilation of European Jewry.
And then came the reports of the double "suicide bombing", or as I call it "mass murder", in Israel. As word leaked out about who the victims were and I realized I knew one of them, I sat in my hotel room and cried. I cried for the korbonot themselves, the sacrifices the Jewish people are making just because we're Jews. I cried for the family members, each of whose lives are shattered, if not destroyed. I cried as well for the Jewish nation, which has put itself in the position of not being able to properly respond to those acts of mass murder the State was created to prevent from happening again to the Jewish nation.
And I cried for the thousands of patients and future emergency patients who won't have Dr. David Applebaum to take care of them. Dr. Applebaum was an angel, comparable to the angel Gavriel referred to in the Torah, the head of emergency medicine at Shaarei Tzedek Hospital in Jerusalem, the hospital I've taken all of my missions to visit. Dr. Applebaum was the one who took the time (of which he had very little that was free) to show us what terror victims go through, who showed us the ball-bearings packed into the bombs that the monster mass murderers use to inflict greater pain and injury on the victims. He was the one who convinced me to hold a fund-raiser for the hospital, to raise funds for a new emergency room to make his workplace more efficient, more state-of-the-art, so Dr. Applebaum and his team could save more lives.
Now he was the victim, killed together with his daughter, the beautiful bride, on the night before her wedding.
All of the victims are special people, but I knew Dr. Applebaum. My friends, the Friedmans, had gone for the wedding, since their cousin was the groom-to-be. Now they went to the double funeral instead, attended by over 5,000 people.
And, finally, I read in the paper that the Jewish population in the US is down by 5%, that inter-marriage is on the rise and the number of Jewish people who have any knowledge of the Jewish religion is dropping.
So why is this letter entitled "hope"? With all this helplessness and hopelessness, where is the hope?
As I walked to my gate this morning at Frankfurt Airport I heard a young woman say to her three children ?Ayn mi lshol et hashealah.? (there is no one here for me to ask questions).
I asked her, ?What is your question??
Shocked to hear another Hebrew speaker in Frankfurt Airport, she responded that she's looking for the big shopping mall in the airport.
And then she said, ?We're making aliya and the kids want some new toys to take with them.?
I said, ?You're making aliya now, on this trip??
She responded, ?Yes, there's never been a better time. What about you??
I was dumbfounded. Should I tell her about all the things I try to do to help Israel in the States? Should I tell her about the large, close family we have in the US and how difficult it would be for us to move? Or should I tell her how difficult it would be to find a comparable job in Israel? Which of my wonderful excuses should I use?
?Someday,? I respond, ?someday, im yirtze Hashem (if G-D wants).?
But this chance meeting gave me my hope. With all that's happening to our people, particularly in Israel our home, there are amazing people out there making aliyah, going home.
?Bless you and yasher koach (congratulations),? I said to this young woman and her kids, ?you are all great people.?
And bless you and yasher koach to all of those making aliyah, our only real tangible response to the terror being inflicted on our people every day.