Everything seemed wonderful. Reports estimated that tens of thousands of people attended the Salute to Israel Parade in New York City. The jammed-packed Manhattan avenue certainly symbolized solidarity and Jewish pride. Jews marched along singing and dancing with flags of Israel. Everyone seemed to be smiling. Especially the leaders of NY Jewry and the politicians from Israel. No protests. No demonstrations. Everyone had a great time.
When the festive Salute to Israel Parade concluded, the marchers returned to their homes in Manhattan, the Five Boroughs, the Five Towns, Long Island, New Jersey, and places like New Rochelle and Monsey. Will any of the marchers come on Aliyah? Maybe a handful. Maybe one hundred. Over the next few years, maybe several thousand will come. The rest will remain in the USA. Given recent Jewish history, I wonder what Hashem thinks about that?
Didn’t we learn from the Holocaust how much Hashem despises Jewish life in Galut? Is the slaughter of six-million Jews a small thing that it can be so readily forgotten? Oh, sure, we remember it happened. All of the curses of exile set forth in the Torah came to pass. Was this such a small thing that the Jews of New York can so easily return to their houses in Queens and Monsey and pretend that Hashem doesn’t care? Has Hashem forgotten His anguish over the unnatural and shameful situation whereby His children remain scattered in strange lands?
Rashi long ago explained the terrible Chillul Hashem this involves in that the gentiles say that Hashem gave the Jews their own Homeland but is powerless to keep them there. Has Hashem changed His mind about the ingathering of His captive children, whether they themselves feel captive or not? Has Hashem gone to sleep? Has He taken a vacation? No, no, no. Hashem neither slumbers nor sleeps. After nearly two-thousand years of punishment in foreign lands where we are hated and don’t belong, and after He in His mercy has opened the gates of return to our Homeland, how does He feel when the marchers return to their comfortable homes in New York and New Jersey instead of marching straight to Kennedy Airport to board planes for the Cherished Land?
With trembling we recall the words of a Torah Giant of the not-so-distant past, Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk, author of the heralded texts, “Meshech Chochmah" and the “Ohr Samayach," who explains:
“Behold, ever since the Jews have lived among the nations - for so many years, during which no one believed that they would survive in such a unexplainable fashion… Divine Providence functioned as follows: The Jews find rest for close to a hundred or two-hundred years. Then a storm wind arises and disperses its myriad waves, utterly destroying, washing them away without mercy, until they are scattered about, all alone. They run, they flee to a far-off place where they unite and become a community once again. They intensify their Torah learning; their wisdom succeeds greatly (along with their good fortune) until they forget that they are strangers in a foreign land. They think that this is their place of origin and they no longer anticipate Hashem’s spiritual salvation at its designated time. Then, an even stronger storm will visit that place and remind them in a thunderous voice: ‘You are a Jew!’"
Rabbi Yaacov Emden, in the introduction to his scholarly prayer book, “Beit Yaacov," writes that “When it seems to us, in our present peaceful existence outside the Land of Israel, that we have found another Eretz Yisrael and Jerusalem, this to me is the greatest, deepest, most obvious, and direct cause of all of the awesome, frightening, monstrous, unimaginable destructions that we have experienced in the Diaspora."
Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Naftali Berlin, also known as the Natziv of Volozion, wrote a treatise on the subject of anti-Semitism known as “Rina Shel Torah." In this study, the Natziv offers an explanation for these waves of antisemitism. He says that antisemitism is the tool used by G-d to remind the Jews that they are Jews. Sometimes Jews may forget that we were created to be a special people with a Divine Calling. When we forget ourselves, the antisemites rise up to remind us who we are. Rabbi Berlin further comments that the more we try to fit in with the gentiles, the greater the persecution will be.
And who will not shudder hearing the words of the Gaon of Vilna, one of the greatest Torah Sages of all time:
“The sin of the Spies hovers over the Jewish Nation in every generation… How strong is the power of the force of darkness (Sitra Achra) that it succeeds in hiding from the eyes of our holy sages the dangers of the impure shells (kelipot), and in the time of Mashiach, the force of darkness attacks the guardians of the Torah with blinders…. Many of the sinners in this great sin of ‘They despised the cherished Land’ including many great guardians of the Torah, will not know or understand that they are caught in the sin of the Spies, that they have been sucked into the sin of the Spies in many false ideas and empty claims, and they cover their ideas with the already proven fallacy that the mitzvah of the settlement of Israel no longer applies in our day, an opinion which has already been disproven by the giants of the world, the Rishonim and Achronim - the Early and Later Torah Authorities" (Kol HaTor, Ch.5).
Let’s hope and pray that next year’s Salute to Israel Parade will bring the marchers to a great fleet of buses waiting to drop them at the three major airports adjacent to New York City - because they want to, not because they have to.