After the war, a Holocaust survivor came to visit his one-time spiritual master, the famed Gerer Rebbe. This broken Jew had been deported to the death camps together with his wife, children, relatives and entire community. The man’s wife and children were gassed, his relatives decimated and his entire community wiped out. He emerged from the ashes a lonely man in a vast world that had silently swallowed the blood of six million Jews.
The Jew lost one more thing in the camps: his Hashem. After what he experienced in the hell of the Nazi death camp, he could not continue believing in a Hashem who allowed for an Auschwitz. Although after the war he made aliyah to Eretz Israel (what was then known as Palestine), he completely abandoned Jewish practice and observance. Yet he missed his old Rebbe and went to visit him in Tel Aviv.
The Gerer Rebbe himself lost large chunks of his family in the Holocaust. In addition, nearly all of his 250,000 followers were wiped out by the Germans. Through an extraordinary web of connections, the Rebbe and some members of his immediate family managed to escape German occupied Warsaw in 1940.
Upon hearing the story of his disciple, the Rebbe of Ger broke into sobs. The man and his Rebbe sat together mourning what they had lost. They wept for an entire world that was destroyed. After a long period of weeping, the Gerer Rebbe wiped his tears and communicated the following idea.
In his farewell address to his people, Moshe recounts the moment when he descended from Har Sinai with the two tablets to present to the Jewish people. “I descended from the mountain,” Moshe recalls, “I grasped the two tablets, and threw them down from my two hands, and I smashed them before your eyes.” Moshe proceeds to relate how after much toil he succeeded in “convincing” Hashem to forgive the Jewish people for their sin. He then, carved out a second pair of tablets to replace the smashed first ones.
Though the two sets were identical in content, containing the Ten Commandments, the second pair did not possess the same Divine quality as the first tablets, which were “Hashem’s handiwork and Hashem’s script.” The second tablets were Moshe’s creation, endorsed by Hashem, but not made by the Almighty.
Now, considering the well-known meticulousness of each word in the Torah, Moshe’s words “I smashed them before your eyes” seem superfluous. Suppose Moshe had turned around and broken the tablets out of view. Would that in any way have lessened the tragedy? Why did Moshe find it important to emphasize that the breaking occurred “before your eyes”?
What Moshe was saying, explained the Rebbe, was that “I smashed the tablets ONLY before your eyes.” The shattering of the tablets occurred only before your eyes and from your perception. In reality, though, there exists a world in which the tablets have never been broken.
What Moshe was attempting to communicate, the Rebbe of Ger explained, is that what seems to us as pure destruction and chaos does not always capture the complete story. “I smashed them before your eyes.” Before your eyes there may be nothing but destruction and devastation. Yet, what in our world bespeaks total disaster may, in a different world, be wholesome.
“As inexplicable as it may seem,” the Rebbe went on to say, “there is meaning in the absurdness of history; there is dignity in the valley of tears. The wholesome Hashem — a Hashem who transcends all human logic and imagination and can appear to us as evil and cruel — is present in every human experience. Hashem was present in the gas chambers and crematoriums. And if He was present, their brutal deaths could not be the end of the story.
“As hard as it is for you and I to believe,” the Rebbe concluded, “I want you to know that the decimation of our families, our communities and our people occurred only ‘before our eyes.’ There remains a world in which the Jewish people are wholesome. Beneath the surface of our perception there exists a reality in which every single Jew from Avraham till our present day is profoundly alive.
“Today all of this cannot be understood. Why does even one child need to suffer? We dare not believe that we have the answer. But the day will come,” said the Rebbe, “when that other world will be exposed. Hashem will transform our perceptions and paradigms. He will mend our broken tablets and our broken nation. We will discover how the tablets were really never broken and the Jewish people were always complete.”
When the Rebbe of Ger spoke these words, he spoke them with a sense of personal grief. He was not an objective preacher of “religious truths”; he felt the pain from inside. Thus, his words gave back to this broken Jew his soul, his faith, his courage.
This idea is perfectly timed for the seven weeks of comforting that we find ourselves in following Tisha Be’Av. We are told that the destruction of the Temples which was indeed a destruction of huge magnitude was in fact done in place of more bloodshed amongst Yidden, “better the destruction of sticks and stones than the destruction of the Jewish Nation”. When we hear of tragedy and destruction we should internalise [not necessarily verbalise] this message of hope – destruction is only ever IN OUR EYES.
The tablets were dubbed by the Rabbis the Ketubah – the marriage document between Hashem and the Jews. Had Moshe not destroyed them then the very future of the Jewish Nation would have been in jeopardy.
This idea extends not only when witnessing the bad but when seeing anything we must remember that we only see through our eyes. What might actually be happening may be quite the opposite to what we have seen with our eyes.
Good Shabbos, Yaakov