Did We Help Kill Ari Fuld?

Kol Yisrael Aravim Zeh Bazeh: All Israel Is Responsible for One Another

It used to be that the hardest thing to say was, “I’m sorry.” That’s apparently not the case anymore, since now we are all perfect we have nothing to be sorry about. Our new self-proclaimed perfection accompanied by its dastardly cohort, pride, now makes “I need you” and “Can you help me?” the hardest things to say.  After all, we are the smarter one, the better one, the more deserving one, and since God mistakenly gave you what he should have really given me, I say, “Keep your favors; keep your advice; keep your money; keep your opinion.”  And furthermore, “You may think you’re great and perfect, but it's not true, because really, I am.”  

And that is why my beloved Jews, we will continue to cry and suffer as a Jewish nation: because we don’t know how to be brothers and sisters, friends and cousins, neighbors and fellow citizens. We begrudge seeing the value in the other, and as such we don’t know how to be mensches. When the ancient Israelites were counted in a national census they were tabulated by half shekels, not whole ones. One reason it was performed as such was to emphasize that we each are just fragments of a whole, single letters in a holy Torah that only have purpose and meaning when united.

When we come to the humbling realization that we do need each other and that you have something that makes me complete and I have something that makes you better-- all so by God’s design--then and only then can we begin to be sorry and hopefully embarrassed for thinking we are perfect. Only then, when there is humility and love and regard for others, can God’s blessings be upon us.

The English poet John Donne wrote in the 1600s that “no man is an island” and we’ve oft repeated it, after all, it sounds poetic and not “too Jewish.” However, over a thousand years before Donne’s popular phrase was inked, the Talmud told us that “all Jews are responsible for one another”—we simply can’t go it alone.  Yet that Jewish obligation is not only relegated to tangible responsibilities, i.e., giving charity, offering a helping hand, it is true on a spiritual level as well. When one Jew sins, he or she not only affects his or her own fate, but that of every other Jew. In fact, when a Jew sins he or she brings down the entire creation. Okay, so here’s where you get turned off, right? Sounds too rabbinical and slightly too esoteric. Yet funny how even though there are few lepidopterists among us, no one ever dismisses the Butterfly Effect: the posit that the gentle flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one part of the world will precipitate a tornado in another part. Be on storm watch my beloved people, for if you flutter in the gutter, God will clip the wings of your fellow Jews and, as a result, we will all come crashing down. A nation meant to soar, will plummet.

The Talmud teaches that we are so connected as a people that the righteous among us suffer as atonement for the sins of his generation. And then Ari Fuld was murdered by an Arab terrorist. Yes, the killer perpetrated the lethal wound, but from all the reviews I’ve read, which echo my own heart-piercing emotions, Ari was a saint, a hero, a lion of Zion, a modern-day David and a national hero of the likes of Yonni Netanyahu. And yet, probably like me, most of you knew him only through social media and like me, you probably wept upon hearing the news as if he was your brother, your son, your friend. Then you searched online for hours seeking answers and also for ways to help. Why? Because all of Am Israel is ONE. Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk said, “There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.” Once again as a people we became whole with one broken heart. Is this what it takes, again, to unite us? If it is, please don’t tell God and give Him any more ideas.

In Ari Fuld’s last live talk on the weekly parasha, less than 48 hours before he was murdered, he said that a leader is only as good as his followers.  What does that make him? What does that make us?

His mind boggling fame around the world, the love he garnered which was more than he or we realized and also the time he was taken from us, in the shadow of Yom Kippur, compels us to ask ourselves a million questions and one among them must be, “What have we done wrong as a people that Ari Fuld is dead?” Many blame the terrorist; I do too. But the blame can’t begin and end there. If he was as righteous as we say he was-- and I believe he was-- then we must ask that very hard follow-up question. Did he die for our sins? I know in my heart losing him sure feels like a punishment.

“The righteous man has perished, but no one takes it to heart, and men of kindness are taken away, with no one understanding that because of the evil the righteous man has been taken away.” (Isaiah 57:1)

My fellow Jews, each year after we finish fasting and praying, we tend to return to our old ways. Don’t be so selfish. Realize we need each other. We hold each other's lives in our hands. Try just a little harder to add a new mitzvah to your life, whether it is Shabbat candles, or saying a prayer before you eat or after. Don't just be a "cardiac Jew," a Jew at heart, be a Jew in your words and in your deeds. And don't turn your back on my problems just because you have your own. 

Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, Israel’s former Chief Rabbi and a Holocaust survivor, reminds us in his autobiography that the German’s motto for their death camp, Buchenwald, was Jedem das seine--each man to his fate! That is the Nazi's way; it is not the Jewish way—our God is one, our land is one, our Torah is one and our fate is one! Don’t be so perfect. I need you. You need me. Our lives depend on it.

Oh, You Mean "Those" Jews?©

Rabbi Hillel once asked:  "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”

But this rhetorical question does not just apply to the individual; it also applies to the Jewish people as a nation. Despite our differences, we are ONE people under ONE G-d. If we are not for each other, who will be for us? History has provided us with the bloody answer.  The rabbis have indeed taught that the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam, groundless hatred for one another. It makes perfect sense. How can a can a temple or any structure stand when its supporting stones fight between themselves? And further, how do Jews expect anyone to like them or respect them when they are so busy hating each other?
Click to read more...  http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/not-that-kind-of-jew/
Often on the blogosphere I will see conservative Jews asked by others why Jews tend to vote Liberal and their proud reply is: “Because they are self-destructive idiots.” Or a Liberal Jew will be asked why Orthodox Jews don’t serve in Israel’s Defense Forces, and the tart reply will be: “Because they are Nazis.”  And, as if Jews don’t have enough people calling them lovely names, the adjectives that come to define the Jew become ever-darkened by lazy, irresponsible, stigmatic name calling sealed by the fact that another Jew said it. Maybe the Liberals vote as they do because of a history or persecution; maybe the religious won’t serve in the military because of certain religious beliefs and indoctrination. Maybe our fellow Jews’ positions deserve a little more respect than simply selling them out with a derogation so others will accept us, or to make ourselves look better, or to safely distance ourselves publically from what we regard as idiocy. The loose definitions that we throw into the blogosphere, Twittersphere or any sphere to define the “other” Jew who is not like us marks not only the intended target but every Jew.  We may deem ourselves as a sharpshooter but the boomerang effect is inevitable. A spot on any Jewish face is a blemish on our collective face.

After President Obama won the election and re-election, many “accused” the Jews of delivering him victory. I’m a Jew; I surely didn’t vote for him and many other Jews didn’t as well. Nonetheless, the collective Jew put him in the White House.  When Madoff was arrested every Jew was a Ponzi schemer; when Pollard was arrested every Jew was a spy with dual loyalties; after the Six Day War, every Jew was a hero.  Whether “modern” Jews want to believe it or not the Talmud was right: "Kol Yisrael arevim zeh la-zeh” (all Jews are responsible for one another).

What has set me off in particular most recently was the attempt to ban gay Jews from marching in the Israel Day Parade.  Now as an Orthodox woman myself, I’m not an advocate of homosexuality—not because of any visceral reaction against it, just as I have no visceral reaction against shopping on the Sabbath. What deems them both wrong to me is simply the fact that the Torah says so. That being said, I did have a visceral reaction to this exclusionary effort pitting Jew against Jew.  The Mishna says, “Hevei mekabel et kol adam b'sever panim yafot (greet every person pleasantly with a kind face).”  I was not aware that the Talmud has since been revised.  

This week’s Torah portion is named Korach, a name which comes from the Hebrew word קרח meaning “division” or “split.”  And According to Maimonides division is contrary to the whole purpose of the Torah. We are one people, am echad! 

Are gays not Jews too? If those against participation by the gay community needed life-saving surgery and only a gay Jewish doctor could save their life, would they pick death instead? We don't have to condone homosexuality, but the Talmud teaches that we don't know which sin or mitzvah is the biggest or smallest. So would they ban people who don't go to mikvah from marching or those who don't keep kosher? Those too are sins. There are gay Israeli soldiers risking their lives daily so that we can have the freedom to practice our religion and be Jews. Were these opponents there to stand with gavel in hand to judge who was Jewish enough for them to march for Israel? I strongly maintain that if we were all Jewish enough for Hitler to kill, then we should be Jewish enough for each other.

This article is not meant to do advocacy for homosexuality. It is meant to advocate ahavas yisroel (Jew loving Jew). If we are to survive as a people, let's make our good great and our bad better and stand only in judgment of ourselves. That is the Jewish way! United we stand and divided we end up lighting more yahrzeit candles.

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