is the first question Hashem asked Adam after he sinned. And it is the question Hashem continues to ask each of us.
Ayeka? Where are you?
Where are you when your brother is in pain? Where are you when a widow cries alone? Where are you when someone is waiting for an invitation, for a phone call, for a listening ear? Tzedakah isn’t only writing a check. That’s easy. Real chesed is when someone knocks on your door and you smile. When someone needs your time, your advice, your presence—and you say, “Ani po—I’m here.”
That is the key to redemption. After the Holocaust, the holy Klausenberger Rebbe lost his wife and 11 children. In a letter to the free world, he described the heartbreaking conditions in the DP camps: Jews wearing the brown shirts of the Hitler Youth because there were no other clothes. One hundred men sharing one tallis, waiting in line for hours to put on tefillin, and trying to glimpse a siddur from afar.
But the Rebbe’s greatest pain wasn’t the hunger. It wasn’t the cold. It was the silence. And so, he finally cried out: Ayeka! Where are you? Where is Klal Yisrael? Where is the compassion? Tisha B’Av is not just a cry of Eicha—how did this happen? It is a call of Ayeka—where am I?
And that question is echoed every day, in every airport when a Jew quietly flashes their Magen David and says, “Hey, I’m one of yours. I’m part of your tribe. Don’t forget me.” We live in a world where we hear cries of “Globalize the Intifada,” and we don’t know where the elections are going, where this world is headed.
But we do know this: Hashem is waiting.
Waiting for one brother to reach out to another. For one sister to feel the pain of another. Waiting for us to stop asking “Eicha?” and start answering “Ayeka.”
My mother a”h once taught me something so beautiful, so deeply profound. The Torah states, in reference to the Jewish people’s exile in Egypt: “V’gam Ani shamati—And I [Hashem] also have heard.” What does that extra word, “V’gam,” also, come to teach us?
It means: When you, Am Yisrael, hear each other’s cries... when you open your hearts to one another’s pain, when you weep not only for yourselves but for each other—then I too will hear. Then I too will respond.
That, she said, is the secret to Geulah. The redemption begins not when we cry for ourselves, but when we cry for one another.
When Moshe Rabbeinu stood before the Burning Bush, he asked, Mi Anochi?—Who am I to lead? Hashem didn’t give him a strategy or a speech. He simply said, “Ki eheyeh imach—I will be with you.”
But we all ask, “Mi anochi?” Who am I to make a difference? I’m not a kiruv professional. I don’t have an organization. I don’t have money. I’m just me.
But that’s the mistake. Because when Hashem is with us, we can do everything.
I recently watched a video that broke me. It was Ori Itzchak Hadad’s mother speaking after his death in Gaza. She said: “Ori lived just 21 and a half years, but he lived with greatness. It’s as if Hashem came to us and said, ‘To bring the geulah, someone will have to pay a price.’ And if Ori had been asked, ‘Will you be that one?’ he would have said, Ani—let it be me.”
He died al kiddush Hashem. But we can live al kiddush Hashem.
So this year, on this night of Eicha, on this day of Tisha B’av, let us answer Ayeka with Ani. Let each of us take one small step. It doesn’t have to be grand. Just one change. One act of kindness, one invitation, one phone call, one moment of love, one whisper of teshuva.
And may that one step become a bridge to tell the Ribbono Shel Olam, “We are taking one step toward You. Please, take one step toward us. And bring us home.”
Mr. Charlie Harary
