By Rabbi Yaakov Asher Sinclair
“And it will be if you obey the L-rd, your G-d, to observe to fulfill all His commandments which I command you this day, the L -rd, your G-d, will place you supreme above all the nations of the earth.” (28:1)
I come from the world of music and the arts. By age 26, I had co-produced a record that sold over 5 million copies. One thing that intrigued me when I became Torah-observant was meeting frum people who were fascinated to hear what some of the “stars” that I had met were like. I sensed an ever-so-slight tinge of FOMO. It's like: “We all know the Torah is true, there’s a Ribono Shel Olam, olam haba and all that, but I’d love to get some of that glatt olam hazeh if it wasn’t forbidden.”
Gentlemen, let me tell you – I wore the T-shirt – I wove the T-shirt. You are missing out on nothing. Except what it means to be a Yid. The Kotzer used to say if you really knew what it meant to be a Yid, you’d jump up and start dancing the Kazotsky.
Sometimes it takes a message from far away to make us realize exactly what we have: South Korea is one of the most tech, fast paced countries on earth. Robots bringing food to your table. There's technology the world hasn't even seen yet. Their education system is one of the most intense in the world. But believe it or not, in South Korea, they learn Talmud in their schools.
About 25 years ago Korean educators became fascinated by the success of the Jewish people: here was a nation that endured exile after exile, pogroms, Holocaust, bloodshed, torture, and yet they somehow produced the most influential, radically transformative people on earth: Nobel prize winners, scientists, doctors, business leaders, thinkers way out of proportion to their numbers.
And the Koreans asked the same question the rest of the world has always asked: How? Why? How is it possible that people running for their lives seemed to live the most fruitful lives? But unlike other nations who nurture the poisonous illusion that the Jews conspire to control the world, the Koreans came to a much more honest conclusion: they said, maybe the Jewish people are more successful because their guidebook to life is wiser than any other guidebook.
They said, we want to understand the Talmud. We want to know why the Jews are so smart, why they're so resilient. The Torah says “baruch tihye mikol ha’amim” (Devarim 7:14) - the Jewish people will be the most blessed of all the nations. The history of the Jewish people shows that we have lived lives far richer than all others: We have built the strongest families, we have the healthiest marriages, the most respectful and dignified ways of dealing with grief, with poverty, with death, the most compassionate ways of giving, the most loving way of guiding an orphan.
When you step back and look at human life as a whole, the Jewish people have lived better, fuller, deeper, more meaningful lives than anyone else on this planet.
The next time you feel like you want to give up; that you’re fed up with having to control yourself at every corner; that you’re missing out on the good life; that life would be just so much easier if we didn’t always have to be on guard; remember, our guide to life has been tested and proven generation after generation.
Sometimes it takes other people, looking from the outside, to tap us on the shoulder and remind us that we got the gold. And what the world has is just so much tinsel town.
Reprinted from the Parshat Tavo 5785 email of OHRNET – The Ohr Somayach Torah Magazine.
