We desperately need the leadership that will not only search for causes but will implement solutions to ensure the safety of our loved ones. The most important solution might be a paradigm shift in our schools, where character development and values assume the centerpiece of all education.
Continuity
This holds true also on the concerns facing our own people. We live in a generation when many good excuses have been given for our bleak demographics and for Jewish continuity becoming an endangered species. Many sociologists have, over the course of the past half-century, explained some of the causes for mass assimilation, intermarriage, ignorance, sexual impropriety, apathy, and strife within the Jewish and general community. The Holocaust, secularism, modernity, failure of institutionalized religion, anti-Semitism, hypocrisy of religious leaders, monotony of ritual, and of course, the extraordinarily successful integration of Jews into the mainstream of American life. The walls of the ghetto, physical and conceptual, have at last crumbled. As a frequent traveler to Jewish conventions and retreats around the globe, I am privy to hear lectures and workshops analyzing the unique challenges of our times and the various crises that threaten our future. They all make good and sound points.
Yet I also had the privilege of seeing a “Yehudah,” who a number of years after the incomprehensible destruction of Auschwitz and Treblinka, rose and declared: “Your servant took responsibility for the lad.” I, your servant, have taken personal responsibility for the collective Jewish community and for every individual Jewish lad.
For the following four decades this man, a biological scion of Yehudah, would not sleep nor allow anyone else to sleep. Single handedly he empowered thousands upon thousands to stop passing the buck, or relieve their conscience by merely making a contribution to a noble cause. He inspired them to take personal responsibility for the welfare, continuity and eternity of the Jewish people. Do not allow “reality,” he always taught, to decide the future of the Jewish people. Take responsibility for the lad! Do not rest until every Jewish child the world over is given the opportunity to be liberated from spiritual slavery, from his (or her) subjugation to forces alien to his essence, and, just like Binyamin, to be able to return to his father in heaven.
Each year on this Sabbath when I hear the words “Your servant took responsibility for the lad” read aloud from the Torah scroll, my eyes swell up in tears. In my imagination I still see my Rebbe, his face aglow, teaching for hours, but always culminating with this resounding message:
“You and I must take responsibility for the lad!” Do not lament, kvetch, sigh and write a check. Do not organize conferences to analyze all of the problems. Instead, go out of your comfort zone and touch the heart of another person. Build communities, schools, synagogues and yeshivos. Get involved and make a difference in people’s lives. Give every Jewish child the gift of a Torah education. Help people get in touch with their Jewish souls and spiritual inheritance. Most of all, care about the other as though he or she was your own brother. “You may have good excuses for your inaction,” he would always say, and nobody will blame you.” But the bottom line is that after all of your rationalization, the child, Binyamin, will remain enslaved to Egypt and its culture.
In our times, often leaderless and aimless, we must make Yehudah’s call our own. “Your servant took responsibility for the lad.” So shall we.
