Words From Rabbi White

Dear mitpallelim/llelot,

It was a great pleasure for me to attend the wedding of Yehonatan and Chayii, conveniently held in the nearby town of Passaic. The chuppah concluded with a most inspirational prayer for the hayyalim, recited by our hazzanim uncle Yaakov and father Dr. Yehoshua Haimovici. 

To the chatan and kalla: may you merit to see children to your children, shalom `al Yisrael. 

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At the seder table, we raise a cup of wine (or grape juice!) and say “ve-hi’ she`amedah la’avoteinu,” and we continue “she-lo’ ‘ehad bilvad” “not only once did they try to destroy us, but in every generation, the Holy One Blessed be He saves us from their hands.” You know that I’m not a “gematrist,” but it’s hard not to be moved by the calculation that has appeared on the internet, that last motsa’ei shabbat, 331 murderous projectiles were sent to Israel, with no significant damage,  and the numerical value of the word “she-lo’” is 331!!!

[shin = 300, lamed =30, aleph=1] [Of course, we wish a speedy recovery to the 7-year-old Bedouin girl Amina Alhasoni, who was seriously injured by a missile fragment.]

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So I suggest an emendation to the American national anthem: “And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night, that HaShem is still here.”

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Our peaceful town of Teaneck continues to be harassed by the River to the Sea crowd. At first, they came to my shul here because there was an Israeli real estate fair; then they came a few weeks later to another shul in my neighbourhood because the River people were protesting a presentation by a couple of Zaka workers, who had come to describe the mitsvah how they recover and identify bodies of Israeli soldiers. And last week, they came just for the sake of intimidating us. But they won’t succeed!!

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Concerning the recitation of Hallel at the seder: I had the privilege of knowing Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm z”l, from before he became President of YU. He had been my professor of Jewish Philosophy one year in college. Subsequently, when I was a semicha student, I got to know him well during the three summers I spent as a teacher in the Morasha summer kollel, as he spent those summers in Morasha. He was an extremely brilliant, and sensitive rabbi.

Rabbi Lamm’s following remarks, part of a much larger sermon, were in response to the Yom Kippur war of ‘73, and are most relevant in the era of “from the river to the sea,” when anti-Israel marches and campus antisemitism are so prevalent.

He wrote: “The real test is to sing of your Judaism even when you sing alone, to be content with your Jewishness even when the world is alienated from you, to laugh at despair...to be a Jew means to sing.”

Remember to arrange for selling of hamets, to check for hamets on Sunday night, to finish eating of hamets in Montreal Monday morning before 10:32 am, to burn hamets before 11:42 am in Montreal.

Shabbat HaGadol Shalom, chag kasher ve-sameach, Bivracha, Rabbi Menahem White