Perfect timing

RABBI Isaac Bruk sees blessing and curse in timing. Esau was sent on a hunt by his father Isaac. Esau thought the provisions he would bring back would guarantee his father’s blessing. However, “Jacob had scarcely left the presence of his father Isaac when Esau his brother came back from the hunt” (Genesis 27:3).

Esau was just a tad late — but late he was.

In an instant he lost his father’s blessing.

Jacob got there first and left just in time to avoid a nasty confrontation with Esau, which — who knows? — might have led Isaac to change his mind.

Perfect timing is more than punctuality. It is having a sense of one’s personal mission. Jacob had it. Esau did not. So it is with everyone whose timing is perfect.

ONE of the most controversial events during World War II was the “Kastner train.” In Budapest, Rudolf Kastner broke the Nazi wall and negotiated for the freedom of a certain number of Jews — if the bribes the Nazis required could be raised. Was Kastner an idealist, or did he pad that part of the train’s populace that came from his home town of Klausenberg with his friends and relatives? The debate will likely remain unresolved. Kastner himself was assassinated in the streets of Tel Aviv in 1957.

What cannot be denied is that 1,684 Jewish lives were saved via Kastner’s train in 1944. Among them were the Satmar Rebbe, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum (1887-1979) and his entourage. The train began in Budapest and threaded its way through Europe, detouring in Bergen Belsen for six months before finally being cleared for neutral Switzerland.

Needless to say, neither Kastner nor any other Jew in Europe during the war had the immense sums the Nazis demanded as blood money. The negotiations were on again, off again, as Kastner played for time and promised delivery of the money; likewise, permission for the train to leave Nazi-controlled territory was on again, off again.

When the train finally approached the Swiss border — just a few minutes from freedom — Himmler, the chief assistant of Hitler in implementing the “Final Solution,” was enraged. He had not yet received his blood money and shot off a telegram to the Swiss border not to let the train in without payment of 15 million Swiss francs.

According to Yaffa Eliach’s Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, Satmar tradition has it that an unnamed station master received the telegram one minute before the train was to reach the border. He could have stopped it.

He let it through.

Then he marked the time of arrival on the telegram exactly one minute later than the time the train actually arrived.

One minute: he would never be caught for this life-saving lie.

One minute — 1,684 lives saved.

Perfect timing.

IN the late 1960s, massive “mobilizations” — anti-Vietnam war protests — filled the streets of Manhattan.

At one such protest, a young woman, perhaps 19 years of age, struck up a conversation with a yeshiva student and — long story short — actually underwent a process of conversion to Judaism.

Her sincerity deeply impressed her beth din, consisting of three yeshiva deans.

A prospective convert is not allowed to be totally Sabbath observant, and this young woman would tell the rabbis that it pained her deeply to perform a single act of violating Shabbos each week.

After a lengthy training period, the beth din scheduled her immersion in the mikveh, which would complete her conversion.

It was a moment of great excitement in her life. She looked forward to the time when she would no longer need to violate the Sabbath and could live and observe mitzvos fully.

Suddenly, shortly before her scheduled appearance at the beth din, she informed the rabbis that she was not ready. This is very much the opposite of a common scenario: pressure on rabbis to speed up and cut corners in the conversion process.

Her rabbis disagreed. They credited her sincerity completely.

Now, some people convert to Judaism out of a very weak faith background. They may have long left another religion, or never had one. This person, however, was converting out of a Catholic background. She told the beth din:

You don’t understand. From the time I was three years old, I was told to look at that image. It was everywhere. It was drummed into my brain.
I no longer have a shred of belief in it. But the image is still in my brain. I cannot convert, I cannot stand before Hashem honestly, until not only that belief but that image is completely erased from my head.

How can I go to the mikveh with that image in my head?

She waited another six months.

Then she informed the beth din she was ready.

Perfect timing.