“Everybody has superhuman physical, emotional, spiritual or intellectual strengths, way beyond what they think.
“You hear stories to this effect all the time.
“A person is pinned under a car after a bad accident. Ordinary bystanders somehow lift the car and free the passenger. If you would have asked them beforehand whether they could lift a car, they’d roll their eyes and say, of course not.
“But they lifted the car!
“They did it.
“So, who is the real you? The person who couldn’t lift the car, or the person who did lift it?
“Was your act of lifting the car a one-time exception to the real you, or was it the real you?”
Rabbi Hershel Berger of Chicago told me that he heard this question from the late Rabbi Chaim Shmuelevitz (1902-1978).
Of course, one can extend the question.
People do all kinds of things they never thought they could: They battle and defeat a very serious illness; they survive the loss of a loved one they said they could never live without; they write a profound book or patent an invention or found a company — but if you would have asked these people years before they did any of things, whether they thought they ever would or could, they’d all say no way.
So, who is the real you?
I shall elaborate on the question in two ways: first, with Rabbi Shmuelevitz; and second, with Abraham our Patriarch.
Was “the binding of Isaac” an exception in Abraham’s life, or was his trek to slaughter his son the real Abraham; and if the latter, how was it a strength? But first, Rabbi Shmuelevitz.
In asking the question — who is the real you? — Rabbi Shmuelevitz did not apply the question to himself, but, in Rabbi Berger’s view, he should have.
Before the Holocaust, Rabbi Shmuelevitz was strictly a scholar. As a young man of 24, when he first met Rabbi Chaim O. Grodzinski, the senior rabbinic scholar in Eastern Europe, Rabbi Grodzinski stood up out of respect.
This surprised others in the room. Why would a preeminent scholar rise out of respect for a person some 40 years his junior? “When the library of the Mir yeshiva walks in, I stand up,” was the reply.
Rabbi Shmuelevitz did not acquire a library’s worth of knowledge by diverting his attention for a moment from his studies.
Yet, he found himself challenged by an oppressive “lift the car” surprise, far removed from books.
At the onset of the Holocaust, Rabbi Shmuelevitz became the senior rabbinic scholar accompanying the Mir yeshiva on its unique escape from the Nazis to Shanghai, China.
Shanghai was ruled by the Japanese. The Japanese were at war with the United States. Yeshiva students could only be kept alive by donations from the US — a form of trading with the enemy.
Punishable by death.
The ivory tower Rabbi Shmuelevitz, untrained in any form of yeshiva administration, let alone in wartime, had to raise the money from abroad and get it into China — undetected.
To this day it is still not fully known how he did this.
In his letters to friends in the US, he devised a series of codes that appeared entirely innocent, with undetectable hints to talmudic laws that conveyed a message. He hoped his learned recipients would decipher the codes and get the messages. Eventually they did.
These communications were so cleverly disguised that Japanese could not even figure out that there was a code, let alone what it said.
But the Japanese knew one thing: Students could not live on nothing. Something had to be going on.
They interrogated Rabbi Shmuelevitz repeatedly. For example:
“I was called to the headquarters of the Japanese secret policy in Shanghai . . . I know what they wanted to know . . . On what are three- hundred-and-fifty non-working yeshiva students living? Everyone knew that no one returned alive from the third floor of the secret police headquarters. A deathly fear fell upon me as I walked up the stairs, and as I walked, I prayed.
“Listen to what I said: ‘Master of the World, if you have chosen me as a sacrifice, I am joyfully willing to be one. But if I return alive, I ask of You three things.
“I had a right to ask, for Rava [a Talmudic sage] says that when a human being is in fear of death, he is permitted to make requests from G-d — and I requested three things. I said, ‘The first thing I request from you, Master of the World, is that when I am deserving of release from this hell, you free me from any financial responsibility for the yeshiva . . .
“I can’t tell you what happened up there on the third floor, but I returned . . . ”
Rabbi Shmuelevitz never bore responsibility — financial or otherwise — for the yeshiva again, after he left Shanghai in 1947. Yet, he guided the yeshiva — the only one to survive the Holocaust intact — through its most difficult period.
So, who was the real Rabbi Shmuelevitz?
The great scholar — or also the person who displayed extraordinary cloak-and-dagger skills, for which he had no prior training?
Who is the real you?
This is the question that Rabbi Shmuelevitz posed, but did not apply to himself. Rabbi Berger, however, did apply it to Rabbi Shmuelevitz, joyfully willing to be a sacrifice.
Who was the real Abraham?
Abraham, in his “ordinary” life, was the discoverer of monotheism, the revealer to humanity of the reality of one G-d, the lofty divine messenger.
He was also the greatest teacher of human character. He was vulnerable to human suffering — vulnerable to his wife Sarai, who was childless (Gen. 16:2-3); to his maidservant Hagar, who was rejected by Sarai (Gen. 16:1-5, 21:24); to his nephew Lot, for whom he went to war to rescue him (Gen. 14:12-16); to the evil ones of Sodom and Gomorrah, on whose behalf he plead to G-d (Gen. 18:22-33); to the idolators surrounding him, to whom he taught the oneness of G-d (Rashi, Gen. 12:5); to his son Ishmael, displaced by Isaac (Gen. 21:8-11); and to the covenantal destiny of his son Isaac (Gen. 17:21).
Suddenly, Abraham — sensitive to the commands of G-d and the needs of people — is asked to ignore both.
He is asked to kill his son Isaac.
To diverge from every ethical principle G-d had taught him thus far.
To eradicate every Divine promise G-d had made to him thus far — the promise, for example, to establish a covenantal line through Isaac, lasting for all generations.
Abraham rose to the occasion (Gen. 22:1-19) because of his absolute humility, his complete abnegation before G-d. Netziv (Rabbi Naphtali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, 1816-1892) observes:
Abraham, in praying to G-d for relief for the condemned people of Sodom and Gomorrah, expressed his humility before G-d, “I am ground and ash” (Gen. 18:27). Netziv developed the metaphor this way:
Everything grows from ground. Ground has offspring, but it has no paternity, other than the formless mass created by G-d at the beginning of creation. Ash is the opposite. It has paternity — its source is whatever was burned and turned into ash — but from ash nothing grows. It has no offspring.
In praying to G-d, Abraham said he was “ground and ash”: he had neither the merit of ancestors — paternity — nor the crown of children — offspring. His ancestors were idol worshippers and his destined son Isaac had not yet been born. Abraham came before G-d with nothing.
Abraham’s unconditional nullification before G-d enabled him to pass G-d’s test, to offer up Isaac as a sacrifice to G-d, before G-d stopped him.
In what sense was Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac a superhuman strength, beyond the ability to act despite the pain and perplexity that G-d’s command likely caused him? Abraham’s act yielded the superhuman strength in the Jewish people to withstand unspeakable persecution and martyrdom.
So, who was the real Abraham — the servant of G-d and of man; or the person whose faith rose immeasurably higher with his willingness to sacrifice Isaac?
Who was the real Rabbi Shmuelevitz — the scholar or the leader?
Who is the real you — the person enmeshed in the rhythms of life, or the person who suddenly demonstrates undreamed of strengths?
Rabbi Shmuelevitz answered:
The real you is the one you can become.
The real you lifts the car.
Withstands the loss.
Writes the book.
Faces danger.
Or disease.
Or death.
And survives.
The real you is the person who can rise high, beyond your wildest imagination and experience. This is the real you.
Copyright © 2013 by the Intermountain Jewish News
