From the heart of Jerusalem: Rabbi Binny Freedman

Believing that Hashem will give us what we need

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“Am hanetzach lo’ mefached mi’derech arukah.” (“The eternal people are not afraid of a long journey”(Rav Kook Sefer Orot )

It’s been a long and painful journey these past 2,000 years. Some of us thought we were there, that the journey was about to end, but like the intense pains of labor just before birth, it gets toughest when you are close to the finish line.

I received an incredible email from a student serving on or near the front lines, whose unit was taken to the Gaza border on Shabbat. A deeply religious young man who has probably never been in a car on Shabbat found himself in an army bus headed for the border along with his entire unit (including many other religious boys) on Friday evening.

As the sun set in the distance over the Mediterranean Sea, he realized he was the only one on the bus with a siddur, so by default he led the Kabbalat Shabbat service. Dozens of soldiers sang the Lecha Dodi prayer, with its magnificent welcoming of the bride (an allegory for Shabbat and the Jewish people), longing for peace and joy on their way to war.He wrote me of his attempts to avoid unnecessary desecration of the Shabbat, particularly the prohibition of carrying on Shabbat, while fulfilling all of the orders he was receiving to help set up their base camp, a near impossible task. By the time I saw the email he was out of contact, and so I did not have the chance to tell him any mistakes he may have made were not an unintentional transgression of Shabbat, they were its fulfillment on the deepest level possible.

This week’s portion, Massei, begins with and is named for the journeys of the Jewish people in the desert. Describing each stop along the way, the Torah delineates the 42 places the Jewish people passed through on their way to entering the land of Israel — from Ramses, the Egyptian suburb built by Jewish slaves, all the way to the plains of Moab on the banks of the Jordan River.

In a brief description of one of these stops, the Torah tells us (Numbers 33:14) that “they encamped at Refidim, and there was no water there to drink.” The Torah then reports that they traveled from there into the Sinai desert.

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