Meaningless labor, and our path to a purpose

I once met a fellow who was born in Germany, but managed to get out in 1938, in the nick of time. Some people don’t think of such a person as a survivor in the same way as someone who survived the death camps, but Shmuel (not his real name) lost his entire family; he was the only one who managed to get out. I asked him what made him realize it was time to get out, when the rest of his family could not see the writing on the wall.

He told me he wasn’t overly concerned when Hitler came to power in 1933; he was a young man with his whole life ahead of him, and everyone around him was saying it wouldn’t last, and that the Jews were the mainstay of the German economy, whom Hitler needed to get the country back on its feet. And he accepted all of this until one sunny afternoon in Hamburg.

He could hear them before he could see them: loud laughter and yelling; a large crowd seemed to be having a good time on one of the major avenues, and even a few passing policemen seemed to be enjoying a good time. A few seconds and a bloody nose later, he was on his hands and knees with a scrub-brush trying to erase words scrawled in red paint on the sidewalk.

Trying to avoid a beating, he scrubbed with enthusiasm while he took in the circumstances. They were in front of a German police station and they were scrubbing a red Star of David that had been scrawled on the sidewalk. When they were finished, and no trace was left of the red paint, a German police officer came over with a bucket full of red paint, and forced one of the Jews to take a paintbrush and scrawl a new large Star of David on the pavement. And then he looked at all the Jews on their hands on knees, backs bending from exhaustion, and screamed, “Scrub!,” as the crowd howled with delight. And in that moment, Shmuel knew: this was not about logic, and whatever would follow did not have to make sense. There was no purpose to their hatred; they just wanted to break the Jews. It was time to get out.

There is a powerful message hidden in this story, which may help us to understand an oft-overlooked mitzvah that appears in the first of this week’s double portion Behar-Bechukotai.