70

How can forces that threaten to break me, remake me? This question, posed earlier this week by a friend in Jerusalem, is rummaging through my heart this morning.

And I’m sure you know why. Our enemies continue to redraw the borders of wickedness. They proudly parade their infernal cruelty for all to see. And now, if it wasn’t telling enough that they defiled the caskets of Ariel, who loved Batman, Kfir, who was murdered before his first birthday, and Oded who devoted much of his life to defending Palestinian dignity. Now a new low. Hamas violates not only the rules of war and of civilization, they insult classifications of what’s vile by sending some anonymous unrelated corpse instead of mother Shiri Bibas. Shiri remains among the 70 in dark, airless Gaza captivity.

How then to breathe, to stay sane, to deepen our humanity as enemies-of-peace disqualify theirs? 

Toward the end of this week’s portion of Torah, we meet the number 70. It comes in a mystical passage at the foot of God’s throne. “Then Moses and Aaron, Nadav and Avihu (2 sons of Aaron) and seventy elders ascended” (Ex. 24:9). To be clear, they remained some distance away. Still they ascended. So too, for us, as the distance grows between wishful outcomes and ugly actual ones, we too must find fresh ways to rise. With the help of our integrity and our Jewish dignity.

Although the terms of our predicament have changed, the challenge has not. 

“Millions of Jews who were exterminated because they had no land are looking at us from the ashes of Jewish history and ordering us to settle and resurrect a land for our people” Moshe Dayan said nearly 70 years ago, in a eulogy for a young man named Roi Rotberg who’d been brutally murdered on a Kibbutz near the Gaza border. “Without the steel helmet and the canon, we will not be able to plant a tree or build a home.” 

Plant, we will. And build, we must. My Jerusalem friend wondered, “Post trauma, do we collapse, or do we grow?” With our ancestors watching closely, we rise with a moral handsomeness that will make them proud. Am Yisrael Chai.