Biblical Proportions

After months of searching, after examining 249 bodies in a Gaza cemetery, Ron Gvili was found and returned home this week. The burying is over. The building can now begin. But how? Where shall we look for our core values that steady our steps forward? 

There’s something uncanny at work with the timing of this week’s closure. Many noted that the last Hostage was brought home on the eve of January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. KI’s gifted teacher, Leaann Shamash, noticed another significance: a telling verse near the beginning of this week’s portion of Torah. 

“And Moses took with him the bones of Joseph, who’d exacted a promise from the Children of Israel, ‘God will surely take notice of you: then you shall carry up my bones from here with you’” (Ex. 13:19). Our ancestors cannot exit Egypt without Joseph’s bones. It’s Moses’s job to bring them forth for reburial in the Land. 

The lesson is unmistakable: moving forward into freedom can only happen when prior promises are kept.

The promise made at the end of the Book of Genesis does indeed get kept at the end of the Book of Joshua. “The bones of Joseph, which the Children of Israel brought up from Egypt, were buried in Shechem” (Josh. 24:32). He’s buried in the spot where, once upon a time, his brothers had thrown him into a pit and sold him to a passing caravan. The repair is also unmistakable: from where he was once stolen from the Land, he is restored to the Land. 

Rarely are the biblical proportions of current events as clear as they are today. 

Our values are marrow-deep. .When we keep them, we win. When we adopt the values of our foes, we lose. Our Jewish People lives, indeed thrives, Am Yisrael Chai, when we live up to our promise.

May the dignity of our grief determine the dignity of our growth.