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1) Were the Prayers in Vain?
“Were the prayers in vain?” It's a question all of us – any rabbi – has heard from someone in pain: "I davened, I poured out my heart, why wasn't I answered?" R. Shimshon Refael Hirsch finds a response embedded in a strange delay at the chanukas haMishkan.
The korbanos are complete, Aharon lifts his hands and blesses the people – and nothing happens. Instead of fire descending, Moshe and Aharon duck into the Ohel Moed, busy themselves with the ketores, emerge, bless the people again, and only then does the kavod Hashem appear. Why the holdup?
Rav Hirsch argues the delay was actually the entire point. Had fire fallen immediately after the korbanos, the people would have drawn the obvious but catastrophically wrong conclusion: that the sacrifices purchased the divine response, the way a gift to a minister purchases a favor. Avodas Hashem would have been reduced to a transaction!
But tefillah and korbanos are not the means, they are the end. Why were the Imahos barren? Because HaKadosh Baruch Hu desires the prayers of the righteous. The hardship itself is the opportunity, the lever by which we open our hearts. If we davened and drew closer to Hashem, even if the request went unanswered, the tefillah achieved its full purpose.
This is why the second brachah mattered. The first was for material shefa; the second was spiritual, that the Shechinah in the Mishkan penetrate each Jewish heart, "v'nasati Mishkani b'socham," within every individual. Only then did the fire fall, teaching once and for all that the avodah has one purpose: to draw Jewish hearts close to their Father in Heaven. Everything else is a byproduct.
2) R. Sacks z”l connecting our parsha to Yom HaShoah, which takes place next Tuesday, April 14.
How do we recover from catastrophe? In Parshas Shemini, Aharon faces every parent's worst nightmare: his sons Nadav and Avihu in the very moment of national triumph. The Torah's description is starkly brief: vayidom Aharon, and Aharon was silent. He does not cry out, does not even abandon his responsibility. He continues to serve! That silence, says R. Sacks z”l, is the sound of a human being choosing life over despair.
R. Sacks saw this same extraordinary choice embodied in the survivors of the Holocaust. (With this Shabbos preceding Yom HaShoah, the connection to the parshah is ideal!) The Klausenberger Rebbe lost his wife and eleven children, yet managed to build Laniado Hospital in Netanya, a place dedicated to healing all people, Jew and Arab alike, and run on the principles of halachah and suffused with Jewish spirit. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, who had witnessed the near-total destruction of European Jewish life, resolved that if Jews had been hunted down in hate, he would search them out in love, launching an unprecedented global campaign to bring Jews back to Yiddishkeit. Survivors whom R. Sacks met personally carried grief and bewilderment, yet what struck him most was their absence of hate, their desire not for revenge but for tolerance and understanding. Having lost everything, they built families, helped one another, and became living memorials to what was destroyed.
Chazal (Avodah Zarah 18a) records that when Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon was burned alive with his Torah scroll, he told his students: the parchment burns, but the letters fly heavenward. R. Sacks writes that the letters lost in the Holocaust have been rewritten, in rebuilt Jewish life, in families raised, communities planted, and faith sustained against all reason. Vayidom Aharon, and from that silence came not emptiness, but the most defiant act of all: beginning again. (To Heal a Fractured World, "Redeeming Evil".)
3) See last year's Chomer Here.
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