This past week, the Mishpacha magazine published an article about a Polish spy who infiltrated the Auschwitz concentration camp and succeeded in leaking information to the outside. Rabbi Moshe Grylak writes that the spy "relayed large volumes of information on the atrocities....including the gas chambers." He further writes, "For it has now become definitively clear that the democratic states making up the Allied Forces at war with Nazi Germany were aware as early as 1942 that genocide was taking place. The planned, deliberate slaughter of millions of Jews was reported to them by a witness on the scene and they made a conscious decision not to take action against it, thus becoming participants on this terrible crime. They will have to sit together with Hitler, yemach shemo, on the defendants' bench of history, or more correctly, they will have to stand trial come the great and terrible Yom Hadin at the end of days, when Hakadosh Baruch Hu judges all the peoples of the earth, tearing the mask of hypocrisy off of their "enlightened" faces and exposing the evil in their hearts."
A few days before reading the article, I came across a Herald Tribune headline,Israel faces isolation as new leader gets ready
$2 million to be used for improving nation of the nation abroad
When reading the magnitude of the amount set aside for hasbarah, I was dismayed. Personally, I think the money would have been better spent on feeding Israel's poor. I recall a video I saw a number of years ago which showed the plight of some Israeli families living in Jerusalem. Images of eight mattresses crammed into a room, a little larger than my bathroom will remain indelibly inscribed in my brain. I was shocked to see women hanging wet Pampers on clotheslines, to be reused once they dried out.
Especially after reading Rabbi Grylak's article I recalled the words, "Hen am levadad yishkon uvagoyim lo yitchashav," "Lo, it is a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations" (Bemidbar 23:9).
Yesterday, the Jerusalem Post published an article entitled "Islam teacher disputes Shoah testimony" in which it was reported that a holocaust survivor was asked to describe his experience in the Buchenwald camp to a group of students at a school in Brussels. During the meeting, a teacher of Islamic religion told the students that the survivor's account was largely exaggerated.
A reader's comment stated the following. "The chutzpah of this person who wasn't there to deny the testimony of a survivor only proves that the Jew haters hatred knows no bounds. Hatred is the absence of reason. Their hatred of us is the only excuse they need to falsify history. "
While I do agree that we must make an effort on our parts to portray Israel in a positive light (I even signed up as a hasbarah volunteer), the question still remains as to why spend such a vast sum of money on hasbarah to foreign nations, when the real hasbarah must be to Hashem? Why pour money into reasoning with sonei Yisrael when, the only One's opinion who really counts is Hashem, Ohev amo Yisrael?
Devorah:
ReplyDeleteYour sensitivity is most admirable but may skew your view of the harsh realities you describe. I hate to raise an obvious point, why are families with absolutely no means of supporting themselves creating untenable situations by bearing additional children and wreaking havoc for themselves and society at large? They perpetuate a cycle of poverty which inevitably results in the crises we see playing out at this time and into the forseeable future.
To Shalom
ReplyDeleteHashem commanded us to be fruitful and multiply. This command applies not only to the rich but to the poverty stricken as well. Whether a family chooses to restrict how many souls will be brought into the world, there will always be poor people, as Hashem created us with an interdependency for one another. The person who is intellectual will rely on the man who is good with his hands to fix his car. And, the bicycle repairman will rely on the lawyer to write him a lease for his house. Similarly, if a rich person has money, he should use it to help those less fortunate and not spend it on a dubious endeavor with limited results. And, remember, the more souls that are brought into the world, the close we are to the coming of the Mashiach.