WILL THESE WORDS REACH YOU?

Part of permanent exhibition at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews dedicated to Oyneg Shabbos. Photo credit: WIkipidia

In the Warsaw ghetto, in German-occupied Poland, as it was being emptied street by street, a group of Jews went round collecting paper. Ration cards and food stamps. Tram tickets. Invitations. Flyers and posters pulled off walls. Press clippings, private letters, drawings, photographs, and the diaries of people who would not survive the month. They wrote down what they saw for themselves, they interviewed the refugees who had been driven in from the surrounding towns and anyone who had escaped a camp and reached the ghetto, and they did all of it while the trains to Treblinka were running, on the working assumption that not one of them would be alive afterwards to tell anyone what had been done to them. Historians, teachers, journalists, rabbis, artists, youth activists, gathered from 1941 by a historian named Emanuel Ringelblum. They took their codename from their weekly Saturday meetings, and the codename was Oyneg Shabbos.

Nearly half a million people had been forced into an area of about one and a third square miles, at roughly five times the population density of present-day Manhattan. The Germans set the ration for Jews at 181 calories a day, and by August 1941 more than five thousand people a month were dying of starvation and disease. The mass deportations ran from 22 July to 21 September 1942, and Ringelblum’s group did not stop.

What they gathered came to about thirty-five thousand pages of paper. In January 1942 a man named Szlama Ber Winer, who had escaped from the Chelmno camp, reached the ghetto and described to Ringelblum’s group what was happening there: Jews brought in by the lorryload, killed with engine exhaust inside sealed vans, and buried in pits in the forest. They took his testimony down. It was smuggled out through the Polish underground, reached London, and was published there by June. So before they buried a single page, they had proof that something written inside that ghetto could get out of it and be read on the other side of the war.

When it became clear the ghetto would be liquidated, they packed all of it into ten tin boxes sealed with clay and three milk cans, and buried it in three places in the ground.

All but three members of the group were murdered. Ringelblum himself was killed in March 1944, in the ruins of the ghetto, with his family.

It was reported this week that the archive is coming to New York. It opens at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on 18 September, eighty years to the day since the first part of it came out of the ground. The exhibition is called Will These Words Reach You?

It came out because two of the three who survived, Rachela Auerbach and Hersz Wasser, came back after the war and led the Jewish Historical Commission of Poland to the spot. On 18 September 1946 ten tin boxes came up out of a cellar at 68 Nowolipki Street. On 1 December 1950 two milk cans came up out of the same building, turned over by construction crews levelling the site for new housing. The third cache has never been found.

Three Treasures

The gemara in Pesachim says Yosef hid three treasures in Mitzrayim: one was revealed to Korach, whom the earth then swallowed along with everything that had been standing at his feet, one to Antoninus son of Asveirus, and the third is stored away for the righteous for the time to come. Ganuz. Put away, not lost and not destroyed.

Dovid HaMelech asks Hashem to keep his tears in a flask: “sima dimasi b’nodecha, place my tear in Your bottle, halo b’sifrasecha, are they not in Your book.” Nothing spills. The suffering of a Jew is not overflow to be mopped up and forgotten about. It is collected, it is kept, and it is on the books.

And what is kept is answered. Rachel Imeinu, crying over her children, is told: “minei eineich midimah, hold your eyes back from tears, ki yesh sachar lifulasech, because there is a wage for your work, veshavu vanim ligvulam, and your children will come back to their own land.”

That third treasure is the or haganuz, the hidden light put away for the tzaddikim, the righteous, and it sits inside a person: the soul’s own love of Hashem, in deep concealment until our own thinking draws it out.

Why the Parsha Says See

Unearthing the core of your own soul is not done with a shovel. It is done with attention, which is why the parsha’s verb is see. The parsha opens: “Re'eh anochi nosein lifneichem hayom bracha etc. See, I place before you today a blessing etc.”

Sight needs no intermediary. When you are told something you are relying on the person telling you; when you are looking at something you are not relying on anyone.

Words in the ground cannot be heard. Nobody digging at Nowolipki Street was listening for anything; the pages had to come up, be unfolded, and be seen. From September they will sit in cases in New York at eye level, and that is when they do their work. What you have been told is carried on somebody else’s word. What you have seen is yours.

The King Is in the Field

A king is typically in his palace. To reach him you need permission, and an appointment, and the right clothes, and somebody to announce you, and most people never get in at all. Once a year he leaves the capital and goes out to the field. Anyone who happens to be out there when he passes can walk up to him. No permission, no appointment, nobody announcing anyone, in their working clothes. And he receives every one of them with a pleasant face.

That is the parable the Alter Rebbe gives for the month of Elul. Rosh Chodesh Elul falls on Thursday and Friday, which makes this Shabbos the one that blesses the month.

In Your Own Domain

In Elul the King leaves the palace and comes out into the field. The One who hid the treasure inside you is standing in your field: the office, the shop, the van, the ordinary Tuesday, whatever your field actually is.

On Parshas Terumah in 5752 the Rebbe asked why the Mishkan’s materials are listed starting with gold, and answered that gold comes first because every Jew had gold to give. Every Jew must be wealthy, in the spiritual and in the physical, in the plain sense of the word. It is not that a Jew has to become wealthy, every Jew already is, and if it is not yet here in the physical that is not because it is not there. Our avodah, the work of serving Hashem in the ordinary day, brings it out, and the digging itself is part of what is gained. This generation, the last of exile and the first of redemption, has finished the work of birur, the refining of the physical world. Nothing is sitting in reserve pending our readiness. What is left is to bring it into the open.

The Rebbe said it on the tenth of Av 5751:

As has been spoken many times, all the matters have already been finished, and the Beis HaMikdash stands ready above, and so too with regard to everything else — it is already everything ready as if in a closed chest, and the chest and the key have been handed over to every single Jew. The only thing being waited for is that a Jew should let out one more shout, with one more request and demand and one more reminder: ad mosai — how long?!

“Ein ashir ela b’daas.” There is no wealth except in daas. The Tanya says the word means hiskashrus, binding yourself to a thing and staying bound to it, which makes it a question of attention. A fact can sit in our heads for thirty years and change nothing, because it never held us long enough to become ours. What shapes a person is the few things we give our minds to and keep giving our minds to, and those are the only things we can be said to own.

Seeing is daas, and daas is clarity. So the wealth is the clarity itself: knowing plainly, and not on somebody else’s word, that Hashem is the treasure, and our very life. That is what is in the chest, and it is worth banking on.

Will these words reach you? Ringelblum’s group meant the question literally, and answering it took two digs four years apart and a construction crew that had no idea what it had hit. The Torah’s words were never buried. They were handed to us, and they say plainly how a brachah, a blessing, is received: re’eh, look at what is being placed in front of you today. The chest is here and the key is in our hand, and the key is attention. That work can be done today, together, in the field where we are standing.

A kesivah vachasimah tovah to every one of you: may we all be written and sealed for a good and sweet year, and may we see it with the coming of Moshiach, now.

Sources: Devarim 11:26 · Pesachim 119a · Tehillim 56:9 · Yirmiyahu 31:15–16 · Nedarim 41a · Tanya ch. 3 · Torah Ohr, Vayelaket Yosef · Likkutei Torah, Re'eh · Sichos Terumah 5752 and Vayera 5752 · Sefer HaSichos 5751 vol. 2 p. 735 · USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia · Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw · Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York