Stories Of Greatness

In Parshas Bamidbar, we are introduced to life in the desert. It’s not exciting. It’s not glamorous. It’s not exotic travel. It’s the same cloud, the same camp, the same manna—day after day. But it was also the greatest training ground in history. It’s where Hashem shaped us into His nation. And that’s what Sefer Bamidbar is all about. Desert life is not about destinations; it’s about formation. It’s about forming and forging ahead with a mission and purpose in life. We might not always know where we’re going, but if we’re with our families, with Torah, and with Hashem, we’re going everywhere that counts.

The posuk refers to one who “slaughters outside the camp.” Homiletically, if a person speaks negatively of others, destroying his character and “slaughtering” the reputation and honor of another person, he will have to answer for this misdeed.

In 1970, Rabbi Dr. Ivan Lerner was recruited to become the first director of NCSY’s Central East Region. The region’s borders stretched east to west, from western Pennsylvania to Indiana, and north to south, from southern Ontario to northern Kentucky. Rabbi Pinchos Stolper, a”h, the founding director of NCSY, insisted that the regional office needed to be in Cleveland.

It is well known that when people visited R’ Chaim Kanievsky, zt”l, to receive a berachah or ask a shailah, he would often tell them to either cut their hair short or grow their beard. He also instructed people to wear their payos out, rather than tucked behind their ears.

If someone hits his neighbor, causing him to lose an eye, he is “owed” an eye. The Torah seems to suggest that the consequence for the attacker or negligent damager is that he must forfeit his own eye. Chazal explain, however (Bava Kama 83b), that we are dealing with monetary value and not an actual eye, as it was difficult back in biblical times to ensure that the removal of an eye did not kill a person, and what would one do if the attacker was already blind, and so on.

It was the winter of 5716 (1956), immediately following the Sinai Campaign, when Israel took control of the Sinai Peninsula from imperialistic Egyptian advances. Poland and the Soviet Union had just signed a treaty allowing all Polish citizens who had fled to Russia during World War II to return to Poland. Jewish or not, they had the right to return, as long as they were Polish citizens on September 1, 1939, the day the Second World War broke out. As a result of this treaty, thousands of Jews throughout Russia returned to Poland, and the majority of them subsequently immigrated to Israel.