Lej Lejá 5776 - English

In this week’s parashah, God promises Abraham he will have a great progeny.  He does this more than once, using powerful metaphors to illustrate this promise. In Bereshit 13:16, He promises to make his offspring as the dust of the earth, and in 15:5 like the stars in the sky that cannot be counted.

God’s affirmation that they cannot be counted is the origin of the traditional custom of not counting how many Jews there are in a certain place for that would be mistrusting how many we are.  It is very common to see those that still speak Yiddish count for a Minyan by saying, “'nisht eins, nisht tsvey, nisht dray” (not one, not two, not three…), precisely for this reason.  If God said we could not count ourselves, well then we cannot assume we can do so.  

But beyond this funny custom, the promise that we would be like the stars in the sky and the dust in the earth has transformed into a symbol, an emblem of God’s pact with Abraham.  

From the literary standpoint, “stars in the sky” and “dust in the earth” are nothing more that interchangeable metaphors.  Both have the same use and we might have one or the other without noticing the difference.  

Or at least that is what I had always thought, up until 15 years ago, when Professor Esther Jarmatz Z”L, one of the great instructors for Jewish teachers in Argentina, during a course on Jewish literature showed me a beautiful poem by Simon Frug.  

Simon Frug was born in Ukraine in 1860 and wrote poems in Russian, some of which were later translated into Yiddish by Y.L. Peretz.  

However, the virulence of the pogroms at the end of the XIX Century turned him into a fervent militant of the Jovevei Tzion movement (one of the groups that gave rise to the Zionist movement) and made him write in Yiddish, as a token of his compromise with his Jewish identity.

In this context, from a people that was trampled on in Russia, where villages were set on fire and women and old people were cowardly murdered, Frug wrote the poem I learned with Morah Esther, called Zamd un Shtern.  This poem that later became a popular song, says in its final verse: “yo, gotteinu, emes, vi zamd un vi shteyner. Tsushpreyt un tsuvorfn oyf shand un oyf shpot Nu, ober di shtern. di lichtige, di klore — Di shtern di shtern vu zenen zey got?"  Translated into English it loses some of its force, but it would be something like this: “Yes, Our God.  It is true that like sand and stones we have been dispersed, decimated, shamed and humiliated.  But, where are the stars, those brilliant lights? The stars, the stars, where are they God?”  

For Frug, the metaphor of “the stars in the sky and the dust in the earth” was not interchangeable.  At the time he lived, the Jews knew very well how to feel like dust and very little about shining as stars.   They were closer to being trampled on by anyone who found them, than from shining with their own light and illuminating the rest.  The promise was not the same in one case as in the other.  It has been fulfilled, we were many, like the dust in the earth, but we still lacked feeling like stars.  

Frug died young, in 1916, in the city of Odessa.  Life did not give him enough years to see the people of Israel shine.  But surely, as a young militant in the Jovevei Tzion, if he had seen the people that were reborn from the ashes and built the vibrant, strong and dynamic Israel we know today, he would have understood the promise was not left unconcluded.

In these days when those that would see us again as the dust of the earth rise once more, when the State of Israel and its inhabitants are threatened and attacked, it is important to remember how once, from not having a National Home, we felt just like the sand on the ground, like the dust of the earth.  This is why it is important that wherever we are, all the Jews in the world feel proud and show support for that place that restored our shine and allowed us to believe in the promise God made to Abraham.    

Shabbat Shalom

Rab Guido Cohen