A dream worth pursuing

The small room wasn’t much to look at, with its old, tired-looking walls and cracked floor tiles. And yet, a man had died here in this room.

They had been looking for him for quite some time, scouring the country and waking entire neighborhoods every time rumor had it that he was somewhere in the vicinity. To judge by the heavily armed troops that were smashing down doors in the middle of the night, he must have had a fire to him, to inspire such a determined manhunt.

He had been afforded many opportunities to escape and find refuge overseas, in Europe or America, and even in England, yet he could not leave the dry sands and swamps of Palestine, the land he loved so much.

His name was Avraham, and like his namesake four thousand years earlier, he was willing to pit himself against the entire world if need be, rather than give up on the beliefs he held so dear.

Those were dark times for the Jewish people; millions of Jews were being herded into the barbed wire camps and ghettos of Europe, and even those few who managed to escape the hell of the Holocaust had nowhere to go. For two thousand years the Jews had dreamed of returning home to Israel, the ancient land of their ancestors, now known as Palestine. But the British, who now ruled that part of the world, refused to let them in, invoking the infamous ‘white paper’ whose quota allowed only fifteen thousand Jews a year into Palestine, while millions clamored to be let in.

Avraham Stern was one of those individuals who finally decided enough was enough. If G-d was not going to send the messiah to bring the Jewish people home, the Jews would have to do it on their own.

To be sure, there were many who disagreed with his violent methods and his absolute refusal to make peace with the British in Palestine, even while the British were fighting the Nazis across the seas.

“The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy,” he claimed, and nothing was more important than removing the British and establishing an independent Jewish State as a safe haven for the Jews of Europe.

And while you could disagree with his politics, and certainly his methods, you had to admire his burning love for the Jewish people and their land.

When Jews were denied entry into Palestine, and the refugee boats full of Jews who had escaped the camps and the ghettos were turned away and sent to internment camps (and more barbed wire) in Greece, he was one of the masterminds of the infamous ‘night of the bridges’ when 14 bridges were blown up overnight, severely hampering British control of the borders.

Forced from hiding place to hiding place, he finally found refuge literally under the noses of the British, in a small roof-top apartment in Tel Aviv. The small room he slept in had a clothes-closet with a false back, which allowed him to squeeze in between the wall and the closet and hide whenever snooping eyes came to visit. The widow whose room he was renting believed in his cause and had successfully managed to pretend she was actually using the room whenever the British came by.

In the end, it was the little things that gave him away. British soldiers acting on a tip, burst in the door as part of a midnight search of the apartment buildings in the area, and were about to leave the apartment when one of them noticed a man’s shaving brush, which might have passed as her deceased husband’s, but for the fact that it was still wet from Avraham’s shave a few minutes earlier. A more aggressive search soon produced Avraham Stern, who was captured alive as attested to by witnesses, but was mysteriously shot and killed while trying to escape. He was shot twice in the back while supposedly trying to leap out a sixth story window, after the high-ranking officer in charge who arrived after Avraham’s capture first demanded that everyone else present leave the room….

I have always detested violence and believe it always to be the last resort, and am not at all sure I would have agreed with many of Avraham Stern’s decisions. Yet, to sit in that lonely room in Tel Aviv, reading the beautiful poetry and magnificent writings of this scholar-turned-warrior, one has to be in awe at the pure dedication and willingness to sacrifice everything for the love of one’s people, and things greater than one self.

Just how important is the place we happen to be, and how much is where we are a statement about who we are? Avraham Stern preferred to live in hiding in a small room in a dingy Tel Aviv apartment, rather than escape to the beautiful mountains of Switzerland, simply because this was the land that he loved; the place he had made his own.

Interestingly, this week’s portion, Vayera, contains the source for a very important tradition regarding the power of place: the idea that a person should ideally return to a makom kavua, a set place whenever he or she prays.

The Torah tells us that on the morning that G-d destroyed the wicked cities of S’dom and Amorah, Avraham returned to the same place he had stood in the day before (when he argued with G-d to save S’dom):

“And Avraham arose early in the morning to the place where he had stood before Hashem.” (Bereishit 19:27)

Why was it important for Avraham to return to the exact same place he had stood in on the previous day? Isn’t Hashem everywhere?

The Talmud (Tractate Berachot 6b) suggests that ‘standing’ here is a language implying tefillah (prayer), and that this verse teaches us that Avraham set a place for his prayers (“kava makom le’tefilato”).

Indeed, from this verse we learn that a person should always pray in a place set aside for prayer (the source for praying in a Synagogue) and many suggest that the need for a particular place goes beyond having a particular synagogue one calls one’s own, and requires a person to have a particular seat or spot.

Why does it make a difference where I pray? Isn’t why and how more important?

Furthermore, what does having a set place for prayer have to do with the story of S’dom? Why does the imminent destruction of S’dom, the most wicked place on earth, raise the issue of a makom kavua, a set place for prayer in the first place?

A closer look at the unfolding saga of S’dom (Genesis 18: 20-33) reveals a rather strange dialogue between Hashem (G-d) and Avraham: G-d wants to destroy S’dom and actually seems to consult with Avraham, whereupon Avraham questions whether it is fair to destroy a city if there might be fifty righteous people in it. G-d acquiesces, and Avraham bargains with G-d to agree to save the city if there are even ten righteous people there, even though G-d already knows that there aren’t. So what was the point of the entire discussion?

Obviously, this dialogue was not for G-d, but for Avraham. Hashem presents Avraham with the reality of the world, and Avraham has to struggle with it. This, in fact, is the essence of what tefillah (prayer) is all about.

In Judaism, prayer is all about our struggles. And this is precisely what Avraham is doing: he is struggling with the world as G-d has presented him with: how can I accept, says Avraham, a world where the righteous, and maybe even the innocent die along with the wicked?

Here we come to the essence of tefillah: Avraham is struggling with what Hashem really wants: of him, and the world in general. And this is what Jewish prayer is all about: the struggle of my role in the world, and the attempt to come to terms with what G-d truly wants of me. But in the end, Avraham accepts Hashem’s will, and this may often be the hardest thing we can do in this world.

Perhaps this is why Avraham returns to the exact same place. Because the place is the same; it is only Avraham who has changed by accepting and seeing a different reality.

Maybe this is why tefillah experienced regularly in the same place is valuable: because if the place is the same, it forces me to consider whether I have changed. And if I am not changing every day then something is wrong.

Four thousand years ago a great man, the first Jew, taught us all that it was not who you were, but whether you could make a difference. And whether for a tragic man all alone in an apartment in Tel Aviv, or for any one of us every time we wake up in the morning and walk out the door, the desire and the struggle and every so often the gift of being able to make that difference is a gift worth cherishing and a dream worth pursuing.