My First Blog

After holding out for so long, I've finally succumbed and have started my own blog. I doubt I'll be using it very often; time is not always available. However, I do want to share a very short 'dvar Torah' I gave last night in honor of Rosh Chodesh Shvat (the first day of the Hebrew month of Shvat). For several years here in Beer Sheva there was a group of women who met every Rosh Chodesh. I was one of the organizers. It disbanded a few months ago, but last night a wonderful group of women organized a wonderful meeting for everyone, and I was honored to be asked to give a Dvar Torah.

So here it is:

I was asked to give this dvar Torah several weeks ago, and I started to write something long ago, look up sources and references etc, so as to make this dvar Torah something special, and more than my usual 'live in the Land, and do mitzvot' talk. And I was busily writing away about unity, and well, living in the Land and doing mitzvoth, when an event occurred this past week that made me change my whole direction. I threw away the other stuff, and decided instead to talk about 2 very special women, neither of whom is Jewish.

The reason I changed my topic for this dvar Torah is because this week Miep Gies passed away. For those who don't know, Miep was one of those who helped Anne Frank and her family hide from the Nazis for two and a half years. Born in Austria, Miep came to Holland as a young girl to escape the hunger that was rampant in Austria and Germany in the 1920s. At the time of the Nazi invasion of Holland, Miep worked as a secretary for Otto Frank (Anne's father) at his spice factory. When the time came and Otto asked Miep if she would help his family and another 4 Jews hide away in the Secret Annex in the factory, Miep did not answer, as she could have, "let me think about it", or "how much will you pay me? And she certainly didn't say "I can't" or I won't". She said, immediately, unhesitatingly, "of course". It was Miep who rode around the city of Amsterdam buying food at different shops so no one would suspect that she was buying more than her rations. It was Miep who brought Anne notebooks, and paper, and pens, books to read, and her beloved Hollywood magazines, which Anne would cut up and tape the pictures of movie stars to her wall. After those 8 Jews were taken from the Annex, it was Miep who found Anne's diary strewn across the floor. And it was Miep who hid the diary away, waiting for Anne's return. She never read it, claiming that Anne deserved her privacy. Until Otto Frank returned from the camps in late 1945, Miep had no idea what was written in those notebooks. Afterwards, she said that it was a good thing she hadn't read them, since she would have had to burn them, as they incriminated, not only her, but her husband and several other people who had helped the families. In addition to the honors she received by both the Dutch and British monarchies and other educational institutions, Miep Gies was honored by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile.

Yet, throughout the past 65 years, while she promoted peace and tolerance around the world, Miep refused to acknowledge that her deeds were heroic. "I'm not a hero", she would say, "I just did my human duty."

Speaking to a group of school children she said "Imagine young people would grow up with the feeling that you have to be a hero to do your human duty. I am afraid nobody would ever help other people, because who is a hero? I was not. I was just an ordinary secretary and housewife."

She claimed that she was not a hero because, as she said, "It's not as if I saved all of Dutch Jewry."

But she was wrong. We know that ordinary people can be heroes. That saving one life is as if you've saved a world. That being a hero doesn't mean being brave, or strong, or important. Being a hero means precisely doing your human duty, acting as you know G-d wants you to, as a being created as צלם אלוקים, despite your fears, your inadequacies, your unimportance. Miep Gies was a hero in all ways. Outliving Anne Frank by 65 years, Miep passed away this week one month short of her 101^st birthday. May her memory be for a blessing.

The second woman I want to speak about lived a few years before Miep. Unnamed, we remember her only through her father, and as saving only one Jewish life. But what a life.

Known in the Torah only as Bat Pharaoh, the daughter of the King of Egypt, and featured in only about half a dozen pasukim, she defied all of Egypt, and saved a baby from the river. It doesn't really seem like much. She was, after all, a princess, she had nothing to fear. There was no fear of arrest for her. But let's imagine for a moment, that this episode took place 3500 years later. She's not Bat Pharaoh, now she's Bat Hitler. She's the daughter of Hitler, a symbol of the Nazi regime and its ideologies. Imagine the daughter of Hitler, or of Stalin, or Bin-Laden, saving a Jewish child, with the full attention of the media.

Bat Pharaoh openly and defiantly, in front of her maids and royal entourage, went against her father's orders. Remember, she didn't simply save a baby from drowning. She knew exactly who this baby was, and what he represented. She gave him to his mother for nursing, and took him back after several years. She could have forgotten about him, she could have changed her mind in those intervening years. But she did not. And not only did she raise the boy, but she raised him with morals, with a sense of doing his human duty. She never kept his roots from him. He visits his people, and slays the Egyptian in moral rage. He meets his brother Aaron in the desert and they already knew each other.

And yet, though she saves the most important Jew of that generation – in fact in our whole history – we're not told her name. We're not told what happens to her. She's mentioned that one time, in a few short sentences, and then she is no longer in the story. Bat Pharaoh didn't stop the slavery in Egypt; she didn't soften her brother Pharaoh’s heart. She didn't ease Bnai Yisrael's workload; she didn't save a whole nation, she didn't change the culture of Egypt. But Bat Pharaoh did her human duty. She acted, despite the environment in which she lived, as צלם אלוקים and saved one Jewish life. Is this unnamed woman a hero? Does the Jewish tradition acknowledge her as such? Chazal say that the baby she saved had many different names. Certainly his parents had given him a name when he was born before being cast into the river. He had a different name in Midian. Yet, throughout the entire Torah, he is known only by the name his adoptive mother gave him, Moshe, as a tribute to her courageousness and heroic, human acts.

Chazal tell us that Bat Pharaoh left Egypt with Bnei Yisrael, going into the unknown, rather than stay within the murderous society in which she was a princess. It is only in the book of Divrei HaYamim that we are told her name is Bitya – the daughter, no longer of Pharaoh, but of G-d.

Being a hero doesn't mean taking out a nest of Hamas terrorists. It doesn't mean feeding all the poor and ending all wars. It means living your life and doing your human duty despite your surroundings, despite your fears, despite your status. Miep Gies said she was a nobody, “only a secretary and housewife”; Bat Pharaoh was a princess in the house of the king. Both, doing their human duty, are heroes. And they teach us that we don't have to stop all the wars, feed all the hungry, we don't have to change the world all at once. Just one deed at a time.

In the words of Anne Frank, "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world".