I’m currently in Israel for a couple of days, having back-to-back meetings with the Belev Echad team.
This morning, I walked to the Kotel to pray at the holiest extant Jewish site. On the way, I noticed many Jews taking the shortcut through the Arab marketplace and I was surprised. When I was a yeshiva student, close to 30 years ago, we always went the longer way, avoiding the marketplace, for safety reasons. The only exception was Friday nights, when the marketplace was closed and hundreds of Jews would all walk through together.
I wondered if things have changed in the past 30 years and it has become safer. So I went up to two border police guards standing right by the entrance and asked them directly.
“Is it safe to walk through here?”
“As long as you are walking, you are safe,” one of the guards told me.
I found her answer to be deeply profound. “As long as you walk without demonstrating fear, focused and with a clear head, you will be safe,” is essentially what she was saying.
But her answer goes far deeper than that, and applies much more broadly than simply walking through the Arab Shuk.
As Jews, as long as we are walking, progressing, with a clear goal and a destination, we are safe. We will remain focused, without veering off the path.
It’s when we stop and get distracted that we are instantly at risk.
We are about to mark the fast of the 10th of Tevet, the day the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem. Even though it falls on Friday this year, we still fast, and although often called a “minor fast,” it is actually one of the strictest—the only one aside from Yom Kippur that we would fast on Shabbat—because it marks the beginning of the destruction of the Holy Temple.
In order to rebuild the Temple and usher in the ultimate and final Redemption, we need to keep walking, focused on our mission, with our goal and destination at the forefront of our minds at all times.
The mission doesn’t change. It is and always has been to spread goodness and kindness throughout the world, to study Torah and do Hashem’s mitzvot, to reach out to our fellow Jews and help them connect with their heritage. History has shown that when we’re actively working towards that mission, our enemies can’t harm us.
Despite millennia of persecution, we are still here. Why? Because we’re focused on the goal—the goal that is coming ever closer. May we celebrate the 10th of Tevet in Jerusalem this year, with Moshiach and our brothers and sisters who are being held hostage in Gaza. Amen.