Parshas Vayigash

 

Hi there Junior Shluchim!
How was your winter break? Did you go to winter camp? I’m sure that whatever you did, you made sure not to waste a second! Over here in snowy Iowa it has been quite cold. In fact it has been kinda freezing. It got so cold that our heating froze over! Yup, for almost a week now I have been wearing my sweaters at night and my pyjamas during the day. Actually I’ve been wearing my sweaters and pyjamas both by day and by night. And a whole bunch more clothes too.
It all started about a week ago (I think I told you that already, but I’m a bit absent-minded, so I can’t remember), when Mrs Getzel and I went away for a few days to visit some friends on the other side of Iowa. Since we were planning to be gone a few days, I didn’t think there was much point in leaving our heating on. I mean I already support the gas company enough without giving them bonuses for when we don’t even need the heat. So we turned the heating off.
The problems started when we came back. You see it had gotten quite cold in our little corner of Iowa while we were away on the other side of the cornfield state. I knew it had gotten cold as soon as we got back to our house because I noticed that the drip that normally goes drips from our bathroom onto our porch was one huge icicle. And our door handle was so cold that my hand almost stuck to it. So of course the first thing I did when I walked back into the house was to turn the heating on full blast. I was sure that by the time I had finished unloading our car I would be able to sit and warm myself by the steam. Except it didn’t quite work like that.
Well unloading the car is always quite an avodah whenever the Getzel family comes back from a trip. We seem to take more and more stuff every time we travel. Of course I am partly to blame. I have to take a whole set of Lekeutei Sichos and my entire collection of Connections newsletters and a whole bunch of other really important stuff, so who am I to complain if Mrs Getzel wants to take all her Nshei Chabad Newsletters too (especially since I enjoy reading them as well)!
When I finally came back into the house it had been at least an hour since I had turned the heating on. The first thing that struck me was the cold. It was soooo cold. Then I heard this strange creaking noise. It sounded a bit like my favourite rocking chair, just a lot louder. And it was getting louder and louder. And louder. And then BANG!!!! It sounded like something had exploded. It reminded me of the noise that the cork made coming out of the bottle of champagne by the Dinner celebrating 25 years of Chabad of Iowa. Except it was a bit louder. Much louder. And then before I knew it I was covered in a huge cloud of smoke, and before I even had a chance to shout ‘Mrs Getzel’ we had both been blown out of the house.
The next day my friend Boris the Electrician came to look at our heating system and he told me that it had frozen over while we had been gone. I asked him ‘mah nishtanah’? I mean that we used to turn our heating off every year when we went away, why did it suddenly decide to freeze this year? I wondered. ‘Well,’ Boris said, ‘either the winter is getting colder, or your heating is getting older!’
Which got me thinking – this golus is definitely getting older, and if we don’t want it to platz (in the wrong way) then we had better make sure that we heat it up real quick!

Good luck kinderlach,
See you next week!
Dr. Getzel

 

עשרה בטבת

This Sunday is עשרה בטבת .  עשרה בטבת means the ‘10th of טבת ’.  We fast on עשרה בטבת .  It is the only fast that can fall on a Friday.  The fast begins when the sun rises in the morning.

עשרה בטבת is considered the ‘Beginning of the End’.  This is because in the BEGINNING, on עשרה בטבת , the king of בבל , named נבוכדנצר , took all his soldiers and surrounded the walls of ירושלים .  This led to the END when the בית המקדש was destroyed.  This was called a siege.  A siege is when an army surrounds the walls of a city and doesn’t allow any food to go into the city.  This siege began on עשרה בטבת and did not end until 2 1/2 years later!  Then, the army of בבל broke through the walls of ירושלים and destroyed the בית המקדש .  נבוכדנצר killed many אידן and led the rest of the אידן into גלות .  The אידן were forced to live in בבל and were ruled by the people from בבל .

So, עשרה בטבת is a very sad day because it was the day that the siege began around ירושלים and this led to the destruction of the בית המקדש .

 

שלושים יום קודם החג

Thirty days before a יום טוב we begin preparing for the special day that is coming up.

We are now a month (30 days) before the יארצייט of the פריערדיקער רבי which is on י' שבט . The 30-days of preparation actually starts on the special day of עשרה בטבת .

It was the פריערדיקער רבי who told us that we are about to greet משיח very soon. He said that we have already completed our preparations and all that is left for us to do is to "polish the buttons" of our uniforms, so that we may go out and greet משיח with greater beauty and glory.

Now that the פריערדיקער רבי ’s יארצייט is coming up, we should put extra effort into following his instructions of “polishing our buttons” to greet משיח .

The פריערדיקער רבי explained that his משל to "polish the buttons," means to add in learning תורה , doing מצוות with greater care, giving צדקה , and to have extra כוונה in our davenning.

(משיחת עשרה בטבת תשמ“ז)

 

 

Immediately before the ניסים of the Six-day war in 1967 the Rebbe began ‘מבצע תפילין ’, the first of the 10 מבצעים ; all חב“ד חסידים should go out and put תפילין on any איד that was willing.

The idea of approaching not-yet-frum strangers in the street with a request to do a מצוה , and such a complicated one at that, was unheard of and no one knew exactly how to go about it. Meetings were made throughout ארץ ישראל to discuss the issue, and the חסידים in כפר חב“ד made a big Farbrengen.

That night the main speaker was ר‘ מענדל Futerfas, an חסיד עלטער and the משפיע of the main ישיבה , who had spent many years imprisoned in Siberia for his work to help people learn תורה and keep the מצוות . That entire night he and everyone else at the farbrengen, tried to bring examples or possible explanations for this totally new idea, with no success.

Then he remembered a story that he heard when he was a prisoner fifteen years earlier.

From everything he heard and saw in the six years he was in Siberia, ר‘ מענדל tried to learn a lesson in עבודת ה‘ , and usually he succeeded. (He once said that the reason that the צדיק , ר‘ זוסיא of Anipoli said that it’s possible to learn seven positive lessons in עבודת ה‘ from a thief is because he never sat in prison. But if he had sat in prison with a thief he would have learned thousands of things!) But there was one story that, try as he could, he couldn’t figure out what was the רוחניות‘דיקע point …. until now.

The prisoner telling the story had been a deep-sea diver in the Czar’s navy, and was now imprisoned by the Communists, and his story was as follows:

“It occasionally happened that one of the ships of the Czar’s navy would sink, sometimes because of a storm at sea, or because it struck a rock, or sometimes in battle. Now, ships are worth a lot of money, just the metal and the equipment alone were often worth millions of rubles, so the navy developed a way to lift the ship from the ocean floor so it could be towed to shore and fixed or at least parts of it could be used again. And that's where I came in.

"What they would do is get two towing-ships on the sea above where the sunken ship was. Each ship would lower a long, thick chain with a huge hook on the end, and I would dive down, attach one hook to the front and the other to the back of the sunken ship. Then the towing-ships would pull in their chains, lift the sunken one from the ocean floor and tow it in to shore.

“Now, this was all fine when the sunken ship had sunk less than a month or so ago, but after that the ship began to rust and the hooks would bring up only huge chunks of iron, leaving the rest of the ship behind. So someone developed a brilliant idea. The two tugboats, instead of lowering just one chain each, would spread a huge, hollow, rubber mat with thick rubber walls over the place where the sunken ship was. Inside the entire length of the mat was a large flat sheet of steel with a few hundred steel ropes attached to it. The ropes ran though special airtight holes in the lower rubber wall in a way that no water could get in and no air would escape, and at the end of each dangling rope was a hook.

“My job was to go down with a few other divers, lower the mat, spread it over the sunken ship and attach the hooks to as many places as possible. Then a motor on one of the two tugboats would pump air into the mat and slowly inflate it. It began to pull upwards until … WHOOPA!! Suddenly the entire ship lifted at once and could be towed to dry land.”

“Just now I began to understand the story,” said ר‘ מענדל . “The ship is like the Jewish people, rusty and falling apart because they have been sunk in exile for almost two thousand years.

"The Rebbe’s idea is to save the ship and we חסידים , are the Rebbe’s deep-sea divers. We have to attach a hook to every single איד … put תפילין on as many אידן as possible, and then when enough ‘hooks’ are attached …WHOOPA!!! ה‘ will pull everyone up TOGETHER.”

 

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