I just came back from Yerushaliyim where I did my annual matzah baking. As usual, I have the most important job in the group: weighing, packing, and labeling. Most people don’t consider this important, but in our group, it IS considered important, since I also write personalized nonsense on each box; such as “Find a Pita: Win a Prize,” “Don’t worry, this year we washed our hands before,” “Certified Kosher, Minus the Certification” . . . things like that.
It would annoy my friend, who was doing the baking and running the operation, that everybody came in during their breaks to see what I was writing and not pay any attention to him, but he told me that this year one woman was worried that I wasn’t going to be in to write something funny on their box. For some reason, people look forward to them.
Last year, the rav who checks all the matzos asked me not to write anything on his box, since his wife gets embarrassed. “No problem,” I said. So, I wrote on the inside of the four flaps of the box, so when you open it up you see, “YOU CANNOT SILENCE ME.” This year he came up and told me how much he liked it.
I also got a little mean this year. On my birthday, my wife made a mug for me and put a plastic cockroach in the cup (our family "bug") hoping to scare me (it didn’t). I eventually avenged myself upon her with said cockroach. However, it was my friend (technically his wife) who sent the plastic cockroach to my wife for her "gift" in the first place. So, naturally, I had to avenge myself upon THEM. So, I wrote on his box, “Find a cockroach and win a prize!” placed a plastic toy under the matzos and a plastic cockroach on the top. I knew he would get home and open the box to air out the matzos from any trapped heat. Needless to say, I received a call five minutes after dropping him off: “YOU ARE A DEAD MAN! Do you know how high I jumped when I saw that?!”
Mission Accomplished.
Before I went the make the matzos, I went to visit a former Rosh Yeshiva of mine from 20 years ago (let’s not ponder that number, shall we?). He runs a small yeshiva for boys who are coming from a non-religious background. At the end of our conversation he told me, “This morning I overheard some of the boys discussing the sitcom they watched last night over their phones. You know . . . in your times, when you guys came to Israel to learn, you were cut off from America (this was before email picked up), and left it all behind. Nowadays, they simply bring it with.”
I later went to quickly see a friend of mine whom I haven’t seen in years. He is a very big talmid chacham nowadays, sitting and learning in Mir Yeshiva. He told me an interesting dvar torah concerning the attacks (there were two in Yerushaliyim that day) that we have been going through. He said that there is a Gemara that discusses the death of Rebbe Yehudah HaNasi. Shortly before his death, his students were asking him deeper questions, and one of them was, “Who are the Yishmaelim (our Arab cousins)?” He answered that they are “The Shaiddim of the Beis HaKisei” or in English, “The Demons of the Bathroom.”
My friend continued, ”Why did we have the Holocaust? Because we placed such a great importance on Western Civilization. We started to worship them and their universities, and through the Enlightenment, we left Torah. So, Hashem punished us through that which we worshipped. The Germans were known for their academia, universities, and enlightenment. After all, it was not Mengele who was killing Jews, it was DOCTOR Mengele . . .
“So, now, here we are, being attacked in the streets and in our homes by ‘Demons of the Bathroom.’ Not ‘Demons of the Fields’ or ‘Demons of the Mansions,’ but the BATHROOM! The disgusting of disgusting! Why? Probably because that is exactly what we are worshipping today: nonsense and disgusting things.”
It’s an interesting insight he had. In previous times, people left Torah because of different ideologies, like Socialism, Communism, and such. They might be anti-Torah, but at least there was some SOMETHING to it, some THOUGHT! But nowadays, our fight isn’t against anything intellectual, but rather it’s simply against physical desires and pleasures with minimal brain usage necessary. That is the battle that we are fighting today, and that is why, he believes, when we worship things that are low and disgusting, we are killed by those who are low and disgusting.
May we all be able to find some way of lifting ourselves above the muck, at least a little bit, to deserve some quiet and peace from our tormentors.
With that, I wish you all a good Shabbos!
Michael Winner