In our Parsha, Tzav is Moshe’s command from Hashem to Aaron HaKohen and his sons to take up and clothe themselves in their Vestments, their garments of service in the Mishkan, and to begin their daily Avodah (service and offerings in the Mishkan).
For seven days, Moshe taught Aaron HaKohen and his sons the laws of their Avodah in the Mishkan. (You might say that they were given, as they term it in the US, OJT from Shemayim.) On the eighth day, Aaron and his sons began their Avodah.
We are taught in our Parsha about the two flames which burn continuously; the flickering light of the Menorah and the powerful flame of the Mizbeiyach (the altar where the various offerings to Hashem were brought). These two flames which burned constantly teach us that a balance must exist between strength and power and modesty and humility. These fires teach us about maintaining a consistency between enthusiasm and constancy. (L’lmod Ul’Lamed, Rabbi Mordechai Katz, Parsha Tzav, page 103-104)
Rabbi Pliskin writes in the Sefer “Growth Through Torah” on our Parsha that one should “view each new day as the first day of your life.” (Growth Through Torah, page 242) We later learn that Aaron HaKohen’s service each day was done with the same level of enthusiasm as was his first day of service in the Mishkan.
Many among our Jewish brethren have let their guard down, have eased off into complacency; Dayenu and many of our brethren deny Hashem’s control of the world and seek to tailor Torah and their Jewishness to fit the ways of the nations; to assimilate, to melt rather than accepting Hashem’s reishut (command) over the world. Many others of our Jewish brethren, the so-called “new Jews”, the Zionists who first created the macho image of the Jew fighting back when bullied, oppressed or brutalized by Arabs or other anti-Semites, but in truth make no bones of their disdain for Yiddishkeit, for their Jewishness and thus evolved into acceptance of the distorted, hypocritical sense of Western morality: taking care for the lives of your enemy while that enemy draws your blood endlessly. They revile the dress and the ways of both their Eastern European predecessors and their brothers who maintain aspects of the Eastern European derech today in Eretz Yisrael, yet they themselves act despicably, based on their sinat chinom for the religious, and anything religious. In their mindless hate of the religious, the “new Jew”, the liberalized Jew who is kind to the cruel (for it’s not their fault that they are poor, live in the refugee camps of Gaza, Judea and Samaria) discredits his own right to live in Eretz Yisrael in the very eyes of the enemy he is kind to by the Chillul Hashem performed before the altar of foreign powers.
For those Jews, it’s an imperative to revisit the Mitzri memory (or lack thereof) of Yosef and to contrast the dialogue between Haman Y’machsh’mo and Ahasuerus — Haman’s top 10 reasons for seeking the annihilation of the Jews as found in Daf Yud Gimmel (page13), amud(side)Bet, with the contemporary Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany. Neither Haman nor Hitler Y’machsh’mom, made any distinction between the Religious or Secular Jew.
There is a message here for Shabbos HaGodol and to be be taken into Pesach, into the Seder; A Jew is a Jew is a Jew, period. You might change your name, or try to adopt some other religion, intermarry or have a liberal or leftist outlook toward those seeking your destruction. But, in the end, you can’t run and you can’t hide from from the fact that YOU are a Jew. So we, in our generations, might as well start being, internalizing and acting Jewish?
May we be zocha in this coming year that our brethren — the refugee families from Gush Katif be permanently settled and be made totally whole, that our dear brother Jonathan Pollard and the 3 captive Chayalim and the other MIAs be liberated and returned to us and that we fulfill Hashem’s blueprint of B’nai Yisrael as a Unique people — an Am Segula, not to be reckoned with as with “the nations” and may we be zocha the Moshiach, the Ge’ula Shlaima, as Dov Shurin sings; “Yom Hashem V’Kol HaGoyim”, the Ultimate Redemption, bim hay v’yameinu — speedily, in our time”, — Achshav, Chik Chuk, Miyad, Etmol!!!
Good Shabbos and Chag Same’ach!
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Moshe Burt, an Oleh, is a commentator on news and events in Israel and Founder and Director of The Sefer Torah Recycling Network. He lives in Ramat Beit Shemesh.
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