From EMAILIM BATORAH
My nephew,
Yesterday, after finishing a talk at a retirement home in Geula, I saw something that really hit me . An elderly woman on dialysis got a call from her taxi driver saying he had to cancel her ride to the hospital because the roads were blocked due to a hafgana - this time a protest over the autopsies on babies who died at a charedi daycare with no clear cause. She was left stuck there, confused and in pain. When I got home and opened the news, I saw the awful report: Naftali Tzvi Kramer, an 18-year-old yeshiva student, was run over and killed by a bus on his way back from that very same protest, near Komemiyut.
It left me with some thoughts. It’s getting harder and harder to ignore this disturbing pattern that keeps repeating at these recent protests. First, at the big rally in Jerusalem against the giyus - a young man, Menachem Mendel Litzman, fell to his death from a high unfinished building. Then, at the next hafgana, Yosef Eisenstal, a 14-year-old boy, was hit and dragged under a bus until he died. And now again - another young life lost on the way home from a protest. Three demonstrations. Three young souls taken.
In Yiddishkeit's terms, when something happens three times like this, it's a chazakah. No one can know for sure what Heaven intends, but the charedi world, more than any other, holds the belief that no tragedy is random. Everything calls for cheshbon hanefesh - and you can’t just pass the responsibility off or brush it aside.
Maybe the message here is that zeal, even if it comes from faith, isn’t always the same as kiddush Hashem. When these hafganos keeps leading to death this reality begs the question: Is this really the path the Torah is asking of us right now?
It’s easier to look away, keep going, say “it happened, let’s move on.” But that road doesn’t lead anywhere good. Maybe it’s time to pause, look inward honestly, and ask ourselves: Where is this society heading, and how do we get there without losing more precious lives along the way?
