I just returned from the land of the giants and feel like a puny grasshopper.
One of those giants was Ivri Dickshtein, hy”d, a commander in Golani who was killed in South Lebanon. At his shiva, I met his father Colonel Ilan Dickshtein, former commander of one of Tzahal’s most elite reconnaissance units, Sayeret Golani. He was sitting amongst his other beautiful children, sad, composed, and strong. Ilan organizes a weekly Beit Midrash in the town of Eli, where every Thursday he and more than forty of his neighbors and fellow alumni of Mechinat Bnei David spend the entire day learning Torah.
Giants.
I was then privileged to spend close to two hours in conversation with Rav Tamir Granot, Rosh Yeshiva of a Yeshivat Hesder in Tel Aviv and father of Amitai, hy”d, killed almost a year ago on the Lebanese border. Rav Granot, a self-described student of Rav Kook and inspiring and influential teacher of Torah, wears his son Amitai’s tefillin every afternoon at Mincha as a way of expressing their continued bond. When his Holocaust survivor grandfather, Tzvi Greenstein, passed away, he had left instructions to be buried with a tefillin shel rosh that he had stored away. That tefillin box had accompanied him throughout his time in Auschwitz where he had donned it daily, and he wanted to be buried with it so that it would bear witness that under the most trying conditions he risked his life to perform that mitzvah.
As Rav Granot beautifully explained, the black straps of the tefillin upon our skin are reminiscent of the black ink on the parchment of the Torah scroll, inscribing on our very flesh our identification with our faith. Amitai’s tefillin are Rav Granot’s bridge from the past to the future, connecting him to both his grandfather in Auschwitz and his son on the battlefield for the Jewish future.
Generations of giants.
The traumatic losses these families have experienced would leave regular people disoriented and lost, but these determined giants know exactly where they are and where they are headed, driven by a clear-eyed resolve to continue down the path of destiny that is Klal Yisrael’s return to Eretz Yisrael.
Sir Isaac Newton humbly said that “if I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” This community of giants, dedicated so completely to the future of the Jewish people, stand taller than others by living on the shoulders of generations. They identify completely with our history and destiny as a people and embrace the responsibility to realize Hashem’s promise to our father Avraham. That mission encompasses the air they breathe, the streets they walk, the Torah they study, and the battles they fight.
In this week’s parsha we read about Avraham’s acquisition of the Me’arat Hamachpeila (Cave of the Patriarchs) in Chevron, the place where our avot v’imahot (patriarchs and matriarchs) would be buried. Chevron was known as the city of giants and was ultimately apportioned to Calev and his descendants in recognition of his having stopped there to pray while on the mission of the spies.
The Chassidic master Chiddushei HaRI”M noted that while Calev went to the city of physical giants, Chevron, and prayed and drew strength at his ancestors’ graves (Bamidbar 13:22, Rashi), his colleagues viewed themselves as grasshoppers (13:33). The spies’ failure was rooted in their rejection of the past made evident in their disdain for the land that their forefathers so valued (see Ramban on Bamidbar 14:17). That rejection of the past left the spies without past generations on whose shoulders they could stand and left them as tiny grasshoppers. Calev, on the other hand, drew himself to the city where the Jewish roots and history that are buried in its soil would transform those who came later into giants, standing on the shoulders of generations.
Such giants roam the land of Israel today, waging a defensive war on the shoulders of generations and on behalf of us all. We look up to them in admiration and pray that Hashem protect them and crown their efforts with decisive victory. Kein yehi ratzon.