MICHIGINNA

I am writing from Dearborn, Michigan [I attended the wedding of Yehuda and Rachel Spindler]. To give you a picture of the scene... Dearborn is a city with a large Arab population. The hotel I am staying at has no Arabs but I am sitting in the lobby and am surrounded by Christmas paraphernalia; wreaths and huge trees with little idols hanging from it [the mitzva to smash graven images comes to mind. Think they'd like it if I tried??:-)]. There are also Christmas "nigunim" being played on the loudspeaker. I am drowning that out with the holier noise emanating from my computer. This place is also a shrine to the infamous Nazi sympathizer Henry Ford. Last night a father of a close friend from Detroit explained to me that Ford was very nice to individual Jews [like this man's two uncles] and only became anti-Semitic because his friend Thomas Edison convinced him that Jews are bad people. Edison was sore because he was a great inventor but a poor businessman and some shrewd Jewish made big money off of his inventions.

The jury is still out.

Anyway - a little bit of Torah from the Rebbe Shlita on Parshas Toldos bi-kitzur.

How is it possible that Yitzchak Avinu had a son like Esav?? Such a great man with such an evil son! There is the famous comment of Rav Hirsch but we prefer not to be critical of the Avos unless we have to. They WERE human and did make mistakes but if their actions can be read two ways we'd rather read them positively and not critically. 

The meforshim teach us that עשו was born עשוי. He was already "done", beard and teeth included. He skipped the impressionable stage of being a baby. Even today, psychology teaches that the formative years of a persons life are his earliest. The later years are merely building on the foundations of what was already determined. Esav never had passed through this critical stage because he was born more 'mature'.

The Rebbe Shlita illustrated this idea with a true story. There was once an old non-Jewish woman who was lying in her bed in an old age home sleeping. Oddly, she kept repeating in a sing-song "Tanu Rabbanan, Yoooohhhh". They couldn't decipher her words until they called a Jew who explained that she was saying "The Rabbis taught, yeahhhhhhhh" which is an ancient Talmudic phrase with an attendant confirmation [yeaaaaaaahhhh]. Which yeshiva did she attend??

No yeshiva at all. She related that when she was a baby her mother was a housekeeper for a religious family and would take her to work. She had obviously heard the man of the house learning and his oft-repeated words left an indelible impression on her. 

The lesson is to try to give our children a strong spiritual foundation, particularly in their most impressionable and formative years.