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Sometime after the war and after the creation of the State of Israel, a Gerrer chasid, a survivor of the Holocaust, arrived in Israel. He had lost all of his family and was embittered and disillusioned. He ceased the observance of mitzvot, shaved his beard, gave up his chasidic garb, and conducted himself as a secular Israeli. Yet, somehow, one day, he felt such a strong a longing to have contact with the Gerrer Rebbe that he appeared at the back of the synagogue of Grand Rabbi Yisrael Alter, the Bais Yisroel. Not willing to be a hypocrite, he came dressed as a secular person. He was certain that no one would sense his origins and that he would merely have an opportunity to see his Rebbe, unobtrusively and incognito.
However, the Bais Yisroel would typically scan the people attending his synagogue, and he had a special ability to remember people he had met. He recognized the man despite all the time and circumstances that had passed, and from his seat in the front of the room, he sent his aide to bring the man to him.
The two sat together and exchanged stories about personal losses of family, friends and community. In response to the Chasid's tears, the Gerrer Rebbe said, "There are no words adequate to comfort you or to 'explain' what we have been through. But let me share with you an observation that has helped me."
In the very last pasuk of the Chumash (Deut. 34:12), the Torah eulogizes Moshe for the "awesome deeds that Moshe performed before the eyes of all Israel". Why did G-d choose to end the Torah with the words "l'einei kol yisrael" -- "before the eyes of all Israel"? What is their special significance?
Rashi explains that the specific deed of Moshe being referred to here was his breaking of the Luchos (see Ex. 32:19). Rashi bases this inference on a Midrashic interpretation (Sifrei on Deut. 9:17) which notes that the same phrase occurs in Moshe's description of the breaking of the Luchos when he recounts the story in Devarim 9:17. Speaking in the first person, Moshe says "I grasped the two Luchos and threw them from my hands, and I smashed them before your eyes".
Why, asked the Gerrer Rebbe, did Moshe add the words, "before your eyes"? The Torah includes no redundant words. Yet, these words appear to be unnecessary and self-understood.
An answer may be found by examining a third Torah verse that has the same phrase. In Gen. 42:24 we are told that Yosef accused his brothers of being spies in Egypt and that he imprisoned Shimon "before their eyes". Rashi cites a Midrashic interpretation (Bereishis Rabbah 91:8) for the words "before their eyes": Yosef 's imprisonment of Shimon was only an illusion; as soon as the other brothers left to return to Canaan, he released Shimon and cared for his needs. Yosef gave the appearance of imprisoning Shimon because there was a certain impression that he wanted to create upon his brothers, "before their eyes."
So, reasoned the Gerrer Rebbe, when Moshe said that the Luchos were smashed "before the eyes" of the Israelites, he was telling us that these Luchos, so precious to Moshe and G-d, were never really destroyed. The reality was that on some plane of existence those tablets were preserved intact, and that Moshe's destruction of them was illusory.
"Thus," continued the Gerrer Rebbe, "I comfort myself with the belief that those Jewish individuals, so precious to G-d, were not really "smashed" during the Holocaust, and that on some plane of existence they are preserved intact by G-d."
And, he concluded, this principle about the illusory nature of our perceptions is so fundamental that G-d chose to end the Torah with those meaningful words "before the eyes of all of Israel."
