To The Right To The Left

To the right to the left.

 

This singular line sends shudders down the spine of every living Jewish man and woman. "The selection" process of yimach shmoSS-Hauptsturmführer Joseph Mengele personifies perhaps the most barbaric and inhumane period in our long and storied journey through golus. If you appeared strong you lived, weak straight to the gas chambers, if you were privileged, subjected to an experiment.

 

Outward appearance dictated fate.  

 

There is a strong and poignant lesson we can learn from this. Are we as a community in a subtle yet similar vein guilty of this same approach?  The torah teaches us in the parshaof egla arufa "yadeinu lo shofchu es hadam hazeh" and chazal teach us to examine whether we did anything that may have assisted and possibly caused the calamity.  Lo potarnu blo levaya and see Rashi there who elaborates.  Are we student of “left and right”?  Are we judging and condemning young and innocent eighth graders to a "selection" process based upon the criteria of what looks good for my school and not the essence of her true neshama?  

 

"To the right to the left." 

 

Did we do everything in our power not to alienate these bnos yisroel and setting them on a path of destruction because of our refusal to accept them in our community schools?  Are we confident heading into a yom hadin to face our creator and ask him to judge us favorably and not look at our sins and condemn uslamoves?  We seem to be very proud of our 11th hour ability to make sure that all girls are accepted into schools at the beginning of the school year. We pat ourselves on the back for a job well done once again. ”We did it!” Every girl has a place in school!  Amazing!  "Mi keamcha Yisroel!"

 

Yet the public school system manages to function without practicing "to the right to the left" and manages to place every child in school without the hypocrisy of the 11th hour “heroics.”  Mi keamcha Yisroel indeed.

 

Yadeinu shafchu es hadam hazeh!  By the time the innocent “11th hour girl” is “placed” the damage is already done.  We have alienated, lost, and "killed" the soul of a bas Sarah, Rivkah, Rochel v’Leah.  We pat ourselves on the back, "Mi keamcha Yisroel!"  They suffer humiliation at the hand of a system run by ruthless mechanchim who judged them and sent them to the left: a system that these innocent souls can no longer believe in.

 

Yadeinu shafchu es hadam hazeh.

 

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Written by a Lakewood mechanech and parent afraid to identify himself out of fear of retaliation against his children.